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Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage
Tori Amos - 2020
From her unnerving depiction of sexual assault in "Me and a Gun" to her post-9/11 album Scarlet's Walk to her latest album Native Invader, her work has never shied away from intermingling the personal with the political.Amos began playing piano as a teenager for the politically powerful at hotel bars in Washington, D.C., during the formative years of the post-Goldwater and then Koch-led Libertarian and Reaganite movements. The story continues to her time as a hungry artist in L.A. to the subsequent three decades of her formidable music career. Amos explains how she managed to create meaningful, politically resonant work against patriarchal power structures-and how her proud declarations of feminism and her fight for the marginalized always proved to be her guiding light. She teaches readers to engage with intention in this tumultuous global climate and speaks directly to supporters of #MeToo and #TimesUp, as well as young people fighting for their rights and visibility in the world.Filled with compassionate guidance and actionable advice-and using some of the most powerful, political songs in Amos's canon-this book is for readers determined to steer the world back in the right direction.
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
Randy Shilts - 1987
America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the disparate threads into a coherent story, pinning down every evasion and contradiction at the highest levels of the medical, political, and media establishments. Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation's welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives. Against this backdrop, Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science and politics, public health and the gay community, who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced. And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly.
A Dutiful Boy
Mohsin Zaidi - 2020
Like Educated with a modern British context. Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of east London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different but in a home where being gay was inconceivable he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life.As he grew up life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor, brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.However Mohsin had incredible drive and he used education as a way out of his home life and to throw himself into a new kind of life. He became the first person from his school to go to Oxford University and there he found the freedom to come out to his friends.But Oxford was a whole different world with its own huge challenges and Mohsin found himself increasingly conflicted. It came to a head when Mohsin went back to visit his parents only to be confronted by his father and a witchdoctor he'd invited to 'cure' Mohsin.Although Mohsin's story takes harrowing turns it is full of life and humour, and it ends inspiringly. Through his irrepressible spirit Mohsin breaks through emotional and social barriers and in the end he even finds acceptance from his family.Now Mohsin is a top criminal barrister who fights large-scale cases on a daily basis. Having faced battles growing up, he truly understands the importance of justice as a way of life.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Roland Barthes - 1980
Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Art and Queer Culture
Catherine Lord - 2012
Not a book exclusively about artists who identify themselves as gay or lesbian, Art and Queer Culture instead traces the shifting possibilities and constraints of sexual identity that have provided visual artists with a rich creative resource over the last 125 years.
Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943
Erica Fischer - 1994
When Lilly "Aimee" Wust, a gentile mother of four and wife of a Nazi officer, met Felice "Jaguar" Schragenheim, a Jew living underground in Berlin, neither could have guessed that their brief initial encounter would develop into a blazing, devoted love. As the Nazi stranglehold closed in on them, Lilly and Felice found themselves fighting insurmountable odds to stay together. Extraordinarily passionate and heartrending, this is a rare and personal look at the love and strength of two women whose commitment to each other defied the brutality of their time.
Sweet Caress
William Boyd - 2015
But this daughter was not one to let others define her; Amory became a woman who accepted no limits to what that could mean, and, from the time she picked up her first camera, one who would record her own version of events.Moving freely between London and New York, between photojournalism and fashion photography, and between the men who love her on complicated terms, Amory establishes her reputation as a risk taker and a passionate life traveler. Her hunger for experience draws her to the decadence of Weimar Berlin and the violence of London's blackshirt riots, to the Rhineland with Allied troops and into the political tangle of war-torn Vietnam. In her ambitious career, the seminal moments of the 20th century will become the unforgettable moments of her own biography, as well.In Sweet Caress, Amory Clay comes wondrously to life, her vibrant personality enveloping the reader from the start. And, running through the novel, her photographs over the decades allow us to experience this vast story not only with Amory's voice but with her vision. William Boyd's Sweet Caress captures an entire lifetime unforgettably within its pages. It captivates.
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass
Lana Del Rey - 2020
Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.” (Lana Del Rey) Lana Del Rey brings her breathtaking poetry to life in an unprecedented audiobook. In this stunning spoken word performance, Lana Del Rey reads 14 poems from her debut book Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass accompanied by music from Grammy Award-winning musician Jack Antonoff. Lana’s debut book solidifies her further as “the essential writer of her times” (The Atlantic). This audiobook features Lana reading select poems from the book, including "LA Who Am I to Love You?", "The Land of 1,000 Fires", "Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving", "Never to Heaven", "Tessa DiPietro", "Happy", and several others. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator.
Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power
Lola Olufemi - 2020
Feminism, Interrupted is a bold call to seize feminism back from the cultural gatekeepers and return it to its radical roots. Lola Olufemi explores state violence against women, the fight for reproductive justice, transmisogyny, gendered Islamophobia and solidarity with global struggles, showing that the fight for gendered liberation can change the world for everybody when we refuse to think of it solely as women's work. Including testimonials from Sisters Uncut, migrant groups working for reproductive justice, prison abolitionists and activists involved in the international fight for Kurdish and Palestinian rights, Olufemi emphasises the link between feminism and grassroots organising. Reclaiming feminism from the clutches of the consumerist, neoliberal model, Feminism, Interrupted shows that when 'feminist' is more than a label, it holds the potential for radical transformative work.
I'm Afraid of Men
Vivek Shraya - 2018
Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak.With raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate. I'm Afraid of Men is a journey from camouflage to a riot of color and a blueprint for how we might cherish all that makes us different and conquer all that makes us afraid.
Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents
Nicholas Ganz - 2004
Offering a unique insight into the very essence of graffiti and its creative explosion over the past thirty-five years, it takes us on an adventure throughout the Americas and Europe to almost every corner of the globe." With over 2,000 pictures of artworks from more than 180 international artists, no other book is remotely so comprehensive or up to date. Nicholas Ganz combines his own first-hand experiences with quotes from the artists themselves to offer a true insider's perspective to the key trends and style developments that have made graffiti what it is today: a global phenomenon.
The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
Sonya Renee Taylor - 2018
Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all.
Sex and Lies
Leïla Slimani - 2017
In a country where the law punishes and outlaws all forms of sex outside marriage, as well as homosexuality and prostitution, women have only two options for their sexual identities: virgin or wife. Sex and Lies is an essential confrontation with Morocco's intimate demons and a vibrant appeal for the universal freedom to be, to love and to desire.
Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire
Tracy Clark-Flory - 2021
It was "broken glass ceilings" and Girls Gone Wild infomercials. With a vague aim toward sexual empowerment, she set out to become what men wanted--or, at least, understand it.In her moving, fresh, and darkly humorous memoir, she shares the thrilling and heartbreaking events that led to discovering conflicting truths about her own desire, first as a woman coming of age and then as a veteran journalist covering the sex beat. Tracing her experiences on adult film sets, at fetish conventions, and during an orgasmic meditation retreat (to name just a few), Clark-Flory weaves in statistics and expert voices to reckon with our views on sexual freedom.Want Me is about looking for love, sex, and power as a woman in a culture that is "freer" than ever, yet defined by unprecedented pressures and enduring constraints. This is a first-hand example of one woman who navigated the mixed messages of sexual expectation, only to discover the complexity of her own wants and our collective need to change the limitations of that journey.