Recently in Books Category

I read a lot of anthologies, and I'm just embarking on the hard task of editing one, so I understand how varied the quality of them can be. Sometimes I pick one up, and I'm immediately struck by the unevenness of the submissions--the diamonds in the rough sparkling, but too much rough to make the diamonds worth the searching. Sometimes, I am immediately drawn in, struck by the originality and veracity of the words. A good personal essay is one of my favorite things on the planet Earth.

The latter was absolutely the case with The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change, a new anthology by Shari MacDonald Strong. As the title suggests, it features a range of essays by women contemplating the ways in which their mothering is part and parcel of their activism, how changing diapers is not opposed to developing a political conscience, and is in fact, intertwined with it.

Although there are some big names (Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto etc.) on the cover, with the exception of Barbara Kingsolver's awesome essay, all the best were by those that are not household names (or at least not outside of the mother's movement). They explore work/life balance, welfare, adoption, caregiving conflicts, relationships between mothers and nannies, race, love, and ten million other interesting threads.

Read the Q&A I did with the editor for Alternet here. And congrats to all the moms who wield both pen and so fiercely.

So I've been reading this book called How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein and I'm finding myself perpetually vacillating between "That's amazing!" and "Wait a minute..." Let me explain.

Bornstein, an extremely thorough journalist, decides that he'll travel around the world and profile "social entrepreneurs" connected to the Ashoka Foundation, starting with the founder of Ashoka himself, Bill Drayton. I first heard about this idea of "social entrepreneurship" a few years ago at an NYU conference, and my interest was immediately piqued. At that time I was feeling especially depressed about the state of the world and my capacity to do anything about it.

Here's the definition, in part, provided on Ashoka's site:

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

So on to the confusion. Sometimes I see these entrepreneurial projects as mind-blowingly amazing. They often abandon the old charity model (third world poor need wealthy western help) and instead embrace the idea that those in community know what their community needs and how to get it--they just need help getting the resources in the right places at the right times. For example, I just read a profile of Jeroo Billimoria, the founder of Childline, a 24-hour helpline and emergency response system for children in trouble--completely run by children! Totally frickin' amazing. Jeroo basically had the wisdom to fund and formalize what street children in India were already doing--sharing resources and looking out for one another.

This works for me entirely, but other profiles seem to operate on the idea that poor people just need to be turned into "a market" and then they will uplift themselves. It's a little like the boot strap ideology with a patronizing altruistic twist. We can't just give malaria nets away; we have to sell them so that people will be incentivized to take them seriously.

So the way to "save the world" is to import more capitalism? What about a systemic analysis of our economies and the ways in which they fail so many people? Is this a little like importing democracy? We've seen how wise that turned out to be.

Maybe I'm overreacting. Will someone help me out here?

*Hey, thanks to all of those that confirmed in the reader's survey that they liked this feature!

I get so many amazing books and I only have so many hours in the day, so I thought I would direct you all to other reviews/posts about some of the great books on my shelf that I'll never get to (at this rate, anyway):

a review of
No Seat at the Table: How Corporate Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom by Douglas M. Branson

a blog post on Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics by Renee Bergland

Righting Feminism: Conservative Women & American Politics by Ronnee Shreiber recommended by the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics

Firedoglake on The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism of the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet

a review of The Saint of Kathmandu and Other Tales of the Sacred in Distant Lands by Sarah LeVine

some harrowing real life analysis from What About Our Daughters? on Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence by Jody Miller

Marvelyn Brown, my brilliant and courageous friend, was on the CNN special, "Black in America," last night. If you didn't catch it, there should be clips available shortly, but meanwhile you can check out the book she and I co-wrote of her life: The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive. It will be released August 19th, but you can pre-order whenever. In it, she very frankly explores how she was infected with HIV while in a committed relationship with "prince charming" and all that happened after. Don't sleep: AIDS is the number one killer of black women aged 25-34.

And on a far less serious note, Marvelyn got us a blurb from none other than Ludacris for the cover. Just rap it: "Marvelyn Brown takes a bold approach to speak to our youth with enough honesty and frankness, everybody should be listening! She is an inspiration to men and women everywhere!" Word Cris.

Most of the feministing crew met Marvelyn last summer when we all won ChoiceUSA awards.

Besides having the best title ever--You're Amazing! A No-Pressure Guide to Being Your Best Self--this Girls Inc. sponsored, young adult nonfiction book is also the shiznit (come on, this is for the tweens) because it's written by Claire Mysko, feministing fan and awesome young feminist upstart.

In an age when every 13-year-old is made to walk the tightrope of high-pressure adolescence--make out but don't be slutty, worry about your weight but don't become a bore, do well in school but don't become a total nerd--this book is so needed. It's, in some ways, a reaction to the Supergirl Dilemma study that Girls Inc. conducted, which showed that girls today are feeling more empowered, but also way more anxious.

Mysko walks girls through all sorts of different rough patches--rejection, gossip, parents' fighting--with the cool ease of a big sister. She's not patronizing or cheesy about it, just compassionate and real. And what's even better--she quotes real girls through out the entire thing. Their voices are totally honored--like this heart breaker section where she asks, "If you could tell older adults in your life one thing you need to hear from them...what would it be?":

"Even if we make you angry or do something wrong, we always want to be told that we're loved and appreciated. Nobody's perfect." -Emma, 13
"Respect our opinions and help us, don't control us!" -Tabitha, 12
"Tell me I'm important!" -Rose, 11

You're important! You're important! Is that my inner 12-year-old crying? Okay, seriously, this book is amazing. You should get it for your little sister, niece, next door neighbor, bad ass lemonade saleswoman.

*There are also places to journal, quizzes (gotta love the quizzes), and feminist history worked in all sneaky like.

Saunter over to your women's studies bookshelf and open up that first flap to discover who published your favorite feminist tomes. Chances are it wasn't Random House or Simon & Schuster, or one of the other major biggies (with a few exceptions). Instead you were probably introduced to feminism thanks to the ingenuity of publishers like the Feminist Press, Seal Press, or one of the other many, many small, independent publishers that takes a chance on feminist lit.

I just sold a new book (stay tuned for details), so I've been thinking a lot about ye ole publishing industry and the way it works. It is an industry that started out with a deep commitment to Ideas--to giving people the goods on how to live a great life, to challenging the status quo, to the development of long careers of writing, reading, and editing. But because of market forces hard to explain in one little blog post (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the rise of less literary forms of entertainment etc.), the publishing industry is not heavily dependent on dollars and cents.

This isn't to say that some books aren't published simply because they contain brilliant ideas, but it is to say that we would naïve if we really bought the idea that publishers aren't primarily interested in the bottom line these days. Did my editor at Simon & Schuster buy Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters because she felt a moral obligation to spread the word about food and fitness obsession? In part. But in truth, she was able to convince her publisher to buy it because they thought it would sell. Point blank.

Feminist presses, on the other hand, still strain to juggle the bottom line with a higher calling. They are committed to spreading the feminist gospel, to challenging traditional notions of gender, to finding new voices who are marginalized and/or left out all together by mainstream publishers. For this--and for Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation, Riverbend's books out of Iraq, and Brown Girl, Brownstone etc.--we thank them from the bottom of our big, feminist hearts.

If there is a book, published by a feminist press, that changed your life, please let us know in the comments.

Jessica's new book, He's a Stud, She's a Slut, is reviewed in tomorrow's New York Times -- alongside Kathleen Parker's ode to gender difference, Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care. (Not familiar with Parker? She's said that women having sex without going through courtship rituals first is a "mental health crisis." And she looooves to talk about how women in the military should expect to get raped.) It makes for quite the contrast:

Both of them cite a study that shows that women are "biologically" programmed to like housework more than men do. Ms. Valenti denounces it as rank anti-feminism. "In our happy little sexist world, things run much better when women are relegated to the home," she writes.

Ms. Parker applauds it: "Allow me again to translate. There's no way to make men into women."

Read the rest here. You can buy Jessica's book here.

Photo of Diane DiMassa by Love Alban

Photo of Cristy C. Road by Amos Mac

Diane DiMassa and Cristy C. Road are contributors of the new anthology, Live Through This. Edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev, Live Through This is a collection of original stories, essays, artwork and photography that explore the use of art to survive many of life's lows, traumas and struggles. Both illustrated and contributed real-life personal pieces to the anthology.

Diane DiMassa is best known as the creator of the comic heroine Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. She recently illustrated a graphic novel written by Daphne Gottlieb called Jokes and the Unconscious, and regularly contributes to anthologies.

Cristy C. Road's works and publications include the punk rock zine, Greenzine; illustrated storybook, Indestructable; a series of illustrated novels based on filmmaker Esther Bell's upcoming film, Flaming Heterosexual Female; and is currently working on Bad Habits, an illustrated love story.

Here are Diane and Cristy...

It's shameless self-promotion time. As many of you probably already know, I have a new book out: He's a Stud, She's a Slut...and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. After writing FFF, it was difficult to know what to write next, so I figured why not go back to basics.

I like to think of this book as a sexism handbook of sorts, it gets into the everyday misogyny that so many of us face - whether it's the sexual double standard or a million other daily inequities women are expected to put up with. It's a fun book, one that that I'm hoping will be a bit subversive - it doesn't look like a feminist book, 'feminism' isn't in the title - so my goal is that a lot of women will pick it up. Think of it as stealth feminism.

I've excerpted the Introduction of the book, and one of the double standards, if you'd like a sneak peak.

I hope you'll pick up a copy and pass it around to your friends. And, of course, huge thanks to all of the incredible readers and supporters of Feministing for making my writing possible.

Judy Norsigian is co-founder of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and co-author of the ground breaking Our Bodies, Ourselves published in 1970. Since its publication, women's groups around the world have developed cultural adaptations of, or other publications inspired by, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Most recently, women's groups in Albania, Russia, South Korea, and Tibet have produced new publications in book and other formats. Judy is also the co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause and most recently, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth. Check out the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog when you can: http://ourbodiesourblog.org/

Judy speaks and writes frequently on a wide range of women's health concerns, including abortion and contraception, sexually transmitted infections, genetics and reproductive technologies, tobacco and women, women and health care reform, and midwifery advocacy.

Here's Judy...

Speaking of (Un)Feminist Guilty Pleasures, last night Nik and I are watching The Real World, yes, it's a habit I don't seem to break, and one of the girls on the show admits to her alcoholic friend that she struggled with an eating disorder. Didn't think much of it.

Then this morning my friend Kate sends me an email:

I'm watching the Real World, and one of the girls in it (Sarah) is lying on her bed in front of a bookshelf. And I see an acid green and book spine and think, "Hey, I know that book." I slowed it down frame by frame and guess what it is? I took a picture because I was so tickled.

Yeah, that's my book people. Mind is blown. Now if we can just get Jess' books on that blonde girl's shelf...she needs a serious dose of feminism 101.

If you're looking for an outlet for some of your no doubt brilliant feminist writing, consider this opportunity: Think Girl's newest project - "I Was There: Stories from the Feminist Front." Sarah Morgan writes:

I was inspired to begin this project after reading Susan Brownmiller's description in Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs of her work on reproductive rights during the Roe v Wade fight. Her first person account of rallying, flyering, marching and, finally, celebrating struck a cord with me and I wanted to read more. I soon learned about the 1998 book The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation. I now want to deepen the dialogue on feminism and anti-racism, to cull past and present stories of activism, and to bridge generational divides between feminists.

In this spirit, Think Girl asks women of all ages, races and backgrounds to submit stories of their work as activists for women's issues. (Think: A Radical Chicken Soup for the Feminist Soul.) These first person stories of strength, perseverance and courage will serve as inspiration to women and girls as they continue their work in or enter the movement.

And more on the organization: Think Girl believes in feminist activism that is both global and local. We aim to center women of color in our dialogues and activism, and to represent the ways in which all social justice movements intersect.. Globally, our web site links activists with women's news, educational resources, and personal writings. We hope to help girls and women understand feminism's past and present, and encourage them to contribute to its future. We are co-organizing The Feminist Summit, a national conference coming to Detroit in May 2009.

Locally, Think Girl bridges women in Metro Detroit: women of all races and ethnicities, of low- and middle-income, of all body abilities, of spiritual and secular beliefs, and from Detroit and the suburbs. We present educational workshops for preteen girls on media literacy and body image, women's history and feminism, and challenging stereotypes.

I saw one of my favorite writers this weekend at Politics and Prose in DC. She's a Young Adult fiction writer named Sarah Dessen, and she happens to be from the town where I grew up. We even went to the same high school (although a lot of years apart). When I was a kid I read a lot--and much of it was young adult fiction. There are a lot of books in that genre, but what I love about Sarah Dessen is that her books have substance. Her characters (almost all of whom are young women) are strong, independent, smart and interesting. She tackles real issues, like divorce, intimate partner violence and substance abuse, but without it feeling forced or like a public service announcement. You might know her work from the Mandy Moore movie, How to Deal (which is based on two of her books combined).

I still read her new books as they come out, even though I'm much out of her target audience age. While I still enjoy them, I do wish they had more to say about things like race and sexual orientation. While Sarah does a good job of portraying women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, the main characters of the books are generally straight and white. Kind of like the town we grew up in.

Did you read YA Fiction growing up? Who were some of your favorite authors?

From a recent performance at The Whitney Biennial. Photo by Eduardo Aparicio.

Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, and editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (with Brian Wallis). Her work on military interrogation was selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

"In the guise of a CIA manual, Coco Fusco's provocative A Field Guide for Female Interrogators offers an unflinching look at women's role in the military and at America's use of torture in the War on Terror"-- (from the book's back cover copy).

Here's Coco...

This is completely indefensible. These images are flat-out racist. Not. Okay.

I want to echo Holly's sentiments, and her call for more information about how the hell this happened. And I'll be writing a letter to Seal that's very similar to Barry's.

UPDATE: Seal Press has issued an apology, and will be removing the images from future printings of the book.

UPDATE II Amanda has also apologized.

Martha Ma is a food and media educator and producer, community chef and health counselor. She is the host and producer of "The Tasty Life," a bi-weekly television show on Manhattan Public Access channel 57, and the editor of the e-newsletter, "Eater's Digest."

Martha is also executive producer of the Food for Thought Film Festival. If you're in the NYC area this weekend, check out the last weekend of the festival at Cooper Union's Wollman Auditorium, 51 Astor Place at Third Ave. Feature films include King Corn, Black Gold, and Life and Debt. Shorts include The Meatrix I, II and II 1/2 and The True Cost of Food.

Here's Martha...

A new children's book, My Beautiful Mommy, (being released on Mother's Day, no less) aims to explain to kids why their mom is getting plastic surgery.

It features a perky mother explaining to her child why she's having cosmetic surgery (a nose job and tummy tuck). Naturally, it has a happy ending: mommy winds up "even more" beautiful than before, and her daughter is thrilled.

Okay, I can understand the need to explain to children why a parent is getting surgery, but this...well, it's just ridiculous.

"My Beautiful Mommy" is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better." Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.

Superhero, huh? I suppose that should come as no surprise, given the book is written by a Florida-based plastic surgeon, Dr. Michael Salzhauer. Now, I'm certainly not going to sit in judgment of those who get plastic surgery - but do we really have to teach our kids that we need it to "feel better" and be "beautiful"? Ugh.

Thanks to Alexis for the link.

I will admit that the blog Stuff White People Like is no doubt one of my guilty pleasures, (maybe even an (Un) Feminist Guilty pleasure), but I, like most with a sense of humor certainly laugh along with the uncanny amount of humor in that blog and all those "aha" moments you have when reading it. The first time I read it I was sure a person of color was writing it and was honestly surprised and pretty happy that it was being written by a white man. I mean what makes a person of color feel better than a white person that can totally laugh at themselves and not take it personally? Well a lot of things, but it is definitely up there.

But jokes aside, I have some deeper feelings that I am trying to work out about this blog that make me not think it is as great and groundbreaking as many have hailed it to be. The real question being, what does this blog do for actual dialog on race?

I guess one simple answer is that it names, marks and makes visible the assumed invisibility of white culture. I grew up hearing, "you are so lucky to have a culture," and I remember thinking, dude you have a culture too. So on a basic level the calling out of white culture for what it is, is in fact powerful and will get you a lot of unexpected fans.

But if you believe that culture is not a static thing, but something that moves and changes and takes in and drops different participants as you go, than maybe it is not as salient. I am all about poking fun at the dominant culture, but if you are a person of color that is reading this blog and you can relate to a lot of the stuff white people like, does that make you white? Are you not a hard-core enough "person of color" if you like the things on that list?

For me, despite the humor (and yes, I see the humor and LMAO to different entries all the time) I don't see how marrying the concept of white-ness to the concept of material is actually helping us get to a new place. And as a friend of mine pointed out, the opposite effect of this is that the underlying assumption of stuff white people like is that the stuff they like is not cool, so then is everything that people of color do totally cool? Does that mean that we should look to people of color for what is cool (insert "wow you are such a good dancer!")? So in a way it is perpetuating that same thing we are trying to get away from. A hyper fascination with the things that white people like.

What sealed the deal for me was when I heard the author got a $300,000 dollar book deal. That is fucking crazy. If he had been a person of color he would have never gotten so much attention or such a hefty book deal. People would have said, omg, that is racist! They wouldn't have given it so much cred. My point being, there are a lot of people that call out racism and whiteness, but they don't get huge book deals for it because they are not white. So despite the potential transformative nature of calling out whiteness for what it is, the author is still getting rewarded for being white, even though he is making fun of white people. And let's not forget, white people also get paid for making fun of people of color. And what exactly do people of color get paid to do. . . ? To also make fun of people of color or to create characters that fit into white people's comfort levels of what is acceptable people of colorness. Because as the blog points out subtly, white people have the most capital to be the biggest consumers of everything, so all the images we see are tailored to their sensibilities.

This may be a total stretch, but this is where I am at with the whole thing and just had to put it out there. I see how many people LOVE this blog and how many people of color love it. And I see how uncomfortable it makes white people, which I also think is good. Being uncomfortable can often motivate you to think outside yourself. But is it really leading to this transformative conversation for a racially just world or is it perpetuating our assumed differences, realigning them with a gaze on what is considered white?

If you haven't had a chance to check out Sarah Seltzer's awesome piece in Bitch on sexism in The New York Times Book Review, pick up a copy today (or read it online). A sharp and savvy excerpt:

Recently, Times editors—in both the daily paper and the Sunday section—have trotted out a particularly insidious formula for bashing feminist authors. First, hire a female reviewer to unleash misogynist tropes in her piece and then, lest she appear prejudiced against her own gender, throw in an illogical, contradictory statement about the importance of a less threatening version of feminism that isn’t so “polarizing,� “provocative,� or “strident.� 


Allison Kilkenny describes herself as "a political humorist, a fancy way of saying writer, who makes shitty world news funny." She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, The Beast, Alternet.org's Wiretap Magazine, and Timothy McSweeney's. Her work has appeared on The Nation and SIRIUS radio.

Here's Allison Kilkenny...

The title of this post is in honor of the fact that I learned yesterday that Fran Drescher has an organization called Cancer Schmancer. For serious.

Anways, Amanda over at Pandagon blogged about this today too, but it was just too ridiculous to pass up. One of my all-time favorite books, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (if you haven't read it, GO PURCHASE NOW) is being censored by a group of students at the University of Utah. Because Alison is so freaking great, her response to this news was "awesome!"

"This sort of bullshit will pretty much permanently fuck up any attempt of feminists to start a reasonable discussion about why so many men are attracted to a flavor of pornography that is as much, if not more, about humiliating and hating women as it is about getting men off. Which is not even all porn, but certainly doesn’t encapsulate novels like this. Hell, we’re stuck in definitional hell, with the right wingers defining porn as “any material that portrays sexuality in a way that I don’t approve of�, and most everyone else in liberal land defining it as, “sexually explicit materials designed to sexually arouse the reader/viewer�, and radical feminists defining it as “photos and videos where the humiliation and pain of the woman is considered an essential part of the erotic experience for the viewer�. Which is, to be fair to radical feminists, the majority of the material available through your internet channels or “Girls Gone Wild� videos. I’m not getting into the discussion of censorship from feminists, since it’s a red herring, since the number of feminists willing to talk censorship is a minority of a minority."

Yea, what Amanda said.

On my way to WAM this last weekend I ate french fries and caught up on my New Yorkers. One article, in particular, really struck me and I wanted to write a bit about it here: "Exposure: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib" by Philip Gourevitch (of the amazing book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families) and Errol Morris (one of my favorite documentary filmmakers.

In it, they look closely at the life of Sabrina Harman, the young soldier who took the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that have come to haunt us. The piece is so powerful, in part because the authors rely heavily on quotations from those involved, particularly Hartman. Unlike most New Yorker pieces, which I find sometimes err on missing the voices of those at the center of the issue, this one is full of organic wanderings by the soldiers who got caught up in that horrendous place and time.

What becomes clear very quickly is that Harman used her camera as a way to process the dissonance between what she felt was right--a small but nagging sentiment--and what she was watching happen all around her to the point of normalization. The lens becomes her way of organizing the world, of making sense of the nonsensical. Interestingly, she is known as the one who won't even let people kill a bug, but she never speaks out directly about the abuse being heaped on detainees. Clearly this contrast tells us something even more frightening about the power of conditioning. She wasn't seeing bugs tortured day in and day out. She was seeing people endure that to the point that it no longer seemed like something to endure or end.

They write of her: "Nobody called Sabrina Harman Mother Theresa at the Abu Ghraib hard site. But even on the Military Intelligence block she retained her reputation as the blithe spirit of the unit, obviously not the leader and yet never a true follower, either--more like a tagalong, the soldier who should never have been a soldier."

Harman writes in a letter home: "They've been stripping 'the fucked up' prisoners and handcuffing them to the bars. Its pretty sad. I get to laugh at them and throw corn at them. I kind of feel bad for these guys, even if they are accused of killing US soldiers. We degrade them but we don't hit and thats a plus even though Im sure they wish we'd kill them."

I am fascinated by the processes by which we dehumanize one another, the slow crawl of corruption into even the most well-intentioned souls, what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." This article is not to be missed by those with similar interests. Gourevitch and Morris manage to present Harman and the action surrounding her with a deep compassion, but also a sharply focused, unforgiving lens of their own.

I don't know about you, but I was obsessed with Sweet Valley High when I was a kid. (Though I was always pissed that the Jessica character was the vapid one, while Elizabeth was the cool, smart reporter type.)

Well, it seems that Random House is re-releasing the series with a new modern twist: skinnier twins.

To publicize the re-release of teen fiction series Sweet Valley High, Random House Children's Books sent a letter to journalists highlighting the changes made to the content of the 1980s paperbacks. New cover girl Leven Rambin (pictured) was not mentioned, but just to make sure preteen and teenaged girl readers are sufficiently insecure about their bodies, the publisher made the "perfect" clothing size a couple of notches more restrictive.

In a side-by-side column comapring the 1983 version of the book with the present one, publishers write that the previous characters were a "perfect size 6." Now, they're a "perfect size 4." Charming. The next SVH book? Nipping it in the Bud: Elizabeth's Designer Vagina.

I’m reading an amazing little book by one of my new favorite authors, Parker Palmer (see my review of The Courage to Teach from a couple of weeks ago). This one's called Let Your Life Speak and in it he explores how one truly finds a vocation, a calling, a purpose in life. He writes:

Some journeys are direct, and some are circuitous; some are heroic, and some are fearful and muddled. But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

Two childhood memories popped into my head…1) lying on the cold, tile kitchen floor, holding my mom’s toes while she talked on the phone to her friends, listening to their stories and the way she consoled them and 2) setting my stuffed animals up in a group and then reading to them aloud, careful to show them the pictures when I turned the pages very patiently and deliberately. What did I become? A professional eavesdropper (i.e. writer) and a teacher.

Watching his granddaughter, Parker writes:

She did not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or “that of God� in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great price.

So today, I ask you, where does your “deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?� What is your “pearl of great price?� I think these questions are particularly important in a society that still clings to inauthentic gender norms, especially when it comes to career. If you were neither man nor woman, if you didn't get caught up in "shoulds" or "oughts", if you had a break from economic fears...who would you be?

Next week: some literary take on the Women, Action, & Media conference and the week after, Complications by by Atul Gawande

Deborah Brenner is the author of Women of the Vine and proprietor of Women of the Vine Cellars. While writing the book, Deborah and winemaker, Signe Zoller met and teamed up in 2006 to launch a first-of-its-kind wine company; bottled and produced by Women of the Vine Cellars.

From 2002-2005, Deborah ran her own marketing and public relations firm, SmallFishBigPond, and worked with such companies as Cinecitta Studios of Rome, Quantel, NBC and CNBC. Prior to that, Ms. Brenner spent over 16 years working in the film, television and the post production industries and was involved in four technology startups.

Here's Deborah...

My girl Kate has a blue streak in her hair. She digs obscure music and was raised by a feminist historian. She's a vegetarian with a yoga teaching dad. Oh, and she wrote a badass book on the subculture of competitive college cheerleading.

A total contrast, I know, but that's why her new book, CHEER!, is so cool. Kate is a journalist fascinated in all the ins and outs of how people become obsessed with sports and identified with the cultures surrounding them. When she first did some reporting on college cheerleading for Jane Magazine, where she was working at the time, she didn't expect to be too drawn in. And then she started to get to know the fearless women and men involved, she started to see that cheerleading was far from rah-rah siskomba and all the other stereotypes. It was leaping thirty feet in the air, concussions, and almost bizarre dedication.

In CHEER! she follows three teams through out the year on their way to Nationals, the Super Bowl of cheerleading. She eats in diners with them, sits in the hospital with them, parties with them, and, of course, watches a lot of frickin' cheerleading. In the process drugs, race, eating disorders, class, and a host of other issues come up.

Kate creates fascinating, empathy-inducing portraits of this culture and each of its characters. If only we were all so curious about the world and so passionate towards other people. Check out Kate on Good Morning America below:

Next week Oprah and I are taking a little break, but I'll be back the week after with something thrilling.

If you haven't seen Searching for Angela Shelton, you've missed out on a truly powerful work of art that interrogates the linkages between diverse women--both triumphant and depressing. Faced with a writer's strike and a bit of a psychic crisis, Californian Angela Shelton hits the road in her RV and visits all the other Angela Sheltons in the U.S. that will speak with her. Very quickly she realized that one of the things that too many of them have in common is a history of abuse and interpersonal violence. The film really comes to a head when Angela, the original, finds her own father who molested her and her siblings when they were all young, and confronts him. I have to say that I've seen few moments caught on film that are that powerful--not in a cathartic way, mind you.

Now Angela has graced us with a book to go alone with the documentary, this one called Finding Angela Shelton. It is a glorified diary of her film journey, complete with far more comprehensive accounts of the lives of the Angela Sheltons along the way and her healing process with her family and her own soul. She ends with this reflection:
My survey of women in America showed me that we are all pretty amazing and we've been through hell, but most of us are breaking the cycle and leading awesome lives."

Amen Angela.

Next time: CHEER! by Kate Torgonick and then I'm on the road so I may take a week off. Can you stand it?

I stand in front of a classroom of 50 some odd skeptical faces and introduce myself. I can see it in their faces. They can’t believe that this woman, who looks like she is a student, is actually the teacher. They immediately wonder: Is she straight or gay? Single or married? How old is she? Is she one of those feminazis or will we be able to express dissenting opinions?

Such is my experience of teaching Intro to Women’s Studies at Hunter College. It is one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever faced, and also, one of the greatest opportunities for making me a smarter, more inclusive, more dynamic thinker and writer.

I was reminded of this (I haven’t been able to teach since I’ve been touring for my book) while reading The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. It is an incredibly moving perspective on what it takes to be a truly enlightened, committed, effective teacher.

Palmer bravely argues that teachers must bring themselves—authentically and fearlessly—into the classroom if they want to change students’ lives. He denounces the defensive posture of old-school teaching, the notion that there is one body of knowledge, a solid and unchanged Truth, and that it is the teachers job to impart this knowledge on the student. Instead, he writes: “To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced…the hallmark of the community of truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality only by being in community with it.�

I turned the last page on this gut-twisting dystopic novel, authored by ex-politico Joe McGinniss Jr., yesterday while cramped in an airplane, headed west, and I felt trapped. I couldn’t get the amoral world of artificial sexuality and economic exploitation, set (surprise, surprise) in Vegas, out of my mind. And a question kept buzzing—like the neon found all over that rough city—in my brain: why do we read?

If we read, if I read, to learn something—than this novel has failed me. I learned nothing new about sex or the quarterlife crisis or exploitation. What I already knew was exaggerated and put in my face in freakish proportions, but it was not new (it may be new to an older reader). If we read to be inspired, uplifted, called-to-action then hot damn has this novel failed me. It was so depressing near the end that part of me wanted to just shut it and shove it in the seat pocket in front of me, not waste another precious minute of my life feeling so sad. But if we read to be moved, to feel something potently and undeniably, than the novel has succeeded.

Miki Fujiwara, aka Urban Envy, is a self-employed visual artist/community activist based in New York City.

Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Miki is known to be one of the original members of the New York Tributary Art Movement. The majority of her work, mostly paintings, has been categorized as "Cultural Surrealism," often said to be in the "tradition of Cynthia Tom and Frida Kahlo."

Urban Envy's works can be seen in local galleries of New York City.

Here's Miki...

My mom—the lady with her finger on the pulse--saw Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core on one of the morning shows and told me I should check it out. As someone fascinated by youth and political culture and spirituality, it’s totally my cup of chai.

The Core, according to the website:

aims to introduce a new relationship, one that is about mutual respect and religious pluralism. Instead of focusing a dialogue on political or theological differences, we build relationships on the values that we share, such as hospitality and caring for the Earth, and how we can live out those values together to contribute to the betterment of our community.
The Interfaith Youth Core is creating these relationships across the world by inspiring, networking, and resourcing young people, who are the leaders of this movement. We provide young people and the institutions that support them with leadership training, project resources and a connection to a broader movement.

Through the site, I realized that Eboo Patel, the founder of the Core, has a new memoir out called Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. It is a rare and beautiful intertwining of a person, a conscience, and a big idea all coming of age at the same time.

My interview with Benjamin Percy, the author of Refresh, Refresh--that great short story collection I reviewed awhile ago, is up at Alternet today. Check it out--he's a smart dude.

I can still remember the way my attic smelled (like cardboard boxes and old crinkly photo albums where the sticky stuff has worn off and turned brown) as I crept up the stairs with my best little guy friend in my childhood home. We were on a mission—to find my dad’s dusty stack of Playboy’s hidden in a tiny closet, to open up the pages and quietly giggle, to have our first visual experience of naked, overt sexuality.

I wish opening the books that DK publishing generously sent me—Sex 365: A Position for Every Day and Kama Sutra by Tracey Cox, no less—gave me that same feeling. But now I’ve lived in a pornified culture, developed my own relationship with my body and the body of a hot partner, generally grown weary of anyone trying to sell me a version of sex they think I can “benefit from.�

My cynicism is warranted. For starters, all you’ll find in these books is heterosexual couples, and in DK publishing land, apparently no one sleeps with anyone outside of their race. (For more on why I think this sucks, read my op-ed in the New York Daily News today). They also all have pretty perfect (by media standards) bodies.

Setting aside the offensively narrow definition of “sex� depicted in the book—heterosexual, monoracial, tight and toned—I can see how flipping through it could liven things up in a couples’ sex life.

Social psychologist Bella DePaulo’s book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After gave me one of those “click� moments—after reading these words, suddenly the world just looked different:

…the way coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person—sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.

You wouldn’t know that, of course, if you just took a quick glance around at our consumer culture and familial expectations. DePaulo writes, with great humor, about the sad face and sigh that people give single people—especially ladies—when they hear the oh so sad news that they haven’t coupled. She also talks about the legal ramifications of living in a society that glamorizes marriage to the point of absurdity (um, 50% failure rate people) and the scientific bunk that’s out there claiming only coupled people can lead fulfilling lives.