Neurodiversity Awareness Month
April is Neurodiversity Awareness month. For those who are unaware of what neurodiversity is, neurodiversity is defined as “a type of brain that is often considered as different from what is usual” (Cambridge). Neurodiversity month started off as Learning Disability Month and ADHD awareness month in 1985 but now has expanded to celebrate and bring awareness to all types of neurodiversity from dyslexia to OCD. In honor of this month, we offer you a couple of books that will help bring awareness to neurodivergence, or if you’re neurodivergent yourself, find support and stories that you may relate to.
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstraction by Temple Grandin
“…Do you have a keen sense of direction, a love of puzzles, and the ability to assemble furniture without crying? You are likely a visual thinker.
With her genius for demystifying science, Grandin draws on cutting-edge research to take us inside visual thinking. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously believed, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the photo-realistic ‘object visualizers’ like Grandin herself…
She also makes us understand how a world increasingly geared to the verbal tends to sideline visual thinkers, screening them out at school and passing over them in the workplace. Rather than continuing to waste their singular gifts, driving a collective loss in productivity and innovation, Grandin proposes new approaches to educating, parenting, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers. In a highly competitive world, this important book helps us see, we need every mind on board” (Amazon.com).
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
“Written by Naoki Higashida, a very smart, very self-aware, and very charming thirteen-year-old boy with autism, it is a one-of-a-kind memoir that demonstrates how an autistic mind thinks, feels, perceives, and responds in ways few of us can imagine.
Parents and family members who never thought they could get inside the head of their autistic loved one at last have a way to break through to the curious, subtle, and complex life within. Using an alphabet grid to painstakingly construct words, sentences, and thoughts that he is unable to speak out loud, Naoki answers even the most delicate questions that people want to know….
With disarming honesty and a generous heart, Naoki shares his unique point of view on not only autism but life itself. His insights into the mystery of words, the wonders of laughter, and the elusiveness of memory are so startling, so strange, and so powerful that you will never look at the world the same way again….” (Primo).
ADHD Does Not Exist: The Truth About Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder by Richard Saul, MD
“Dr. Richard Saul offers a groundbreaking solution. After thousands of clinical trials, he has determined that ADHD is not an entity on its own, but in fact a cluster of symptoms stemming from 12 other conditions, each of which requires a separate treatment.
The comprehensive list ranges from harmless conditions (poor eyesight and giftedness) to more severe illnesses (bipolar disorder). Dr. Saul takes the reader through clinical examples in which he alters peoples’ lives by diagnosing the underlying cause of their attention-deficit symptoms” (Primo).
Depression: What Everyone Needs to Know by Jonathan Rottenberg
“Depression: What Everyone Needs to Know® cuts through the confusion around this often-debilitating illness, offering a practical, reader-friendly synthesis that bridges science, treatment, and everyday life.
Pithy and straightforward, this volume is the essential go-to guide both for understanding what we know about the causes of depression and the depression epidemic, and for learning what to do about it” (Primo).
The Dyslexia, ADHD, and DCD-Friendly Study Skills Guide: Tips and Strategies for Exam Success by by Ann-Marie McNicholas
“This practical skills guide helps young people with who learn differently including those with dyslexia, DCD/dyspraxia and ADHD, study for their exams. Students who learn differently can often find exams challenging and can experience a good deal of anxiety around exam time, leading to exam results that may not accurately reflect their capabilities. Much exam stress arises from a lack of confidence with the ability to learn and retain information in a meaningful way.
This engaging workbook is designed to help students to overcome these issues. It not only shows students how to develop a positive success attitude towards study and exams, but also aims to equip them with powerful strategies and techniques for learning and remembering.
…Struggling students will become confident, successful learners, with a positive attitude and access to a wide range of effective strategies, and in this way, you will achieve the results in exams that you have worked for and deserve” (Primo).
Obsessed: A Memoir of My Life with OCD
by Allison Britz
“…Until sophomore year of high school, fifteen-year-old Allison Britz lived a comfortable life in an idyllic town. She was a dedicated student with tons of extracurricular activities, friends, and loving parents at home. But after awakening from a vivid nightmare in which she was diagnosed with brain cancer, she was convinced the dream had been a warning. Allison believed that she must do something to stop the cancer in her dream from becoming a reality. It started with avoiding sidewalk cracks and quickly grew to counting steps as loudly as possible.
Over the following weeks, her brain listed more dangers and fixes. She had to avoid hair dryers, calculators, cell phones, computers, anything green, bananas, oatmeal, and most of her own clothing. Unable to act ‘normal,’ the once-popular Allison became an outcast…. Finally, she allowed herself to ask for help and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This brave memoir tracks Allison’s descent and ultimately hopeful climb out of the depths” (Primo).
Dyslexia: A Very Short Introduction by Margaret J. Snowling
“This Very Short Introduction provides an accessible overview of this exciting field of research, beginning with its history, and drawing on testimony from people living with dyslexia.
Considering the potential causes of dyslexia, and looking at both genetic and environment factors, Margaret Snowling shows how cross-linguistic studies have documented the prevalence of dyslexia in different languages. Discussing the various brain scanning techniques that have been used to find out if the brains of people with dyslexia differ in structure or function from those of typical readers, Snowling moves on to weigh up various strategies and interventions which can help people living with dyslexia today.” (Primo)
-MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Women’s Literature
It’s Women’s History Month! To honor women and their history we present Award winning novels written by female authors.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
“A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women—their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery” (Amazon).
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
“Heralded as Virginia Woolf’s greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman’s life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old”(Goodreads).
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
“Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness… about marriage and children and memory… about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself” (Joan Didion).
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
“Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s ‘saying’ the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.
Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. ‘To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.’ Forty years later the stories and history continue” (Amazon).
All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds’ Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.
Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does.
Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding. Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him—and Juniper—forever. When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth—and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst” (Primo).
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
“The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world.
When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future. One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate” (Primo).
All that She Carried by Tiya Miles
“In 1850s South Carolina, just before nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag–including Rose’s message that ‘It be filled with my Love always.’
Historian Tiya Miles carefully follows faint archival traces back to Charleston to find Rose in the kitchen where she may have packed the sack for Ashley. From Rose’s last resourceful gift to her daughter, Miles then follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States… As she follows Ashley’s journey, Miles metaphorically ‘unpacks’ the sack, deepening its emotional resonance and revealing the meanings and significance of everything it contained” (Primo).
-MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Black History Month
As you may know, February is Black History Month. In commemoration, we present to you books and videos that showcase Black art and teach about black history and struggles. Why not pick out something to learn more for Black History Month!
Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience and Restoration by Tracy M. Lewis-Giggetts
“When Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote an essay on Black joy for The Washington Post, she had no idea just how deeply it would resonate. But the outpouring of positive responses affirmed her own lived experience: that Black joy is not just a weapon of resistance, it is a tool for resilience.
With this book, Tracey aims to gift her community with a collection of lyrical essays about the way joy has evolved, even in the midst of trauma, in her own life. Detailing these instances of joy in the context of Black culture allows us to recognize the power of Black joy as a resource to draw upon, and to challenge the one-note narratives of Black life as solely comprised of trauma and hardship.” (Simon and Schuster).
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
“…With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work…” (Amazon).
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
by Saidiya V Hartman
“…In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century….
…Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them―domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty―and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology.
For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires” (Primo).
The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement by V.P. Franklin
“…Some of the most iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement are those of young people engaged in social activism, such as children and teenagers in 1963 being attacked by police in Birmingham with dogs and water hoses. But their contributions have not been well documented or prioritized.
The Young Crusaders is the first book dedicated to telling the story of the hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers who engaged in sit-ins, school strikes, boycotts, marches, and demonstrations in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other national civil rights leaders played little or no part. It was these young activists who joined in the largest civil rights demonstration in US history: the system-wide school boycott in New York City on February 3, 1964, where over 360,000 elementary and secondary school students went on strike…
…Highlighting the voices of the young people themselves, Franklin offers a redefining narrative, complemented by arresting archival images. The Young Crusaders reveals a radical history that both challenges and expands our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement” (Primo).
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and The Emergence of a People directed by Thomas Allen Harris
“Inspired by Deborah Willis’s book Reflections in Black, Through a Lens Darkly casts a broad net that begins with filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris’s family album. It considers the difference between black photographers who use the camera to define themselves, their people, and their culture and some white photographers who, historically, have demeaned African-Americans through racist imagery.
The film embraces both historical material (African-Americans who were slaves, who fought in the Civil War, were victims of lynchings, or were pivotal in the Civil Rights Movement) and contemporary images made by such luminaries as Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems.
The film is a cornucopia of Americana that reveals deeply disturbing truths about the history of race relations while expressing joyous, life-affirming sentiments about the ability of artists and amateurs alike to assert their identity through the photographic lens” (Primo).
In Black and White Profiles of 6 African American Authors directed by Matteo Bellinelli
“In Black and White is the first video series devoted to the life and work of contemporary African American authors. It introduces… six of America’s most talented and challenging writers: Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman and August Wilson.
These authors’ work is helping to define a new multi-cultural American literary canon for the 21st Century. As Nobel Prize- winning novelist Toni Morrison observes in her program, “American literature is incoherent without the contribution of African Americans.'” (California Newsreel).
Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies by Dick Gregory
“…A friend of luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today’s popular black comics, including Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Damon Young, and Trevor Noah, Dick Gregory was a provocative and incisive cultural force for more than fifty years.
As an entertainer, he always kept it indisputably real about race issues in America, fearlessly lacing laughter with hard truths. As a leading activist against injustice, he marched at Selma during the Civil Rights movement, organized student rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and participated in hunger strikes in support of Black Lives Matter.
In this collection of thoughtful, provocative essays, Gregory charts the complex and often obscured history of the African American experience. In his unapologetically candid voice, he moves from African ancestry and surviving the Middle Passage to the enjoyment of bacon and everything pig, the headline-making shootings of black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement. A captivating journey through time, Defining Moments in Black History explores historical movements such as The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as cultural touchstones such as Sidney Poitier winning the Best Actor Oscar for Lilies in the Field and Billie Holiday releasing Strange Fruit. An engaging look at black life that offers insightful commentary on the intricate history of the African American people, Defining Moments in Black History is an essential, no-holds-bar history lesson that will provoke, enlighten, and entertain” (Primo).
-posted by MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )New Year’s Resolutions
Happy New Year! In celebration of the arrival of 2024, we present to you a couple of books that might help with your New Year’s Resolutions. From eating healthier to managing finances, these books will give you the information and motivation you need to make changes this New Year.
The Home Edit Life: The No-Guilt Guide to Owning What You Want and Organizing Everything by
Joanna Teplin and Clea Shearer
“At home or on the go, you don’t have to live like a minimalist to feel happy and calm. The Home Edit mentality is all about embracing your life—whether you’re a busy mom, a roommate living with three, or someone who’s always traveling for work. You just need to know how to set up a system that works for you.
In the next phase of the home organizing craze, Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin go beyond the pantry and bookshelf to show you how to contain the chaos in all aspects of your life, from office space and holiday storage to luggage and pet supplies. Get to know your organizing style, tailor it to your family’s lifestyle, and lead the low-guilt life as you apply more genius ideas to every aspect of your life.
Clea and Joanna are here to remind you that “it’s okay to own things” in the quest for pretty and smart spaces. With The Home Edit Life, you’ll soon be corralling phone cords, archiving old photos, arranging your phone apps by color, and packing your suitcase like a pro” (Amazon).
Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol by Holly Whitaker
“The founder of the first female-focused recovery program offers a groundbreaking look at alcohol and a radical new path to sobriety. We live in a world obsessed with drinking… Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity-in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but…
When Holly found an alternate way out of her own addiction, she felt a calling to create a sober community with resources for anyone questioning their relationship with drinking, so that they might find their way as well. Her resultant feminine-centric recovery program focuses on getting at the root causes that lead people to overindulge and provides the tools necessary to break the cycle of addiction, showing us what is possible when we remove alcohol and destroy our belief system around it… You will never look at drinking the same way again” (Primo).
How to Money: Your Ultimate Visual Guide to the Basics of Finance by Jean Sherman Chatzky
There’s no getting around it. You need to know how to manage money to know how to manage life― but most of us don’t! This full-color, illustrated guidebook from New York Times bestselling author and financial expert Jean Chatzky, Kathryn Tuggle, and their team at HerMoney breaks down the basics of money―how to earn it, manage it, and use it―giving you all the tools you need to take charge and be fearless with personal finance.
Featuring exclusive HerMoney interviews with CEOs, activists, and many more, How to Money will teach you the ins and outs of:
- creating a budget (and sticking to it)
- scoring that first job (and what that paycheck means)
- navigating college loans (and avoiding student debt)
- getting that first credit card (and what “credit” is)
- investing like a pro (and why it’s important!)
All so you can earn more, save smart, invest wisely, borrow only when you have to, and enjoy everything you’ve got!” (Amazon).
How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life by Catherine Price
“Is your phone the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you touch before bed? Do you frequently pick it up ‘just to check’, only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Do you say you want to spend less time on your phone—but have no idea how to do so without giving it up completely? If so, this book is your solution.
Award-winning journalist Catherine Price presents a practical, hands-on plan to break up—and then make up—with your phone. The goal? A long-term relationship that actually feels good. You’ll discover how phones and apps are designed to be addictive and how the time we spend on them damages our abilities to focus, think deeply, and form new memories. You’ll then make customized changes to your settings, apps, environment, and mindset that will enable you to take back control of your life—both on your phone and off” (Primo).
Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Life by Gretchen Rubin
“Habits are the invisible architecture of our lives. Rubin provides an analytical and scientific framework from which to understand these habits―as well as change them for good.
Infused with her compelling voice and funny stories, she illustrates the core principles of habit formation with dozens of strategies that she uses herself and tests out on others. Rubin provides tools to help readers better understand themselves, and presents a clear, practical menu of strategies so readers can take an individualized approach….
Armed with self-knowledge, we can pursue habits in ways that will truly work for us, not against us. Going to the gym can be as easy, effortless, and automatic as putting on a seatbelt. We can file expense reports, take time for fun, or pass up that piece of carrot cake without having to decide. With a foundation of good habits, we can build a life that reflects our values and goals” (Primo).
Fast Food Genocide: How Processed Food is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It by Joel Fuhrman
“…Dr. Joel Fuhrman, delivers a hard-hitting, culture-shifting examination of the role fast and processed food plays in our nation’s health crisis and offers a program to help us discover a lasting solution, including a two-week meal plan and 80 recipes..
…Processed and fake foods have become the primary source of calories in the United States―a trend that is growing across the developed world. While these “Frankenfoods” efficiently feed the majority of our citizens, they do not contain the sustaining biological and chemical properties of food produced in nature…. They create an avalanche of harmful problems―chronic disease, lowered intelligence levels, and attention deficits that are intrinsically linked to poverty, reduced educational and occupational opportunities, and even increased drug addiction, violence, and crime.
An urgent call to action, Fast Food Genocide also provides a clear and very achievable solution. While food can destroy the world, it can also heal it. We must take back control of our diet―by eating specific natural ingredients in a balanced way—and in doing so, our right to a healthy, long life….” (Primo)
-MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Native American Heritage Month
November is Native American Heritage Month! Native American Heritage Month is about recognizing and celebrating the accomplishments, history, and culture of Native Americans. In this blog, we’re taking the time to showcase groundbreaking works written by Native Americans authors about the Native American experience.
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
“A young Native American, Abel has come home from war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his father’s, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world—modern, industrial America—pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, trying to claim his soul, and goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of depravity and disgust.
An American classic, House Made of Dawn is at once a tragic tale about the disabling effects of war and cultural separation, and a hopeful story of a stranger in his native land, finding his way back to all that is familiar and sacred” (Amazon).
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
“Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.
Tayo’s quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions—despair” (Amazon).
There There by Tommy Orange
“Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. They converge and collide on one fateful day at the Big Oakland Powwow and together this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism” (Amazon).
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
“…Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author’s own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character’s art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live” (Amazon).
Love Medicine by Louise Eldrich
“Set on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine—the first novel from master storyteller and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich—is an epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines.
With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter of this stunning novel draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life.
Erdrich has written a multigenerational portrait of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable whirlwind of anger, desire, and the healing power that is love medicine” (Amazon).
Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith
“Raised in suburban Maryland and Oklahoma, Smith dove head first into the political radicalism of the 1970s, working with the American Indian Movement until it dissolved into dysfunction and infighting.
…In his journey from fighting activist to federal employee, Smith tells us he has discovered at least two things: there is no one true representation of the American Indian experience, and even the best of intentions sometimes end in catastrophe.
Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong is a highly entertaining and, at times, searing critique of the deeply disputed role of American Indians in the United States.” (Amazon).
Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
“Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team.
Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into an FBI investigation of a lethal new drug.
Reluctantly, Daunis agrees to go undercover, drawing on her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to track down the source. But the search for truth is more complicated than Daunis imagined, exposing secrets and old scars.” (Goodreads).
-posted by MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Women’s Biographies
March is Women’s History Month. During this month, we celebrate the accomplishments and impact that women have had on our society throughout history. In honor of Women’s History Month, we’ve highlighted biographies about women from various time periods whose impact is still felt today.
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
by Charlotte Gordon
“This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book until now.
In Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein, two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy.
In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable life spent pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations for women came to an end. But another was just beginning. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history. The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted storyteller. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel.
…Romantic Outlaws reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era” (Primo).
The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation
by Anna Malaika Tubbs
“Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin’s son James, about Alberta King’s son Martin Luther, and Louise Little’s son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them.
…Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning—from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice.
These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced. These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America’s racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families’ safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers. These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue” (Primo).
The Woman They Could Not Silence
by Kate Moore
“…1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened—by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So he makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum. The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband.
But most disturbing is that Elizabeth is not the only sane woman confined to the institution. There are many rational women on her ward who tell the same story: they’ve been committed not because they need medical treatment, but to keep them in line—conveniently labeled ‘crazy’ so their voices are ignored. No one is willing to fight for their freedom and, disenfranchised both by gender and the stigma of their supposed madness, they cannot possibly fight for themselves. But Elizabeth is about to discover that the merit of losing everything is that you then have nothing to lose…. Elizabeth’s refusal to be silenced and her ceaseless quest for justice not only challenged the medical science of the day, and led to a giant leap forward in human rights, it also showcased the most salutary lesson: sometimes, the greatest heroes we have are those inside ourselves” (Primo).
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston
by Valerie Boyd
“A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother, and her 1937 masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a crucial part of the modern literary canon.
Wrapped in Rainbows, the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in more than twenty-five years, illuminates the adventures, complexities, and sorrows of an extraordinary life. Acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston’s history—her youth in the country’s first incorporated all-black town, her friendships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou.
With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston’s work in her time but also offers riveting implications for our own” (Amazon).
Cleopatra: A Life
by Stacy Schiff
“Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.
Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and—after his murder—three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra’s supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff ‘s is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life” (Primo).
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
by Alison Weir
“The tempestuous, bloody, and splendid reign of Henry VIII of England (1509-1547) is one of the most fascinating in all history, not least for his marriage to six extraordinary women.
In this work of scholarship, Alison Weir draws on early biographies, letters, memoirs, account books, and diplomatic reports to bring these women to life. Catherine of Aragon emerges as a staunch though misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn, an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour, a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves, a good-natured and innocent woman naively unaware of the court intrigues that determined her fate; Catherine Howard, an empty-headed wanton; and Catherine Parr, a warm-blooded bluestocking who survived King Henry to marry a fourth time” (Primo).
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
by Janice P. Nimura
“Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of ‘ordinary’ womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician
Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights—or with each other.
From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. As Elizabeth herself predicted, ‘a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now'” (Primo).
-Posted by MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )African American Authors
In 1926, black historian, author, and cofounder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) Dr. Carter G. Woodson proposed a week in February dedicated to the celebration of African American history and achievements. The proposition was taken up immediately by the black community, and soon schools and the public were celebrating Negro History Week. Black history clubs were erected, teachers were eager to teach Black history to their pupils, and white progressives supported these efforts.
However, as African Americans intellectuals and activists became more aware of their history and culture, they began to observe during more than just a week. By the 1940s, some African American activist circles started to celebrate Black history for the entire month of February instead of just the week. With pressure rising from prominent African American figures to change Black History Week to Black History Month, ASNLH pushed for a Black History Month in 1976. That same year, President Ford issued a statement acknowledging Black History Month, and encouraged Americans to celebrate Black history and Black contributions to the United States. In 1986, Congress passed a law officially declaring February as National Black History Month.
In commemoration of this month, we would like to highlight works from accomplished African American authors about the black experience.
Sources:
https://guides.loc.gov/black-history-month-legal-resources/history-and-overview
https://asalh.org/about-us/origins-of-black-history-month/
Hitting A Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance
by Zora Neale Hurston
“Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston’s ‘lost’ Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives.
These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales reflective of the cultural currents of Hurston’s world. All are timeless classics that enrich our understanding and appreciation of this exceptional writer’s voice and her contributions to America’s literary traditions” (Primo).
The Beautiful Struggle
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack, and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free.
Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets.
The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father’s steadfast efforts assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction” (Primo.)
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
“Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.
A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.
The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of ‘the Brotherhood,’ and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.” (Amazon).
Brown Girl Dreaming
by Jacqueline Woodson
“Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.
Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become” (NILRC).
The Short Stories of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes
“This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963—the most comprehensive available—showcases Langston Hughes’s literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns….
These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes’s uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general” (Amazon).
Sula
by Toni Morrison
“This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit childhood in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
Nel Wright has chosen to stay in the place where she was born, to marry, raise a family, and become a pillar of the black community. Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America” (GoodReads).
Kindred
by Octavia Butler
“Butler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him.
During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother” (Octavia E. Butler).
The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
“From the bestselling author of Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.
Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856—a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces—when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry’s master turns violent, Henry is forced to leave town—along with Brown, who believes Henry to be a girl and his good luck charm.
Over the ensuing months, Henry, whom Brown nicknames Little Onion, conceals his true identity to stay alive. Eventually Brown sweeps him into the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—one of the great catalysts for the Civil War. An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride’s meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival” (Primo).
Passing
by Nella Larsen
“Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s.
When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for a white woman after severing ties to her past—even hiding the truth from her racist husband. Clare finds herself drawn to Irene’s sense of ease and security with her Black identity and longs for the community (and, increasingly, the woman) she lost. Irene is both riveted and repulsed by Clare and her dangerous secret, as Clare begins to insert herself—and her deception—into every part of Irene’s stable existence.
First published in 1929, Larsen’s brilliant examination of the various ways in which we all seek to ‘pass,’ is as timely as ever.” (Primo).
Go Tell It On the Mountain
by James Baldwin
“Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin’s first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem.
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.
Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves” (Primo).
– Posted by Kevin Purtell and MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Women Artists
When one thinks of art, many people’s minds go to the works of artists such as Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, or Vincent Van Gogh–all men. With this blog entry, we invite readers to expand their horizons and learn more about the lives and works of some accomplished female artists from various time periods.
Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness
by Rebecca VanDiver
“In Designing a New Tradition, Rebecca VanDiver presents a fresh perspective on the art and career of Loïs Mailou Jones. Considering the importance of Africa for Jones’s work and examining the broader roles played by class, gender, and politics in constructions of African American art histories as a whole, VanDiver makes a convincing case for Jones’s lasting place in American art history.
Accessibly written and filled with fascinating anecdotes about Jones’s life and career, her many acquaintances, and the challenges she faced as a black woman artist working in the twentieth century, this book makes a singular contribution to a new and expanded art-historical canon” (Amazon).
Sofonisba Anguissola: The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance
by Ilya Sandra Perlingieri
“Anguissola was erased from the annals of art history for four centuries, but Perlingieri’s exhaustive archival research reestablishes her as a force in the creation of 16th-century art. Her resurrection is cause for rejoicing, but it also forces us to consider the injustice of the loss of a master who painted for over 80 years.
Born into nobility, the artist benefited from astute parenting and a comprehensive education that included study under Campi, Gatti, and, briefly, Michelangelo. Both Mannerist and High Renaissance influences penetrate her impressive body of work. Perlingieri unleashes the essential truth of a female painter who flourished despite antagonism from patriarchal society, thoroughly underscoring Anguissola’s characteristic technique and style in rendering emotion and anatomy. The deft descriptions of period costumes mirror the accuracy and seriousness with which Anguissola painted” (Primo).
Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist
by Gail Levin
“Born to Jewish radical parents in Chicago in 1939, Judy Cohen grew up to be Judy Chicago—one of the most daring and controversial artists of her generation. Her works, once disparaged and misunderstood by the critics, have become icons of the feminist movement, earning her a place among the most influential artists of her time.
In Becoming Judy Chicago, Gail Levin gives us a biography of uncommon intimacy and depth, revealing the artist as a person and a woman of extraordinary energy and purpose. Drawing upon Chicago’s personal letters and diaries, her published and unpublished writings, and more than 250 interviews with her friends, family, admirers, and critics, Levin presents a richly detailed and moving chronicle of the artist’s unique journey from obscurity to fame, including the story of how she found her audience outside of the art establishment.
…Becoming Judy Chicago tells the story of a great artist, a leader of the women’s movement, a tireless crusader for equal rights, and a complicated, vital woman who dared to express her own sexuality in her art and demand recognition from a male-dominated culture” (Amazon).
Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe
by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and Georgia O’Keeffe
“Georgia O’Keefe (1887?-1986) was one of the most successful American artists of the twentieth century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes, and stark white cow skulls are seminal works of modern art.
But behind O’Keeffe’s bold work and celebrity was a woman misunderstood by even her most ardent admirers. This large, finely balanced biography offers an astonishingly honest portrayal of a life shrouded in myth” (Amazon).
Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman
by Mary Cassatt, Judith A. Barter, Erica E. Hirshler, and Art Institute of Chicago
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) holds a unique place in the history of art. One of the few women artists to succeed professionally in her era, she was the only American invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists.
This handsome volume, richly illustrated with paintings, prints, and pastels spanning Cassatt’s entire career, accompanies a major traveling exhibition that opens at The Art Institute of Chicago in October 1998. Essays trace Cassatt’s development from her early influences through her critical role in bringing Old Master and Impressionist art to the United States. The superb colorplates clearly demonstrate why Cassatt is considered one of North America’s most important artists…” (Amazon).
Unbound: The Life and Art of Judith Scott
by Joyce Scott, Brie Spangler, and Melissa Sweet
“Judith Scott was born with Down syndrome. She was deaf, and never learned to speak. She was also a talented artist. Judith was institutionalized until her sister Joyce reunited with her and enrolled her in an art class. Judith went on to become an artist of renown with her work displayed in museums and galleries around the world.
Poignantly told by Joyce Scott in collaboration with Brie Spangler and Melissa Sweet and beautifully illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist, Melissa Sweet, Unbound is inspiring and warm, showing us that we can soar beyond our perceived limitations and accomplish something extraordinary” (Amazon).
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait
by Frida Kahlo, Sarah Lowe and Carlos Fuentes
“Published in its entirety, Frida Kahlo’s amazing, illustrated journal documents the last 10 years of her turbulent life. These passionate, often surprising, intimate records, kept under lock and key for some 40 years in Mexico, reveal many new dimensions in the complex personal life of this remarkable Mexican artist.
The 170-page journal contains the artist’s thoughts, poems, and dreams—many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera—along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations. Her views of love, politics, and more come into sharp focus in a kaleidoscope of creativity and thought.
The text entries, written in Frida’s round, full script in brightly colored inks, make the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Her writing reveals the artist’s political sensibilities, recollections of her childhood, and her enormous courage in the face of more than 35 operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of 18.
This intimate portal into her life is sure to fascinate fans of the artist, art historians, and women’s culturalists alike” (Primo).
– posted by MyEva Newsome
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )2022 Oakton Staff Picks
During Staff Day 2022, Oakton Staff from different department met virtually to discuss what they were reading and would recommend to our community. These were the books discussed:
The Book of Longings
by Sue Monk Kidd
“…, Sue Monk Kidd brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman named Ana. Raised in a wealthy family in Sepphoris with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, a relentless seeker with a brilliant, curious mind and a daring spirit. She yearns for a pursuit worthy of her life, but finds no outlet for her considerable talents. Defying the expectations placed on women, she engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes secret narratives about neglected and silenced women.
When she meets the eighteen-year-old Jesus, each is drawn to and enriched by the other’s spiritual and philosophical ideas. He becomes a floodgate for her intellect, but also the awakener of her heart. Their marriage unfolds with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, James and Simon, and their mother, Mary. Here, Ana’s pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to the Roman occupation of Israel, partially led by her charismatic adopted brother, Judas.
She is sustained by her indomitable aunt Yaltha, who is searching for her long-lost daughter, as well as by other women, including her friend Tabitha, who is sold into slavery after she was raped, and Phasaelis, the shrewd wife of Herod Antipas. Ana’s impetuous streak occasionally invites danger. When one such foray forces her to flee Nazareth for her safety shortly before Jesus’s public ministry begins, she makes her way with Yaltha to Alexandria, where she eventually finds refuge and purpose in unexpected surroundings.
Grounded in meticulous historical research and written with a reverential approach to Jesus’s life that focuses on his humanity, The Book of Longings is an inspiring account of one woman’s bold struggle to realize the passion and potential inside her, while living in a time, place, and culture devised to silence her” (Primo).
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America
by Clint Smith
“How the Word is Passed is Clint Smith’s revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves” (Primo).
Reasons to Stay Alive
by Matt Haig
“Like nearly one in five people, Haig suffers from depression. Here he explains how, minute by minute and day by day, he overcame the disease with the help of reading, writing, and the love of his parents and his girlfriend, and eventually learned to appreciate life all the more for it. Both inspiring to those who feel daunted by depression and illuminating to those who are mystified by it, Haig’s humor and encouragement never let us lose sight of hope” (Primo).
The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
“Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place” (Primo).
Throne of Glass
by Sarah J. Maas
After she has served a year of hard labor in the salt mines of Endovier for her crimes, Crown Prince Dorian offers eighteen-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien her freedom on the condition that she act as his champion in a competition to find a new royal assassin” (Primo).
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
“Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he? (Primo).
The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future
by Ryder Carroll
“There’s a reason this system for time management, goal setting, and intentional living has been adopted by millions around the globe: it works. Not only will you get more done, but you’ll get the right things done. All you need is a pen, paper, and five spare minutes a day. In The Bullet Journal Method, Ryder Carroll, the system’s founder, provides an essential guide to avoiding all-too-common beginner mistakes and building a core discipline from which you can personalize your practice.
You’ll not only learn to organize your tasks, but to focus your time and energy in pursuit of what’s truly meaningful to you by following three simple steps:
- Track the past. Create a clear and comprehensive record of your thoughts.
- Order the present. Find daily calm and clarity by tackling your to-do list in a more mindful, systematic, and productive way.
- Design the future. Transform your vague curiosities into meaningful goals, and then break those goals into manageable action steps that lead to big change” (Overdrive).
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
“Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the magic day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life. But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow’s best friend are killed in an accident.
With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and a rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself. Life as Wednesday’s bodyguard, driver, and errand boy is far more interesting and dangerous than Shadow ever imagined-it is a job that takes him on a dark and strange road trip and introduces him to a host of eccentric characters whose fates are mysteriously intertwined with his own” (Primo).
Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
“…[Neverwhere] is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he discovers a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her—an act of kindness that plunges him into a world he never dreamed existed.
Slipping through the cracks of reality, Richard lands in Neverwhere—a London of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth. Neverwhere is home to Door, the mysterious girl Richard helped in the London Above. Here in Neverwhere, Door is a powerful noblewoman who has vowed to find the evil agent of her family’s slaughter and thwart the destruction of this strange underworld kingdom. If Richard is ever to return to his former life and home, he must join Lady Door’s quest to save her world-and may well die trying” (EReadIllinois).
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
by Neil deGrasse Tyson,
“What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and bestselling author Neil deGrasse Tyson. But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in digestible chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.
While waiting for your morning coffee to brew, or while waiting for the bus, the train, or the plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe” (Primo).
He Who Fights with Monsters
by Shirtaloon
“It’s not easy making the career jump from office-supplies-store middle manager to heroic interdimensional adventurer. At least, Jason tries to be heroic, but it’s hard to be good when all your powers are evil.
He’ll face off against cannibals, cultists, wizards, monsters—and that’s just on the first day. He’s going to need courage, he’s going to need wit, and he’s going to need some magic powers of his own. But first, he’s going to need pants….
Experience an isekai culture clash as a laid-back Australian finds himself in a very serious world. See him gain suspiciously evil powers through a unique progression system combining cultivation and traditional LitRPG elements. Enjoy a weak-to-strong story with a main character who earns his power without overshadowing everyone around him, with plenty of loot, adventurers, gods and magic. Rich characters and world-building offer humor, political intrigue and slice-of-life elements alongside lots of monster fighting and adventure” (Goodreads).
The Book of Form and Emptiness
by Ruth Ozeki
“After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn’t understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where ‘things happen.’ He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.
And he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter” (EReadIllinois).
The Neighborhood
by Mario Vargas Llosa
“In the 1990s, during the turbulent and deeply corrupt years of Alberto Fujimori’s presidency, two wealthy couples of Lima’s high society become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail.
One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposes. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique’s wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique’s lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru’s unspoken laws and customs, while the staff of the magazine embark on their greatest expose yet” (Goodreads).
The Greatest Love Story Every Told
by Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman
“The year: 2000. The setting: Los Angeles. A gorgeous virtuoso of an actress had agreed to star in a random play, and a basement-dwelling scenic carpenter had said he would assay a supporting role in the selfsame pageant. At the first rehearsal, she surveyed her fellow cast members, as one does, determining if any of the men might qualify to provide her with a satisfying fling. Her gaze fell upon the carpenter, and like a bolt of lightning, the thought struck her: No dice. Moving on.
Yet, unbeknownst to our protagonists, Cupid had merely set down his bow and picked up a rocket launcher. Then fired a love rocket (not a euphemism). The players were Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman, and the resulting romance, once it ignited, was… epic. Beyond epic. It resulted in a coupling that has endured to this day; a sizzling, perpetual tryst that has captivated the world with its kindness, athleticism, astonishingly low-brow humor, and true (fire emoji) passion….
Eighteen years later, they’re still very much in love and have finally decided to reveal the philosophical mountains they have conquered, the lessons they’ve learned, and the myriad jigsaw puzzles they’ve completed” (Penguin Random House).
Lakesedge
by Lyndall Clipstone
“When Violeta Graceling and her younger brother Arien arrive at the haunted Lakesedge estate, they expect to find a monster. Leta knows the terrifying rumors about Rowan Sylvanan, who drowned his entire family when he was a boy. But neither the estate nor the monster are what they seem.
As Leta falls for Rowan, she discovers he is bound to the Lord Under, the sinister death god lurking in the black waters of the lake. A creature to whom Leta is inexplicably drawn…
Now, to save Rowan—and herself—Leta must confront the darkness in her past, including unraveling the mystery of her connection to the Lord Under”(MacMillan).
The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings
by Neil Price
“The Viking Age—between 750 and 1050—saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they reshaped the world between eastern North America and the Asian steppe. For a millennium, though, their history has largely been filtered through the writings of their victims.
Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology, their art and culture. From Björn Ironside, who led an expedition to sack Rome, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most travelled woman in the world, Price shows us the real Vikings, not the caricatures they have become in popular culture and history” (Goodreads).
Anybody Out There?
by Marian Keyes
“…Life in the Big Apple is perfect for Anna. She has the best job in the world, a lovely apartment, and great friends. Then one morning, she wakes up in her mammy’s house in Dublin with stitches in her face, a dislocated knee, hands smashed up, and no memory at all of what happened.
As soon as she’s able, Anna’s flying back to Manhattan, mystified but determined to find out how her life turned upside down. As her past slowly begins coming back to her, she sets out on an outrageous quest—involving lilies, psychics, mediums, and anyone who can point her in the right direction.
Marrying life’s darker bits with wild humor and tender wit, Anybody Out There? is a strange and wonderfully charming look at love here and ever after” (HarperCollins).
Take My Hand
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
“Montgomery, Alabama 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies.
But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a worn down one-room cabin, she’s shocked to learn that her new patients are children—just 11 and 13 years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica and their family into her heart. Until one day, she arrives at the door to learn the unthinkable has happened and nothing will ever be the same for any of them” (Goodreads).
Red Queen
by Victoria Aveyard
“This is a world divided by blood—red or silver. The Reds are commoners, ruled by a Silver elite in possession of god-like superpowers. And to Mare Barrow, a seventeen-year-old Red girl from the poverty-stricken Stilts, it seems like nothing will ever change.
That is until she finds herself working in the Silver Palace. Here, surrounded by the people she hates the most, Mare discovers that, despite her red blood, she possesses a deadly power of her own. One that threatens to destroy the balance of power.
Fearful of Mare’s potential, the Silvers hide her in plain view, declaring her a long-lost Silver princess, now engaged to a Silver prince. Despite knowing that one misstep would mean her death, Mare works silently to help the Red Guard, a militant resistance group, and bring down the Silver regime.
But this is a world of betrayal and lies, and Mare has entered a dangerous dance—Reds against Silvers, prince against prince, and Mare against her own heart” (Goodreads).
Court of Thorns and Roses
by Sarah J. Maas
“When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a terrifying creature arrives to demand retribution. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she knows about only from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not truly a beast, but one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled her world.
As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.” (Primo).
Dragon Song
by Kristie Clark
“Dr. Eva Paz wants only a peaceful life on Roatán for herself and her dolphins, continuing their research in dolphin communication and educating children on the importance of caring for the reef.
But when Eva discovers that the Caribbean’s wild dolphin pod has been captured, she must go back into action to find them. Her pursuit returns her to the Pacific, where she finds her newest nemesis has engineered yet more sea dragons, and this time she finds herself embroiled in an international struggle that could end in a World War.
Dragon Song is the fourth book in Kristie Clark’s Order of the Dolphin series. Dragon Song may be read as a standalone, but it is best enjoyed with the other Order of the Dolphin series books: Killing Dragons, Dragon Gold, and Dragon Clan” (Kristie Clark).
—posted by Kevin Purtell
Coming Together 2022: Sharing Experiences of Disability
Each year, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Skokie, and Niles come together as a community to build knowledge and understanding between people of different groups and ages in an event known as Coming Together. This event includes various book discussions, library events, and activities to expand people’s knowledge and appreciation of our diverse backgrounds. This year’s theme is Sharing Experiences of Disability. As part of the celebration, Oakton Community College will host the following events:
Book Discussion: Get a Life, Chloe Brown
Wenesday, April 6, 2022
7-8 p.m.
Des Plaines Campus Library, Lower Level
Join our next book discussion in collaboration with Coming Together 2022: Sharing Experiences of Disability as we read and talk about Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert. Pick up a copy at the Oakton Library!
Get a Life, Chloe Brown is a witty romantic comedy about a woman who’s tired of being “boring” and recruits her mysterious, handsome neighbor to help her experience new things. Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list.
An Evening with Alice Wong
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
7-8 p.m.
Register for this event and receive the Zoom link here
Alice Wong, acclaimed disability rights activist and founder of advocacy group Disability Visibility, discusses the process of, and motivation behind, editing the powerful essay collection of the same name. Hear more about what inspired Wong to put together this collection, and bring your questions for a community Q&A at the end.
Live ASL interpretation and captioning will be available at this event.
Hosted by the Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Niles-Maine District, and Skokie Public Libraries, Niles Township Government, and Oakton Community College.
Additionally, the following are titles carefully selected for this event by librarians and community members.
About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times
Catapano, Peter, editor
“Boldly claiming a space in which people with disabilities can be seen and heard as they are—not as others perceive them—About Us captures the voices of a community that has for too long been stereotyped and misrepresented. Speaking not only to those with disabilities, but also to their families, coworkers and support networks, the authors in About Us offer intimate stories of how they navigate a world not built for them.
Since its 2016 debut, the popular New York Times’ ‘Disability’ column has transformed the national dialogue around disability. Now, echoing the refrain of the disability rights movement, ‘Nothing about us without us,’ this landmark collection gathers the most powerful essays from the series that speak to the fullness of human experience—stories about first romance, childhood shame and isolation, segregation, professional ambition, child-bearing and parenting, aging and beyond. Reflecting on the fraught conversations around disability—from the friend who says ‘I don’t think of you as disabled,’ to the father who scolds his child with attention differences, ‘Stop it stop it stop it what is wrong with you?’—the stories here reveal the range of responses, and the variety of consequences, to being labeled as ‘disabled’ by the broader public.
Here, a writer recounts her path through medical school as a wheelchair user—forging a unique bridge between patients with disabilities and their physicians. An acclaimed artist with spina bifida discusses her art practice as one that invites us to ‘stretch ourselves toward a world where all bodies are exquisite.’ With these notes of triumph, these stories also offer honest portrayals of frustration over access to medical care, the burden of social stigma and the nearly constant need to self-advocate in the public realm.
In its final sections, About Us turns to the questions of love, family and joy to show how it is possible to revel in life as a person with disabilities. Subverting the pervasive belief that disability results in relentless suffering and isolation, a quadriplegic writer reveals how she rediscovered intimacy without touch, and a mother with a chronic illness shares what her condition has taught her young children” (Primo).
Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism
by Elsa Sjunneson
“A deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.
As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be.
As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all” (Amazon).
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
by Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi
“In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
“On the heels of Woodstock, a group of teen campers are inspired to join the fight for disability civil rights. This spirited look at grassroots activism is executive produced by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama” (You Tube).
Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally
by Emily Ladau
“People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority, an estimated 15 percent of the global population. But many of us—disabled and nondisabled alike—don’t know how to act, what to say, or how to be an ally to the disability community. Demystifying Disability is a friendly handbook on the important disability issues you need to know about, including how to appropriately think, talk, and ask about disability; recognizing and avoiding ableism (discrimination toward disabled people); practicing good disability etiquette; ensuring accessibility becomes your standard practice, from everyday communication to planning special events; appreciating disability history and identity; and identifying and speaking up about disability stereotypes in media. Authored by celebrated disability rights advocate, speaker, and writer, Emily Ladau, this practical, intersectional guide offers all readers a welcoming place to understand disability as part of the human experience” (Primo).
From the Periphery: Real-Life Stories of Disability
edited by Pia Justesen
“From the Periphery consists of more than thirty first-person narratives by activists and everyday people who describe what it’s like to be treated differently by society because of their disabilities. Their stories are raw and painful but also surprisingly funny and deeply moving—describing anger, independence, bigotry, solidarity, and love, in the family, at school, and in the workplace. Inspired by the oral historians Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, From the Periphery will become a classic oral history collection that increases the understanding of the lived experiences of people with disabilities, their responses to oppression, and the strategies they use to fight for empowerment” (Primo).
The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me
by Keah Brown
“Keah Brown loves herself, but that hadn’t always been the case. Born with cerebral palsy, her greatest desire used to be normalcy and refuge from the steady stream of self-hate society strengthened inside her. But after years of introspection and reaching out to others in her community, she has reclaimed herself and changed her perspective.
In The Pretty One, Brown gives a contemporary and relatable voice to the disabled—so often portrayed as mute, weak, or isolated. With clear, fresh, and light-hearted prose, these essays explore everything from her relationship with her able-bodied identical twin (called ‘the pretty one’ by friends) to navigating romance; her deep affinity for all things pop culture—and her disappointment with the media’s distorted view of disability; and her declaration of self-love with the viral hashtag #DisabledAndCute.
By ‘smashing stigmas, empowering her community, and celebrating herself’ (Teen Vogue), Brown and The Pretty One aims to expand the conversation about disability and inspire self-love for people of all backgrounds” (Primo).
—Posted by Kevin Purtell and Gretchen Schneider
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