Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) by Bell Hooks is another book from my 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40 List. Bell Hooks is a black woman, a feminist and social activist. While going through school, she found that her women studies courses and the books she read did not reflect her own experiences as a Black woman. When she tried to bring in her own experiences, her voice was often ignored or disregarded. Because there were no books discussing […]
My apology to women authors (with an assist from Amy Poehler)
I have to start this review with a confessional sidenote. As I went to choose my next read after Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman, I ended up with a pool of five potential books, eventually settling on the second in the series of memoirs by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I’d read the first last year and wanted to get to this next one before I let too much time pass. But as I started to read, something was nagging at me, so I went down my list of […]
Saving their story from obscurity
3.5 stars. I’ve heard so much about Bletchley Park code breakers and the Native American code talkers, that it somehow never even occurred to me that there were tons of Americans actively engaged in breaking both German and Japanese codes during World War II. Like the women at Bletchley Park, the American code women were sworn to secrecy about their work and it’s only now that their work is coming to light. Liza Mundy spent an incredible amount of time and effort tracking down women […]
A book for everyone
(Sidenote: In posting this review, I’m noticing that the Kindle version is just $2.99!) 4.5 stars. As a person in the 21st century who exists both in the real world and the internet world, I had a passing knowledge of who Lindy West was. I had mostly only encountered her work that went viral however, so I didn’t go into this book as a hardcore fangirl, just as an interested bystander. I think after reading this, I can probably be classified as a hardcore fangirl. […]
I Want to Live With Wonder Woman
“[Women are] told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives.” There are sentences like this throughout this collection of essays, that seem so obvious and yet feel like a gut punch every time you read them. Here’s another, from The Longest War: “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” Or “Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and maybe that’s more important to talk about than protecting […]
Hilarious takedown of pop feminism
This year, my book club did a Book Swap for our December/Christmas meeting. We’ve done a Friendsgiving for a few years in a row, but this was the first time we’d done anything for Christmas. J, F’s husband, insisted that he was going to do his own book swap and get books for all of us. None of us took him seriously, until we arrived at his and F’s house and sure enough, there was a wrapped present with a label in his handwriting for […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- …
- 43
- Next Page »