Non-fiction favorites
Discover top non-fiction favorites with our curated list of must-read books. Explore bestsellers, biographies, history, and more for your next great read.
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Backlash
by Susan Faludi
A New York Times bestseller for more than four months, Backlash is Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Susan Faludi's eye-opening, meticulously documented account of the growing and effective anti-feminist backlash in America during the last 10 years. "A bracing look at the counter-assault in our society on women's progress over the last decade".--The New York Times Book Review.
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Against Our Will
by Susan Brownmiller
The bestselling feminist classic that revolutionized the way we think about rape, as a historical phenomenon and as an urgent crisis—essential reading in the era of #MeToo. “A major work of history.”—The Village Voice • One of the New York Public Library’s 100 Books of the Century As powerful and timely now as when it was first published, Against Our Will stands as a unique document of the history, politics, and sociology of rape and the inherent and ingrained inequality of men and women under the law. Fact by fact, Susan Brownmiller pulls back the centuries of damaging lies and misrepresentations to reveal how rape has been accepted in all societies and how it continues to profoundly affect women’s lives today. A keen and prescient analyst, a detailed historian, Susan Brownmiller discusses the consequences of rape in biblical times, rape as an accepted spoil of war, as well as child molestation, marital rape, and date rape (a term that she coined). In lucid, persuasive prose, Brownmiller uses her experience as a journalist to create a definitive, devastating work of lasting social importance. Praise for Against Our Will “The most comprehensive study of rape ever offered to the public . . . It forces readers to take a fresh look at their own attitudes toward this devastating crime.”—Newsweek “A classic . . . No one who reads it will come away untouched.”—The Village Voice “Chilling and monumental . . . Deserves a place next to those rare books which force us to change the way we feel about what we know.”—The New York Times Book Review “A landmark work, one of the most significant books to emerge in this decade.”—Houston Chronicle “A definitive text, startling, compelling, and a landmark.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch “An overwhelming indictment. We need it, it is a hideous revelation and it should be required reading.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Chilling, monumental, exhaustive, detailed, absorbing and original. . . . Brownmiller’s greatest contribution is establishing the continuity between rape and other facets of American culture.”—Commonweal
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Whores and Other Feminists
by Jill Nagle
First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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The New Victorians
by Rene Denfeld
Journalist Rene Denfeld explains why her generation has become alienated from the women's movement, maintaining that the actions of the movement's current leadership have actually encouraged a return to the kind of sexual repression and political powerlessness challenged by feminists in the 1970s. Here she offers a practial battle plan which includes confronting the issues of child care and birth control, working for equal government representation, and treating sexual assault as a serious crime.
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Generations
by Neil Howe
Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading. William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium. Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.
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Barren in the Promised Land
by Elaine Tyler May
Chronicling astonishing shifts in public attitudes toward reproduction, May reveals the intersection between public life and the most private part of our lives--sexuality, procreation, and family.
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The Clone Age
by Lori Andrews
With a new afterword. Sperm donors on the Internet, an epidemic of multiple births, posthumous parenting-the foremost legal expert in the field takes us inside the secret world of reproductive technology. Lori B. Andrews passed her bar exam the day the first test-tube baby was born. Today she is the world's most visible expert on the legal and ethical implications of reproductive technology, sought after to assess the impact of genetic testing, the ethics of creating babies from dead men's sperm, and the propriety of human cloning. In this provocative work, Andrews relates her experiences, exploring the vast array of scientific developments in this virtually unregulated field and the social, moral, and legal questions they raise. A new afterword written for the paperback edition addresses the latest headline- making developments.
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Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism
by John Shelby Spong
By popular demand—study guides to two of Bishop John Shelby Spong's bestselling and controversial works, including questions, reflections, and summaries for group and individual use.
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Sexual Politics
by Kate Millett
Praised and denounced when it was first published in 1970, Sexual Politics not only explored history but also became part of it. Kate Millett's groundbreaking book fueled feminism's second wave, giving voice to the anger of a generation while documenting the inequities -- neatly packaged in revered works of literature and art -- of a complacent and unrepentant society. Sexual Politics laid the foundation for subsequent feminist scholarship by showing how cultural discourse reflects a systematized subjugation and exploitation of women. Millett demonstrates in detail how patriarchy's attitudes and systems penetrate literature, philosophy, psychology, and politics. Her incendiary work rocked the foundations of the literary canon by castigating time-honored classics -- from D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover to Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead -- for their use of sex to degrade and undermine women. A new introduction to this edition draws attention to some of the forms patriarchy has taken recently in consolidating its oppressive and dangerous control.
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The Baby Boon
by Elinor Burkett
Who stays late at the office when Mom leaves for a soccer match? Whose dollars pay for the tax credits, childcare benefits, and school vouchers that only parents can utilize? Who is forced to take those undesirable weekend business trips that Dad refuses? The answer: Adults without children--most of them women--have shouldered more than their share of the cost of family-friendly America. Until now.
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Private Choices, Public Consequences
by Lynda Beck Fenwick
"Private Choices, Public Consequences will open your eyes to both the amazing reproductive choices some people are making today and the far-reaching public consequences of their decisions."--BOOK JACKET.
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Where the Girls Are
by Susan J. Douglas
Media critic Douglas deconstructs the ambiguous messages sent to American women via TV programs, popular music, advertising, and nightly news reporting over the last 40 years, and fathoms their influence on her own life and the lives of her contemporaries. Photos.
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The Woman That Never Evolved
by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
What does it mean to be female? Sarah Blaffer Hrdy--a sociobiologist and a feminist--believes that evolutionary biology can provide some surprising answers. Surprising to those feminists who mistakenly think that biology can only work against women. And surprising to those biologists who incorrectly believe that natural selection operates only on males. In The Woman That Never Evolved we are introduced to our nearest female relatives competitive, independent, sexually assertive primates who have every bit as much at stake in the evolutionary game as their male counterparts do. These females compete among themselves for rank and resources, but will bond together for mutual defense. They risk their lives to protect their young, yet consort with the very male who murdered their offspring when successful reproduction depends upon it. They tolerate other breeding females if food is plentiful, but chase them away when monogamy is the optimal strategy. When "promiscuity" is an advantage, female primates--like their human cousins--exhibit a sexual appetite that ensures a range of breeding partners. From case after case we are led to the conclusion that the sexually passive, noncompetitive, all-nurturing woman of prevailing myth never could have evolved within the primate order. Yet males are almost universally dominant over females in primate species, and Homo sapiens is no exception. As we see from this book, women are in some ways the most oppressed of all female primates. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is convinced that to redress sexual inequality in human societies, we must first understand its evolutionary origins. We cannot travel back in time to meet our own remote ancestors, but we can study those surrogates we have--the other living primates. If women --and not biology--are to control their own destiny, they must understand the past and, as this book shows us, the biological legacy they have inherited.
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Regulating the Lives of Women
by Mimi Abramovitz
This important book looks at the changes in AFDC, Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance, and welfare "reform." This new edition reveals how welfare policy scapegoats women more than ever to justify widespread retrenchment and to divert the public's attention from the real causes of the nation's mounting economic woes.
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Blinded by the Right
by David Brock
In a powerful and deeply personal memoir David Brock, the original right-wing scandal reporter, chronicles his rise to the pinnacle of the conservative movement and his painful break with it. David Brock pilloried Anita Hill in a bestseller. His reporting in The American Spectator as part of the infamous “Arkansas Project” triggered the course of events that led to the historic impeachment trial of President Clinton. Brock was at the center of the right-wing dirty tricks operation of the Gingrich era—and a true believer—until he could no longer deny that the political force he was advancing was built on little more than lies, hate, and hypocrisy. In Blinded By the Right, Brock, who came out of the closet at the height of his conservative renown, tells his riveting story from the beginning, giving us the first insider’s view of what Hillary Rodham Clinton called “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” Whether dealing with the right-wing press, the richly endowed think tanks, Republican political operatives, or the Paula Jones case, Brock names names from Clarence Thomas on down, uncovers hidden links, and demonstrates how the Republican Right’s zeal for power created the poisonous political climate that culminated in George W. Bush’s election. With a new afterword by the author, Blinded By the Right is a classic political memoir of our times.
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Recreating Motherhood
by Barbara Katz Rothman
Selling "genetically gifted" human eggs on the free market for a hefty price. In vitro fertilization. Fetal rights. Prenatal diagnosis. Surrogacy. All are instances of biomedical and social "advancements" with which we have become familiar in recent years. Yet these issues are often regarded as distinct or only loosely related under the rubric of reproduction. Barbara Katz Rothman demonstrates how they form a complex whole that demands of us in response a woman-centered, class-sensitive way of understanding motherhood. We need a social policy for dealing with mothers and motherhood that is consistent with feminist politics and feminist theory. Her book show how we as a society must first recognize that the real needs of mother, father, and children have been swept aside in an attempt to reduce the complex process of human reproduction to a clinical event that can be controlled by medical technology. Rothman suggests ways to accomplish social and legal change that would allow technological advances to affirm motherhood and the mother-child relationship without cost to women's identity. This new edition of Recreating Motherhood contains exciting updates. Rothman shows how this material is key in understanding the family, not just motherhood. And a new chapter, "Reflections on a Decade," explores how new reproductive technologies combine with new marketing and new genetics to pose troubling social questions.