To-Do List (Political/Non Fiction)
Explore our curated to-do list of must-read political and non-fiction books. Discover insightful titles that delve into governance, history, and societal issues to expand your knowledge and perspective.
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Fighting the Forces
by Rhonda Wilcox
Fighting the Forces explores the struggle to create meaning in an impressive example of popular culture, the television series phenomenon Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the essays collected here, contributors examine the series using a variety of techniques and viewpoints. They analyze the social and cultural issues implicit in the series and place it in its literary context, not only by examining its literary influences (from German liebestod to Huckleberry Finn) but also by exploring the series' purposeful literary allusions. Visit our website for sample chapters!
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Red Diapers
by Judy Kaplan
Red Diapers is the first anthology of autobiographical writings by the children of American communists. These memoirs, short stories, and poems reflect the joys and perils of growing up in a subculture defined by its opposition to some of society's most deeply held values. How red diaper babies have come to terms with their political inheritance is the theme of this compelling anthology. Some contributors have fond memories of family activism; others recall the past with ambivalence or even pain. The authors range in age from their twenties to their eighties. Some, such as Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and sixties activist Bettina Aptheker, are widely known themselves; some are the children of well-known American leftists, including Jeff Lawson, son of blacklisted screenwriter John Howard Lawson, and Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In disparate voices, the contributors elaborate on how their parents attempted to pass on to them the torch of radical politics.
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy
by James B. South
This lively collection of essays links classical philosophy to the hit television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"--a show that explores the evil underlying everyday life, making it ripe for the kind of witty, penetrating philosophical analysis this book delivers.
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Stupid White Men
by Michael Moore
Sorry excuses for the state of the nation. United States. Manifesto on malfeasance and mediocrity. Satire.
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Seven Seasons of Buffy
by Glenn Yeffeth
This collection of irreverent and surprising essays about the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer includes pieces by leading science fiction and fantasy authors. Contributors include bestselling legend David Brin, critically acclaimed novelist Scott Westerfeld, cult-favorite vampire author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and award-winner Sarah Zettel. The show and its cast are the topics of such critical pieces as Lawrence Watt-Evans's "Matchmaking in Hellmouth" and Sherrilyn Kenyon's "The Search for Spike's Balls." An informed introduction for those not well acquainted with the show, and a source of further research for Buffy buffs, this book raises interesting questions concerning a much-loved program and future cult classic.
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Lies (and the Lying Liars who Tell Them)
by Al Franken
A New York Times Bestseller. Al Franken has been studying the rhetoric of the Right. He has listened to their cries of "slander," "bias," and even "treason." Examined the administration's policies of squandering our surplus, and alienating the rest of the world. Al bravely and candidly destroys the liberal media bias myth by doing what his targets seem incapable of: getting his facts straight.
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Reading the Vampire Slayer
by Roz Kaveney
A critical appreciation of Buffy and its spin-off series Angel, whose contributors look at the complex ways in which both shows have won the hearts and minds of an audience that has opened out from the teen to the hip.
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The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
by Barbara G. Walker
Do You Know... where the legend of a cat's nine lives comes from? why "mama" is a word understood in nearly all languages? how the custom of kissing began? whether there really was a female pope? why Cinderella's glass slipper was so important to the Prince? The answers to these and countless other intriguing questions are given in this compulsively readable, feminist encyclopedia. Twenty-five years in preparation, this unique, comprehensive sourcebook focuses on mythology anthropology, religion, and sexuality to uncover precisely what other encyclopedias leave out or misrepresent. The Woman's Encyclopedia presents the fascinating stories behind word origins, legends, superstitions, and customs. A browser's delight and an indispensable resource, it offers 1,350 entries on magic, witchcraft, fairies, elves, giants, goddesses, gods, and psychological anomalies such as demonic possession; the mystical meanings of sun, moon, earth, sea, time, and space; ideas of the soul, reincarnation, creation and doomsday; ancient and modern attitudes toward sex, prostitution, romance, rape, warfare, death and sin, and more. Tracing these concepts to their prepatriarchal origins, Barbara G. Walker explores a "thousand hidden pockets of history and custom in addition to the valuable material recovered by archaeologists, orientalists, and other scholars." Not only a compendium of fascinating lore and scholarship, The Woman's Encyclopedia is a revolutionary book that offers a rare opportunity for both women and men to see our cultural heritage in a fresh light, and draw upon the past for a more humane future.
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Empire
by Michael Hardt
Empire, as Hardt and Negri demonstrate, is the new political order of globalization. Their book shows how this emerging structure is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today’s Empire draws on the hybrid identities and expanding frontiers of U.S. constitutionalism.
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Between Men
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
At the time of its first appearance in 1985 Between Men was viewed as an important intervention into Feminist as well as Gay and Lesbian studies. It was an important book because it argued that "sexuality" and "desire" were not a historical phenomenon but carefully managed social constructs. This insight (that actually originated with Michael Foucault) is often viewed as anti-humanist or post-humanist because it argues that men and women are simply the products of patriarchal power relations over which they have no control. By mobilizing Foucault's theories of the history of sexuality Sedgwick re-fashions Feminism and Gay and Lesbian Studies to make it seem as though Feminism and Gay and Lesbian studies are ideally situated to continue those interventions into the history of sexuality begun by Foucault.
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The Bush Dyslexicon
by Mark Crispin Miller
"A particularly astute analysis of the television coverage of the campaign, the election, and the political aftermath."--Newsday
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Postmodern Fairy Tales
by Cristina Bacchilega
This book offers a historicizing perspective on the question of gender in fairy tales, focusing on past and present versions of four classic stories in order to analyze their varying representations of women.
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The Second Wave
by Linda J. Nicholson
This volume collects many of the major essays of feminist theory of the past 40 years-works which have made key contributors to feminist thought.
