bookmarks | summer 2008

This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books
Ehrenreich, who previously engaged the nation’s conscience (and cracked the bestseller list) with her firsthand exposés of working conditions for women in Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, decries the belief that prosperity is a zero-sum game and that players must “get what you can while the getting is good.”

The Stone Gods
By Jeanette Winterson
Harcourt
This is science fiction with a satirical twist, part Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and part Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In a future world where the line between human and machine is blurred, Winterson explores how dependency on technology complicates identity.

Alfred and Emily
By Doris Lessing
HarperCollins
In what’s half-novel and half-biography, Nobel Prize winner Lessing tells of her parents’ lives under the impact of World War I. She imagines a happier, more fulfilling life and contrasts it with the truth of their hardships.

Audition
By Barbara Walters
Knopf
The veteran television journalist chronicles her five decades in front of the lens and behind it, providing true confessions and heartfelt candor.

Pressure Is a Privilege: Lessons I’ve Learned from Life and the Battle of the Sexes
By Billie Jean King
LifeTime Media, Inc.
Simple but wise words from a woman who’s way more than a sports champion. At age 64, still stumping for women’s equality, King has earned the right to be a life guru.

The Sum of Our Days
By Isabel Allende
HarperCollins
This memoir picks up where Allende left off in Paula, her wrenching account of her daughter’s death. Drawing from letters to her mother, Allende recounts life as matriarch of a most unconventional family.

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS
By Elizabeth Pisani
W. W. Norton & Co.
Epidemiologist Pisani travels through brothels, heroin-shooting galleries and red-light districts tracking the spread of AIDS and putting a human face on the death count.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
By Xiaolu Guo
Nan A. Talese
In Guo’s novel, translated from the Chinese, a country peasant escapes to Beijing to seek her fortune as an actor, finding that in conservative China women face being labeled as either good girl or prostitute.

Slowpoke: One Nation, Oh My God!
By Jen Sorensen
Ig Publishing
Village Voice cartoonist Sorensen continues her trademark brand of absurdist humor with political commentary on Republican hypocrisy and weapons of mass political correctness.

Society’s Child
By Janis Ian
Tarcher
Ian writes autobiography as she does song lyrics: unadorned and to the point. She tells of childhood molestation, precocious musical stardom, IRS nightmares, scary illnesses, crazy loves and, ultimately, a settled life in Nashville as a musical artist with a loving wife.

Sex, Science and Stem Cells: Inside the Right Wing Assault on Reason
By Diana Degette
The Lyons Press
Rep. Diana Degette (D-Colo.) confronts the religious right’s undermining of science. She debunks government-released misinformation about AIDS prevention, sex education and stem cells.

Mexican Enough: My Life between the Borderlines
By Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Washington Square Press
Growing up biracial near the border and never having felt “Mexican enough,” Griest takes an eight-month journey in search of her roots, only to find that Mexicans have the same complaint: They try to maintain their heritage, but adopt American culture for the privilege it affords.

Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters
By Nancy Pelosi
Doubleday
The speaker of the House tells of her journey to become the highest-ranking elected woman in American history, overcoming barriers at each political level until she shatters the Capitol’s “marble ceiling.”

Sound Bites of Protest
By Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich
Third World Press
Essays and speeches from the professor, author and civil rights activist put readers on the you-are-there front lines of African American women’s struggle to end segregation, combat sexism and fight for union representation.