Book Review

What Renee Bracey Sherman Wants You to Know About Liberating Abortion and the People Who Make It Possible

Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone recently released their co-authored book, Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. In it, they offer a new perspective on the history of abortion and imagine a future where reproductive justice is realized.

Bracey Sherman and Mahone ask us to build a better future that begins with building community around abortion and reproductive freedom now.

Ms. sat down with Renee Bracey Sherman to discuss her new book, Liberating Abortion, the history of abortion and where we go from here.

‘The Chronicler, the Microphone, the Billboard’: Jessica Valenti’s ‘Abortion’ Book Arms Us to Face the Violence of Abortion Bans

In her recently released book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies and The Truths We Use to Win, Jessica Valenti details the future. But, her gift is not prophecy, but clarity of facts. She is clear that the question of abortion access is a question of personal autonomy. She is clear that conservatives are carefully crafting a world where women who have the audacity to want sex on their own terms must be punished by a pregnancy. She is clear that conservatives want to take personhood from a person with a uterus and assign it to the embryo or fetus within it.

As Valenti writes, it is those who would “force children to give birth … make devastated women carry dead and dying fetuses, and make women raped by men prove their attacks really happened before receiving health care” that are the problem. 

In ‘One Way Back,’ Christine Blasey Ford Describes Life in the Aftermath

On Sept. 27, 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982. In a beautifully-written and searing new memoir, One Way Back, Blasey Ford recounts her life before, during and after the 1982 sexual assault and her 2018 testimony.

Blasey Ford’s memoir corrects the record, and explains what happened after her testimony.

‘Dare to Be Fabulous’ Essay Collection: 30 Remarkable Women on Embracing Our True Selves

Each of the 30 essays in Dare to be Fabulous, by writer and editor Johanna McCloy, recounts a life-changing instance when women dared to be their true selves. The inciting moments are as unique as the women themselves—deciding to join a roller derby team, canceling a wedding at the last minute, or walking 3,000 miles to raise hell and make a point.

Looking Back and Forging Ahead: Three Feminist Writers on Women’s History, Feminist Media and Intergenerational Engagement

Friends of Ms. gathered last month to discuss two extraordinary anthologies, Blackbirds Singing: Inspiring Black Women’s Speeches from the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century by Janet Deward Bell and 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution. Both give voice to extraordinary women throughout history who fought to define and demand equality.

2023 ‘Best of the Rest’: Our Favorite Books of the Year!

Each month, we provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. And each year, we review our monthly Reads for the Rest of Us lists and choose our favorite books of the entire year. 

You’ve read the other “Best of” lists—now read the other one. You know, for the rest of us. So here they are, our book critic’s top 38, in alphabetical order.