I finally made it to the Roxane Gay party! Bad Feminist is a critically acclaimed collection of essays by Roxane Gay that covers many topics. The essays are divided into categories such as “Gender and Sexuality,” “Race and Entertainment,” “Politics, Gender and Race,” and “ME.” Within each category, Gay offers a number of essays related to the topic at hand, writing with insight, well-argued liberal opinions, and humor. She is well versed in politics and pop culture, and is willing to reveal something of herself […]
Dedicated People Make Amazing Things Happen
Doctor Elizabeth Ford is a psychiatrist who has worked on and overseen the prison hospital psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital in New York since 2000. In this memoir, Dr. Ford describes the conditions, staff and patients in these wards as well as her own personal journey in working with them. Much of what she describes is frustrating and tragic: the lack of space and consistent treatment for those in need, seeing the same prisoners cycle back into her wards over and over, stories of individual […]
The American Revolution Through Slaves’ Eyes
Laurie Halse Anderson’s award-winning YA novels set during the American Revolution are superb. Not only does she get her history correct — with fascinating detail about daily life for wealthy and working classes, Loyalists and Patriots, city life and army camp life — but she also provides narrators whose perspectives are unique and provocative. Isabel and Curzon are slaves. Each brings a different view of the revolution and what it means for them as slaves. The three novels take the reader from May of 1776, when […]
Powerful Novel of War and Hope
Half of a Yellow Sun is a story of independence, war, betrayal and loss both for a nation and for a particular group of people swept up in it all. Set in the 1960s, it examines life in Nigeria on the eve of war and then during the chaos and violence of the Biafran war. While providing concise historical background on Nigeria and Biafra, Adichie, through her characters, shows how class division, race, culture, and gender fed into and were in turn influenced by conflict. […]