Perhaps you have heard of Ruby Bridges, the little girl shown at right. She was the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in 1960. But have you heard of Lucile Bluford or Ada Lois Sipuel? What about Marguerite Carr, Karla Galarza, Barbara Johns, Betta Bowman and Elaine Chustz? In Rachel Devlin’s A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America’s Schools, we have an outstanding history of the unsung heroes of the American Civil Rights movement — […]
Killer Queen
I honest to the heavens thought I’d reviewed this one. The short version is: True crime fans/Murderinos will probably enjoy this one. I’m not sure anyone else will; the subject matter is pretty grim and the person in question warped like HH Holmes. Lizzie Borden may have killed her father and stepmother with an axe, but Belle Gunness killed a hell of a lot more, including her own children.
I Am Somebody
In 1994, when Clemantine Wamariya was 6 years old, she and her 15-year-old sister Claire had to leave their family in Kigali, Rwanda, due to the “conflict.” The two girls spent the next 6 years as refugees, traveling through 7 African countries, having to learn new languages and find the means to survive, not knowing whether their parents and younger siblings were alive. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine Wamariya tries to come to terms not only with the upheaval and trauma of her […]
Memoir about Trauma, Shame, Food, and Body
When she was 12 years old, Roxane Gay was gang-raped by a group of boys from school, one of whom was a boy she had sort of been dating and loved. After that, she set out to eat and eat until her body was a “fortress” that could protect her and couldn’t be hurt. This was interesting for me to read because of the multiple lenses through which I was viewing it. There was the psychologist part of me who had a sort of detached […]