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Great Women Sculptors

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLGBTQ+

American Teenager

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
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NonfictionMemoir

Before they were famous

Feature by Julie Hale

Raised by genteel, churchgoing parents, actress Geena Davis was a shy young woman while she was growing up, but over time, she found her true self as an artist and feminist. She chronicles her personal evolution in her companionable memoir, Dying of Politeness. With wit and honesty, Davis takes stock of her time as a model, key film roles (including Thelma & Louise), important relationships and motherhood. She also considers the difficulties of being a woman in Hollywood. Throughout this vivid book, Davis proves a skillful storyteller with hard-won wisdom to share

Singer and actor Billy Porter opens up about his difficult childhood in Unprotected. As a gay Black kid in 1970s Pittsburgh, Porter was harassed at school and abused at home. But he found empowerment in performing and—thanks to his remarkable talents—went on to achieve professional success. From living with HIV to starring on Broadway, Porter candidly covers personal tests and triumphs. His frankness as he delves into topics like gay rights, racism and the redemptive power of art make his memoir a rewarding book club pick.

Comedian Jo Koy explores his biracial background in Mixed Plate: Chronicles of an All-American Combo. From an early age, Koy—the son of a white father and Filipina mother—struggled to find a sense of self. Inspired by figures like Richard Pryor, he decided to become a comedian. On the path to success, Koy contended with racism and his own sense of uncertainty. In this bold yet vulnerable book, he shares fascinating details about his creative methods and growth. Themes of identity, the immigrant experience and racial stereotyping will kickstart lively dialogue among readers.

With Finding Me, Oscar winner Viola Davis offers an unflinching account of her difficult journey to stardom. One of six children, Davis grew up in a poor family with an abusive father. At Rhode Island College and the Juilliard School, she studied acting and laid the groundwork for an acclaimed career on stage and screen. In her memoir, she traces her development as an actress, reflecting on the challenges of being typecast and the lack of substantial film roles for Black women. Inspired and revealing, Finding Me gives readers insights into the mindset of a legendary actress.

Book clubs will be swept away by 4 rewarding autobiographies by Viola Davis, Geena Davis, Billy Porter and Jo Koy.

Undue Burden

Shefali Luthra’s Undue Burden is a rigorous and compelling condemnation of the unnecessary pain and sorrow Dobbs left in its wake.
NonfictionSocial Science

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Who wouldn’t want to keep reading a book that opens with these lines: “Yabom was lucky. She heard one flat tone, then an abrupt pop. A moment of silence, then the flat tone again. Thank God, she thought. The phone was ringing.” With the brisk pacing of investigative journalism, Mara Kardas-Nelson’s revelatory We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance probes the perils and promises of microfinance for women in developing countries.

The idea behind microfinance originated with Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus, who theorized that microcredit could end poverty. He believed that by giving women a few dollars, they could start small businesses and take care of themselves and their families, and he engaged in this practice by giving a total of $27 to 42 poor women in a village in his native Bangladesh in 1976. Although Kardas-Nelson first learned about microfinance in the early 2000s, the word and the idea had fallen out of the zeitgeist by 2010. When she moved to West Africa in 2015, however, she started hearing about it again.

Drawing on interviews with more than 350 people, from policy makers to aid workers and loan recipients, Kardas-Nelson focuses on the stories of women who’ve taken microloans in hopes of pulling themselves out of poverty and building a sustainable future. Aminata, for example, took out a loan so she could make and sell yogurt, but she lost all her goods in the chaos that led up to the 2023 Freetown, Sierra Leone, elections. Kadija has used her loan to support her work as a hairstylist; while she complains about the high interest rates and fees, she feels lucky to be able to borrow at all. Yabom’s phone call that opens the book, and this review, was to a friend; she begged him to check on her young children after she was brought to the police station for failing to pay back her loan. No one has seen or heard from her since. As Kardas-Nelson points out, “microfinance is remarkably unremarkable: just another source of debt woven into a complex tapestry of lending and borrowing, an expensive, burdensome appendage they’ve learned to live with.” Yet, she observes, “Women are terrified of the loans and their consequences. And they are also terrified of life without them.”

With riveting storytelling, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky reveals the often heartbreaking human dimensions of international monetary policy.

The riveting We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky probes the perils and promises of microfinance for women in developing countries.

Traveling

Ann Powers’ biography of Joni Mitchell is a travelogue of one of the greatest artistic journeys ever taken, and it's a pleasure to go along for the ride.
NonfictionHealth & Fitness

This Is Why You Dream

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Dr. Rahul Jandial spends a great deal of time delving into the human brain—both literally, as a neurosurgeon, and figuratively, as a researcher, professor and author of the international bestseller Life Lessons From a Brain Surgeon and the memoir, Life on a Knife’s Edge.

In his engaging and information-packed new book, This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life, Jandial enthusiastically explores the slumberous state, offering tips to help readers use dreams to reach their full potential around the clock. “By interpreting your dreams,” he asserts, “you can make sense of your experience and explore your emotional life in new and profound ways.”

Understanding the sleeping brain’s whimsy isn’t as simple as consulting a dream dictionary—which, by the way, Jandial does not recommend. That’s because dream dictionaries “cleverly offer a mix of vagueness and specificity that make it easy to shape your personal circumstances to fit any of [their] interpretations.” Rather, “Your dreams are the product of your brain at this particular moment in your life, and they change with the seasons of your life. To expect them to fall in line with others because they share the same central narrative, or the same visual element, is simply not realistic.”

We bring our unique experiences to the hours when the brain’s Executive Network, “responsible for logic, order, and reality testing,” turns off and the unfettered, judgment-free Imagination Network kicks in. But Jandial also reveals that surveys conducted 50 years apart in four different countries found that broader concerns (e.g., being chased, sexual experiences, school or studying) remained consistent in dreams across time and geography. This is evidence, he believes, that “the characteristics and contents of dreams are baked into our DNA, as a function of our neurobiology and evolution.”

For those in pursuit of personal evolution, Jandial says we can turn to dreams for harbingers of health challenges, including worsening symptoms of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, addiction and depression. Creativity can be boosted by training ourselves to remember dreams and “focusing outward when we awaken.” And advanced dream-wranglers will revel in two chapters devoted to lucid dreaming, another way in which Jandial believes readers can gain self-awareness, boost happiness and make our dreams even, well, dreamier. This Is Why You Dream is a fascinating, eye-opening dispatch from the world of neuroscience.

Rahul Jandial’s This Is Why You Dream is an engaging, eye-opening dispatch from the world of neuroscience.

The Uptown Local

In The Uptown Local, Joan Didion’s assistant recounts his relationship with the iconic author, as well as his complex family history and obsession with death.
NonfictionLGBTQ+Biography

The Other Olympians

Review by Anne Bartlett

The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin—dubbed the “Nazi Olympics” for providing an international platform to the genocidal regime—produced lasting memories, including the triumphs of Black American track and field star Jesse Owens and the “Boys in the Boat” rowing team that beat Germany in a dramatic upset. Less remembered is the wide speculation at the games that Helen Stephens, a U.S. runner who won two golds, might actually be a man.

She wasn’t. But the phony controversy was symptomatic of a panic in the Olympics establishment. Not long before the 1936 games, two top track and field athletes who had competed in international competitions as women said publicly that they were men (we would say now that they had come out as trans). A handful of Olympic leaders, including Nazi sympathizers, immediately drew the wrong conclusions and called for mandatory medical exams to determine sex prior to sports competitions.

In The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, author Michael Waters sensitively tells this forgotten history and reveals its modern resonances. The book connects the struggles of those two athletes, Zdenek Koubek of Czechoslovakia and Mark Weston of Britain, with the relatively open attitude toward queerness in pre-Nazi Central Europe, the resistance within the early Olympics movement to women’s sports, and the failed effort to boycott the Berlin games.

The Other Olympians is full of surprises for contemporary readers. For example, anyone who mistakenly thinks Christine Jorgensen was the first person to have gender affirming surgery will learn very much otherwise. But Waters’ detailed description of the outspoken Koubek’s life before and during his transition is the heart of the book. He emerges as an overlooked pioneer.

Koubek, Weston and other trans and queer people profiled here never wanted to compete against women after their transitions. Yet an entire regimen of sex testing was built on the unfounded belief that men were somehow masquerading as women to participate in sports contests. Decisions made in the late 1930s created sports competition rules that still exist today, as debate over trans athletes rages in school board meetings, courtrooms and legislative sessions. Waters doggedly chronicles where the debate originated and calls for what he believes is overdue change.

The Other Olympians doggedly chronicles the lives of pioneering trans athletes and the historically fraught 1936 Olympic Games.

The Hamilton Scheme

Drama-filled and insightful, The Hamilton Scheme chronicles the beginnings of America’s economic history.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestyles

The Heirloomist

Review by Alice Cary

If you are the sort of person who can’t bear to part with sentimental objects—“That belonged to Mamaw!”—this book is for you. Packed inside The Heirloomist: 100 Heirlooms and the Stories They Tell are photographs and stories of 100 items belonging to everyday as well as famous people, including Gloria Steinem, Rosanne Cash and Gabby Giffords. Their treasures might be a Rolex watch or a Rolleiflex camera—or simply scribbled notes, ticket stubs and even a plateful of spaghetti and meatballs.

After becoming curator of her family’s important items, Shana Novak turned to other people’s stuff. Her photography and storytelling business, The Heirloomist, has documented over 1,500 keepsakes since 2015. No matter their financial value, she writes, “all are priceless, precisely because their stories will play your heartstrings like a symphony.” Take, for example, the daughter of a New York City firefighter who died on 9/11. Several years after that tragedy, she and her mother opened a toy chest and found an old Magna Doodle, on which her father had written: “Dear Tiana, I love you. Daddy.”

The Heirloomist is meant to be shared with loved ones, especially those who harangue you to declutter. They may even start rummaging through basement boxes with a freshly appreciative eye.

Shana Novak’s gorgeous, poignant The Heirloomist documents 100 treasures beloved by everyday and famous people.

The Great River

Boyce Upholt wrangles the geological, political and cultural history of the wild Mississippi River in a compelling, lively narrative.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Take Back Your Brain

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Before creating her popular podcast Unf*ck Your Brain, Kara Loewentheil was already ambitious and accomplished: Her accolades include a degree from Harvard Law School, a clerkship for a federal judge and a job as a litigator for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I had it all,” she writes, but “the problem was that my brain did not seem to share this understanding. . . . I felt like I was being held hostage by a voice that was a cross between a middle school bully and a disapproving English governess.”

Through working with a life coach, Loewentheil learned cognitive behavioral techniques to challenge her unproductive thoughts and emotions, but even after getting certified as a life coach herself and coaching other women for years, something was still missing. “What we needed to really change our lives—and therefore change the world—was feminist coaching.” Loewentheil’s literary debut, Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head—and How to Get It Out, examines how sexist and patriarchal messages impact women’s thoughts and emotions and undermine our self-esteem and self-confidence. What’s more, she offers practical advice for living well despite those long-standing messages.

The book’s first section, “Reclaim Your Brain,” walks readers through the ways pervasive, sexist beliefs play into unconscious emotional and mental cycles. Loewentheil offers a written exercise called the “thought ladder” to help readers move from a negative or debilitating thought to a neutral or even positive thought. The book’s second section, “Reclaim Your Life,” covers body image, self-esteem, romantic relationships, money mindset and time. Each chapter is grounded in cultural and social history or reportage—for instance,the beauty and wellness industries—and offers practical exercises and prompts. Throughout, Loewentheil shares anecdotes and quotes from clients, as well the missteps and successes that make up her own story.

While some of the book’s cognitive-behavioral techniques may be familiar to readers who’ve seen therapists, the feminist framework is a welcome approach for our still-evolving 21st-century society. And Loewentheil is an engaging, straightforward guide.

 

Kara Loewentheil offers a feminist take on self-help in the engaging, straightforward Take Back Your Brain.

Project UrbEx

In Project UrbEx, photographer Ikumi Nakamura explores and captures unusual and hidden locations throughout the world.

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