Social Groups Books

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America

Alex Kotlowitz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 92 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The other America indeed 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Nice mix of anecdote and historical background on life in inner city America. Excellent insight into the everyday difficulties faced by families and some of the root causes. This book, though almost 20 years old, still has a message that needs to be heard.

Editorial Review:

There Are No Children Here, the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 at the start, brings home the horror of trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago's West Side, literally learning how to dodge bullets the way kids in the suburbs learn to chase baseballs. "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," says Lafeyette at one point. That's if, not when--spoken with the complete innocence of a child. The book's title comes from a comment made by the brothers' mother as she and author Alex Kotlowitz contemplate the challenges of living in such a hostile environment: "There are no children here," she says. "They've seen too much to be children." This book humanizes the problem of inner-city pathology, makes readers care about Lafeyette and Pharoah more than they may expect to, and offers a sliver of hope buried deep within a world of chaos.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover Thrift Editions)

Harriet Jacobs

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

fact or fiction 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Some say this isnt true, after reading it seems that some is fiction. Especially extensive quotes years after the events from someone who coulnt read or write at the time the events occured and would have no way of recording them for future use. Somewhat drawn out. Keep looking there may be something better out there on the subject.

Really for all ages, about slavery 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I used an excerpt from this book included in a women's literary anthology used in my women's literature class. It was one of the many classes' favorite reads. For their final they were allowed to concentrate on one class assignment, write a documented essay, and from it, give an oral presentation with visuals....several successfully replicated, small scale, the yard and house with attic where Jacobs describes as being hidden for years... an incredible true story for everyone of all ages!

Editorial Review:

This autobiographical account by a former slave is one of the few extant narratives written by a woman. Written and published in 1861, it delivers a powerful portrayal of the brutality of slave life. Jacobs speaks frankly of her master's abuse and her eventual escape, in a tale of dauntless spirit and faith.

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

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Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> British -> Classics -> Woolf, Virginia

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A must have 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

A timeless essay not only for women. Good hard binding that will keep. It's a must have if you like English literature.

Obligatory Reading 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Virginia Woolf in her best form - personal but not self-centred, concentrated and ready to fight for what she believes is right. This long essay gives her views on the position of women in literature but offers also an overview of their role through centuries - from the imaginary Shakespeare's sister to her contemporaries. A must read for all readers regardless of sex!

Editorial Review:

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

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Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> African American -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

It's shocking how little has changed between the races in this country since 1963, when James Baldwin published this coolly impassioned plea to "end the racial nightmare." The Fire Next Time--even the title is beautiful, resonant, and incendiary. "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" Baldwin demands, flicking aside the central race issue of his day and calling instead for full and shared acceptance of the fact that America is and always has been a multiracial society. Without this acceptance, he argues, the nation dooms itself to "sterility and decay" and to eventual destruction at the hands of the oppressed: "The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream."

Baldwin's seething insights and directives, so disturbing to the white liberals and black moderates of his day, have become the starting point for discussions of American race relations: that debasement and oppression of one people by another is "a recipe for murder"; that "color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality"; that whites can only truly liberate themselves when they liberate blacks, indeed when they "become black" symbolically and spiritually; that blacks and whites "deeply need each other here" in order for America to realize its identity as a nation.

Yet despite its edgy tone and the strong undercurrent of violence, The Fire Next Time is ultimately a hopeful and healing essay. Baldwin ranges far in these hundred pages--from a memoir of his abortive teenage religious awakening in Harlem (an interesting commentary on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain) to a disturbing encounter with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. But what binds it all together is the eloquence, intimacy, and controlled urgency of the voice. Baldwin clearly paid in sweat and shame for every word in this text. What's incredible is that he managed to keep his cool. --David Laskin

Women, Men, and Society (5th Edition)

Claire M. Renzetti, Daniel J. Curran

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Some caveats 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

A well researched book, but tendentious. I taught that book and I had trouble trying to explain to my students that most of the homeless people are men. The confusion of my students was the result from the way that Renzetti and Curran presented the issue (See Box 7.1 "Gender and Homelessness" p.213, Fourth Edition). I simply found disingenuous their statistical treatment of homeless and gender because a few pages later (p.237) Renzetti and Curran criticize the use of their reasoning when they dispute some analyses of the relationship between gender and delinquency. Then they pointed out that the fact that the growth rate of delinquency is greater among women does not mean that more women are turning into crime because the number of women committing crimes is proportionally smaller than that of men. I found this double standard disappointing because the relationship between gender and homelessness is important for understanding how the gender role of men is a social problem. Rather than focusing on the structural aspects of gender, sometimes the valuable work done by Renzetti and Curran get lost because a rather simplistic picture of the issues.

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development

Carol Gilligan

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> Developmental Psychology
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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> Sexuality -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This is the little book that started a revolution. First published almost twenty years ago, it made women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than three-quarters of a million copies sold around the world. In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate-and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light.

Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women--their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience.

Women, Race, & Class

Angela Y. Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Gift of Intelligence 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Not since the works of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois have I encountered such in-depth work. This book is among Davis' early publications. Although the work is scholarly, it can be read by a wide audience. Research is extensive in three separate but intertwined issues that have contributed to human disparities around the globe. A shortcoming is that Dr. Davis confined the work to United States and Western Europe and, as a result, makes ethnocentric conclusions that are not applicable to a global perspective.

Editorial Review:

Longtime activist, author and political figure Angela Davis brings us this expose of the women's movement in the context of the fight for civil rights and working class issues. She uncovers a side of the fight for suffrage many of us have not heard: the intimate tie between the anti-slavery campaign and the struggle for women's suffrage. She shows how the racist and classist bias of some in the women's movement have divided its own membership. Davis' message is clear: If we ever want equality, we're gonna have to fight for it together.

The Cultural Nature of Human Development

Barbara Rogoff

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Culturally Complicated, But Brilliant 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Rogoff's acclaimed concepts about how human development and culture naturally intertwine unfold in a highly intricate matter within this text.

Like Jerome Bruner, her prose can overpopulate itself with too many techy terms for the average educator; however, if you can push through the woods of her thick style, you will uncover many truths about culture.

As she puts forth, culture springs from the natural progression of social history and interaction. Each culture possesses its own scripts and nuances on what exists as "typical" development.

I invite anyone to delve into her mind.

Editorial Review:

Three-year-old Kwara'ae children in Oceania act as caregivers of their younger siblings, but in the UK, it is an offense to leave a child under age 14 ears without adult supervision. In the Efe community in Zaire, infants routinely use machetes with safety and some skill, although U.S. middle-class adults often do not trust young children with knives. What explains these marked differences in the capabilities of these children?
Until recently, traditional understandings of human development held that a child's development is universal and that children have characteristics and skills that develop independently of cultural processes. Barbara Rogoff argues, however, that human development must be understood as a cultural process, not simply a biological or psychological one. Individuals develop as members of a community, and their development can only be fully understood by examining the practices and circumstances of their communities.

The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls

Joan Jacobs Brumberg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fair Attempt to Explain a Growing Problem 3 out of 5 stars.
13 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book because I see how girls/young women stuggle to achieve a very unrealistic ideal of beauty and how middle aged women stuggle to hang on to what they had as young women. As I approach 50, I know I am expected to stay trim, fit and muscular in spite of the fact that my body struggles mightly against it, especially since pregnancy and child birth.

As for the book, it is heavily researched and some of that research does involve journals from the 19th century and beyond. The first chapter is about how girls' bodies are maturing at a much faster rate than those of their fore sisters and the implications of this. Interesting.

The second chapter covers menstruation and menarche in detail. It is really too long. The basic premise of the chapter is how menarche has become consumerized. Mothers provide their daughters with all the mass manufactured equipment and not much else. The author wants menarche to be explained to girls as the time they enter womanhood, but I have a problem with this for two reasons. #1 Most girls are entering menarche at a time when they are not even remotely ready to be women. #2 When I enter menopause, am I exiting womanhood?

The third chapter covers the quest for perfect skin. It is page after page covering the subject of acne and how it has been dealt with over the past century. This, also, the author feels has been very much consumerized, as mothers take their daughters to the doctors and buy any and every cream and potion to relieve their daughters' agony.

The fourth chapter deals with the history of girls trying to achieve the perfect body and the fifth with the disappearance of virginity and how women have gained sexual freedom, but this has also filtered down to girls in middle school and high school and most of these girls and young women are ill equipped mentally and emotionally to deal with the ramifications of their sexuality.

The overall ideals in the book are excellent. The fact that girls have lost their closeness with mothers, aunts, teachers and other female role models. The fact that most of their learning comes from the media and girls their own ages. The fact that outward beauty is what females are judged by rather than beauty that comes from inside. The fact that girls are no longer protected through the family unit. They are sexually active earlier and earlier and often with older men and not boys of their own age. They have been sold the goods of freedom and independence when they are really not ready for them, etc.

Unfortunately, the book did not so much back up these ideas, but more harped on consumerism...the buying of feminine products, make up, clothes, etc. I am pretty sure this is but I small part of the problem.

Editorial Review:

Adolescent girls today face the issues girls have always faced: "Who am I?" and "Who do I want to be?" Unfortunately their answers, now more than ever before, revolve around the body rather than the mind, heart, or soul. "The body is at the heart of the crisis that [Carol] Gilligan, [Mary] Pipher, and others describe.... The fact that American girls now make the body their central project is not an accident or a curiosity," writes Brumberg, "it is a symptom of historical changes that are only now beginning to be understood." The historical photos, thorough research, and political even-handedness make this a book of worth and sincerity. The Body Project is also comforting for women, adolescents, parents, lesbians, and male lovers of women--helping us sort out the roots of female insecurities, obsessions, and angst.

Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter

Adeline Yen Mah

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 345 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Doing the right thing is priceless 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Adeline Yen Mah, the youngest daughter of a prominent chinese businessman and his young half-chinese, half-french new wife, shows a poignant and vivid picture of life as a most unwanted Chinese daughter growing up during the cultural revolution in mid- 20th century China. Despite horrible mistreatment and abuse by her step-mother, Yen Mah slowly flourished from a sad, quiet girl to a successful physician living in the United States because of the love and encourgement of one unempowered Aunt. A heartwrenching read, this autobiography is proof that even when 'bad things happen to good people', knowing one has done the 'right thing' is priceless indeed.

Editorial Review:

Snow White's stepmother looks like a pussycat compared to the monster under which Adeline Yen Mah suffered. The author's memoir of life in mainland China and--after the 1949 revolution--Hong Kong is a gruesome chronicle of nonstop emotional abuse from her wealthy father and his beautiful, cruel second wife. Chinese proverbs scattered throughout the text pithily covey the traditional world view that prompted Adeline's subservience. Had she not escaped to America, where she experienced a fulfilling medical career and a happy marriage, her story would be unbearable; instead, it's grimly fascinating: Falling Leaves is an Asian Mommie Dearest.