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Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A moving collection of essays on aging and happiness Drawing on more than six decades' worth of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, Willard Spiegelman reflects with candid humor and sophistication on growing old. Senior Moments is a series of discrete essays that, when taken together, constitute the life of a man who, despite Western cultural notions of aging as something to be denied, overcome, and resisted, has continued...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A stressed family, an unplanned pregnancy, and a painful, if liberating, awakening from the author of the lauded memoir Her. Loved and Wanted is the passionate story of a woman's love for her children, and a poignant and bracing look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day, in a nation where policies and a cultural war on women leave them without sufficient agency over their bodies, their futures, and even their hopes...
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Formats
Description
"'Tender, unsparing, poignant. . . . [A] love story that braids together intimate self-revelation with a rich meditation on the literature of aging.'-- Stephen Greenblatt. On Susan Gubar's seventieth birthday, she receives a beautiful ring from her husband, a gift that startles her into an appreciation of their luck. As she contemplates their sustaining relationship, Susan considers how older lovers differ from their youthful counterparts--and from...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren't threatening her life, they're shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Best Books
Around the World: August in North America
New African American Non-Fiction
October 2023 New Releases
Around the World: August in North America
New African American Non-Fiction
October 2023 New Releases
Description
"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Jacob Neusner (born 1932) is one of the most important figures in the shaping of modern American Judaism. He was pivotal in transforming the study of Judaism from an insular project only conducted by--and of interest to--religious adherents to one which now flourishes in the secular setting of the university. He is also one of the most colorful, creative, and difficult figures in the American academy. But even those who disagree with Neusner's academic...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A near-death experience turns a troubled underachiever into an accomplished English professor. The botched robbery didn't do it. Neither did the three gunshots. It wasn't until he flatlined twice and was administered last rites that David Borkowski finally realized he was about to die, a thug at age fifteen. A Shot Story: From Juvie to Ph.D. is a riveting account of how a bullet to his lungs saved his life and helped a juvenile delinquent turn his...
11) Afropessimism
Author
Publisher
Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton and Company
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"In the tradition of Edward Said's Orientalism and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of the non-analogous experience of being Black. A seminal work that strikingly combines groundbreaking philosophy with searing flights of memoir, Afropessimism presents the tenets of an increasingly influential intellectual movement that theorizes blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Rather than interpreting...
Author
Publisher
Legacy Lit
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"In this gripping and perceptive memoir, Woods takes us along on his journey to understand how race has impacted his life. Unflinching and uninhibited, Inheritance explores what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past"--
Author
Publisher
Verso Books
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and raising two kids, McKenzie Wark had a particularly extreme mid-life change: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recast her whole relation to the world and revealed it to her as something strange and different. Her past life became a stranger to her, a past she reclaims here by writing to important figures in her life, and addressing the big themes that haunt...
Author
Publisher
Northwestern University Press
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"Dead Weight chronicles the experiences of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, earned a PhD in creative writing and became the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions"--
Author
Publisher
Soho Press
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
"Okey Ndibe's funny, charming, and penetrating memoir tells of his move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the influential (but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency) African Commentary magazine. It recounts stories of Ndibe's friendships with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, and tells of Okey's own development as a novelist; examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial...
Author
Publisher
Riverhead Books
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"A provocative examination of reproductive technologies that questions our understanding of fertility, motherhood, and the female body Since the world's first test-tube baby was born in 1978, in vitro fertilization has made the unimaginable possible for millions of people. Yet today, the revolutionary potential of babies in bottles remains unrealized. Fertility centers continue to reinforce conservative norms of motherhood and family, and infertility...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"Tracking an underground language from one family's obsession to the outcasts who spoke it in order to survive. Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people who were "wiz" (in the know)-vagrants and refugees, merchants and thieves. This hybrid language was rich in expressions for police, jail, or experiencing trouble, such as "being in a pickle." And beginning with Martin Luther, German...
18) Correctional
Author
Publisher
The University of Wisconsin Press
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
"The first time Ravi Shankar was arrested, he spoke out against racist policing on National Public Radio and successfully sued the city of New York. The second time, he was incarcerated when his promotion to full professor was finalized. During his ninety-day pretrial confinement at the Hartford Correctional Center -- a level 4, high-security urban jail in Connecticut -- he met men who shared harrowing and heart-felt stories. The experience taught...
Author
Pub. Date
2015
Language
English
Description
"Wendy W. Fairey grew up among books. Her mother, the famous Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's last love--he died in her living room in 1940. As part of a 'College of One' education, Fitzgerald would bring Graham literary classics from Charles Dickens to William Thackeray, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. The protagonists of these books later became Fairey's intimates. Leaving her glamorous Hollywood world as a young girl,...
Author
Publisher
University of South Carolina Press
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
"Author June Manning Thomas offers an intimate history of her experiences in Orangeburg, South Carolina during the 1960s. Thomas was among the plaintiffs in the court case Adams v. School Dist. No. 5, Orangeburg County (1964) and as a result was part of the first group of African American students to attend racially integrated public schools in Orangeburg. Thomas discusses her experiences with a sense of emotion and intimacy that helps readers to...