New to the Stacks: Brotopia
Tag Archives: Feminism
Book List: Black in America
This is an incomplete list of books I’ve read which have helped me understand what it means to be “other,” based on skin color. They make my heart ache, and think more deeply about my own privilege of being white.
Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Beautiful Struggle – Ta-Nehisi Coates
We Should All Be Feminists Now – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Not a Genuine Black Man – Brian Copeland
By Any Means Necessary – Malcolm X
Beloved – Toni Morrison
What’s Auntie Reading Now?: The Armored Saint
The Armored Saint by Myke Cole ~ Review
New to the Stacks: Programmed Inequality
by Marie Hicks
Marie Hicks wrote Programmed Inequality about sexism in computing in England which led to the downfall of the UK’s computer industry. She signed it “Thanks for supporting the humanities,” because, like me, she believes Humanities is integral to a well-rounded life.
Review: The Last Girl
#ReadingIsResistance
by Nadia Murad
Title: The Last Girl
Author: Nadia Murad
Published: 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-5247-6043-4
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books
Twitter: @NadiaMuradPeace
What’s Auntie Reading Now? picture
Publisher’s Blurb
Yazidis believe that before God made man, he created seven divine beings, often called angels, who were manifestations of himself. (p. 27)
#ReadingIsResistance to ignoring the call of bearing witness to the atrocities of the world. Resistance to becoming complacent in our corner of the world while those around us suffer in unimaginable ways.
I expected to struggle with the content of this book. I expected it would be hard for me to read about Nadia Murad’s horrifying experience at the hands of ISIS. I did not expect The Last Girl to be fascinating and easy to read.
Imagine you’re a 21 year-old-woman living in a community where everyone is loved and cared for. Things are not easy, but everyone gets by and helps each other. The village in which you live is the only one you’ve known, and your dream is to teach history or do make up for others. It’s all you know, and it makes you happy.
One day, all of this is torn apart and the life you once knew no longer exists. ISIS, the most hated terrorist group in the entire world, comes to your part of Iraq and lays waste to everyone you ever held dear. All the men are rounded up and killed. A few escape, but not many. All the women, girls and boys are rounded up in the school house. These women and girls are sorted into two categories, house slaves and sex slaves. The boys are sent to camps where they are brainwashed and become fighters for ISIS.
This is Nadia’s story. And it happened because she is Yazidi, a religion not recognized by the fanatics of ISIS. There is no tolerance for something different. Different is “other,” and “other” is not human and can therefore be treated in abhorrent fashion.
For a month, she was passed around between men who raped her repeatedly, grew tired of her, and sent her to another man. There is no sugar-coating this, no way to make it easy to take. Nadia Murad’s memoir makes sure the reader understands exactly what happened to her, and girls like her, in state-sponsored genocide of the Yazidi people.
Murad was a “lucky” one. She escaped and was helped across the border into Kurdistan where she was reunited with the few remaining members of her family. There, she realized she needed to tell her story. She’s gone from someone who had never seen an airplane to flying all over the world relating the horrors all Yazidi suffered at the hands of ISIS.
The Last Girl is a powerful book, and I’m glad to have been able to bear witness to Nadia Murad’s story, and her drive to help others become aware of, and stop such horrifying atrocities around the globe. I, too, hope that she is “the last girl in the world with a story like [hers].” (p. 308)
#readingisresistance is a collaboration between readers and book bloggers who believe in the activism of reading; especially in the current political climate. Reading enriches, teaches, and allows us to experience the lives of others. It leads us to understanding. It forces us to confront the hard questions, and asks us to engage with the world in a way which leads to change. Join the resistance, read.
What’s Auntie Reading Now?: The Last Girl
by Nadia Murad
The Last Girl by Nadia Murad ~ Review
Review: The Blind Assassin
by Mararet Atwood
Title: The Blind Assassin
Author: Margaret Atwood
Published: 2000
ISBN-13: 9780385720847
Publisher: Anchor Books
[My bones] ache like history: things long done with.
An elderly lady writes her memoirs, revealing dark family secrets. Within those secrets is the book The Blind Assassin, a science fiction novel. Surrounding this novel within a novel is that tale of two lovers who meet surreptitiously and spin yarns.
Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors. I often feel like there’s something just skimming below the surface in her stories, but if I look too hard it will skitter away. And the sheer perversity of this outlandish science fiction tale in the middle of a story of two mystery lovers wrapped in the memoirs of an elderly lady looking back can be fascinating at times.
This was my second read, and found it didn’t hold as well as the first.
Review: Princess – A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia
by Jean Sasson
Title: Princess – A True Story Of Life Behind The Veil In Saudi Arabia
Author: Jean Sasson
Published: 2001
ISBN-13: 9780967673745
Publisher:Windsor-Brooke Books
Twitter: @JeanSasson
What’s Auntie Reading Now? picture
No matter what we do, our future is linked to one prerequisite: the degree of kindness in the man who rules us. (p. 138)
In some ways, Jean Sasson’s Princess reads like a breathless, salacious tell-all. A behind the scenes story of life as a princess in the Saudi royal family. But beneath the glamorous veneer are stories of torture, rape, and misogyny. It confirms every horrible thing we Westerners have ever heard about the treatment of women in the Middle East.
The princess in this book is called Sultana Al Sa’ud who met Sasson in 1983 while Sasson was living in Saudi Arabia. They became friends, and Sultana began to tell her story, which then became the book.
Behind the veil, Sultana is said to be smart and funny, and beautiful. She wants the freedom to choose her destiny, the right to decide how to live her life. But in front of the veil, Sultana is confronted with the reality that a woman’s life is never her own. Especially a woman of the royal family.
The men are controlling. Marriages are arranged. Women and children are treated as nothing more than pets and toys. Sultana’s brother gets all the attention and is allowed to do heinous things with no regard or reprimand. He is after all, male. And males of the royal family are given free rein to do as they like with the riches made available to them.
Females, on the other hand, are only allowed to do what the males allow. And females are monitored closely. There’s little that comes as a surprise in Sultana’s story.
Given this rich background, Sasson’s gossipy writing style gives Sultana’s story a more fictional flavor than Sultana deserves. There are many other reviews available which call into question the veracity of Sultana’s story. I don’t quite know what to make of this so-called controversy.
My take away from the book is what one is supposed to take away. Women are treated horribly in the Middle East and the world has much work to do in ensuring the civil rights of women. I’m not sure Princess does much to advance that cause. It reads more Jackie Collins than anything. I’d suggest giving Princess a pass and read Nnedi Okorafor’s brilliant science fiction series, Binti or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, which are both more entertaining than Princess.
#readingisresistance is a collaboration between readers and book bloggers who believe in the activism of reading; especially in the current political climate. Reading enriches, teaches, and allows us to experience the lives of others. It leads us to understanding. It forces us to confront the hard questions, and asks us to engage with the world in a way which leads to change. Join the resistance, read.
What’s Auntie Reading Now? The Burger-Meister’s Daughter
Oshia, this one’s for you.
The BurgerMeister’s Daughter by Steven Ozment
Review: Prague Winter
by Madeleine Albright
Title: Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
Author: Madeleine Albright
Published: 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-203031-3
Publisher: Harper Collins
I have long admired Madeleine Albright, the first woman to become Secretary of State in the US. To rise to that level and make a difference seems to me to be an astonishingly difficult job. To do it as a woman raises the difficulty scale even higher.
In The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, Albright discusses the role religion has played in world affairs, something that isn’t going to go away any time soon. She also reveals hard truths about herself, including the fact she didn’t know she had lost relatives to the Holocaust or that she was, in fact, Jewish.
Prague Winter is a product of Madame Secretary’s research into her own history, which is intertwined inextricably with Czechoslovakia and World War II.
This is not an easy book to read. This is well-researched, often emotional, retelling of one little girl’s life as Hitler rose to power and began to exterminate millions of people. Albright was only a child, but her memories, backed up with research, make for sorrowful reading.
Focusing on Czechoslovakia and its struggle to remain a united, independent country in the face of internal divisiveness between Czechs and Slovaks, and the onslaught of Nazis and Communists under Stalin, Albright’s story reminds the reader that nothing, truly, is every simple when zealots and ideologues are in charge.
She is fair in her assessment, through the long lens of history, that decisions made by Western leaders, while short sighted, were what politics of the time demanded. Neville Chamberlain will always be remembered as an appeaser, but what is rarely discussed is the force of Hitler’s personality and his ability to fool people into thinking he was a reasonable human being who simply wanted to strengthen Germany in the face of the disempowering Versailles treaty of World War I.
Albright’s story is one of heartbreak, and agony. It’s also an important story to know, because the true atrocities of Hitler and Stalin often get masked by the statistics and overwhelming amount of information available. Madeleine Albright’s story is about one family, and one country’s struggle during World War II. It puts into perspective the horrifying truth of what it is to be “other,” when that means certain death.s to change.
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