Women, Culture & Politics

Written by Angela Y. Davis

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 19, 1990
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-72487-2 (0-679-72487-7)

This collection of Davis's speeches and writings addresses the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.

"The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that positions be taken on current issues... Read more >

Women, Race, & Class

Written by Angela Y. Davis

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 12, 1983
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-394-71351-9 (0-394-71351-6)

A powerful, documented study of the women's movement in the United States. Recounts time from abolitionist days to the present that demonstrates how the movement has always been hampered by the racist and classicist biases of its leaders.

"A historical study of how the three themes of the title became entangled in... Read more >

Lieutenant Nun
Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World
Written by Catalina De Erauso

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: June 30, 1997
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7073-4 (0-8070-7073-4)

Named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1996

One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the extraordinary tale of Catalina de Erauso, who in 1599 escaped from a Basque convent dressed as a man and went on to live one of the most wildly fantastic... Read more >

Surviving Ophelia
Mothers Share Their Wisdom in Navigating the Tumultuous Teenage Years
Written by Cheryl Dellasega

Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: October 1, 2002
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-45538-3 (0-345-45538-X)

Drawing on the experiences of scores of mothers and daughters, Dellasega takes a hard look at the lives of girls in crisis—once happy, carefree children who are now struggling with eating disorders, unplanned pregnancies, substance abuse, and severe mental problems. These are stories of girls on the edge, and mothers who... Read more >

Faith and Betrayal
A Pioneer Woman's Passage in the American West
Written by Sally Denton

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 11, 2006
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3473-4 (1-4000-3473-6)

In the 1850s, Jean Rio, a deeply spiritual widow, was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out from England for Utah. Traveling across the Atlantic by steamer, up the Mississippi by riverboat, and westward by wagon, Rio kept a detailed diary of her extraordinary journey.

In Faith and Betrayal... Read more >

Lucia
A Venetian Life in the Age of Napleon
Written by Andrea Di Robilant

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 10, 2009
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9511-7 (1-4000-9511-5)

In 1787, the beautiful Lucia is married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the most powerful Venetian families. But their life as a golden couple will be suddenly transformed when Venice falls to Bonaparte. We witness Lucia's painful series of miscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an... Read more >

A Venetian Affair
A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century
Written by Andrea Di Robilant

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 12, 2005
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72617-0 (0-375-72617-9)

In the waning days of Venice’s glory in the mid-1700s, Andrea Memmo was scion to one the city’s oldest patrician families. At the age of twenty-four he fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful, illegitimate daughter of a Venetian mother and British father. Because of their dramatically different... Read more >

Pornland
How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
Written by Gail Dines

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: April 26, 2011
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0154-7 (0-8070-0154-6)

Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it’s no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. And, as Gail Dines shows, today’s porn is strikingly different from yesterday’s Playboy. As porn culture has become... Read more >

Pornland
How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
Written by Gail Dines

Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: June 29, 2010
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4452-0 (0-8070-4452-0)

Professor Gail Dines has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. She attends industry conferences, interviews producers and performers, and speaks to hundreds of men and women each year about their experience with porn. Students and educators describe her work as “life changing.”

In Pornland–the culmination of... Read more >

Mermaid and the Minotaur

Written by Dorothy Dinnerstein

Format: Trade Paperback, 332 pages
Publisher: Other Press
On Sale: June 17, 1999
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-1-892746-25-2 (1-892746-25-5)

"The Mermaid and the Minotaur is the most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration thus far. Its re-publication is a celebratory occasion, similar to the kind of intellectual exhilaration that greeted its original publication. It is no longer possible to address the questions of the relationship of women and men, of... Read more >

Seducing the Boys Club
Uncensored Tactics from a Woman at the Top
Written by Nina DiSesa

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: December 30, 2008
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-49699-7 (0-345-49699-X)

Chairman of the flagship office of the largest advertising agency network in the world, McCann Erickson, Nina DiSesa is a master communicator, a ceiling crasher, and a big-time realist. In Seducing the Boys Club, DiSesa shows you how S&M–seduction and manipulation–is the secret to winning over (and surpassing) the big guys... Read more >

The Only Girl in the Car

Written by Kathy Dobie

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Delta
On Sale: March 2, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-31883-9 (0-385-31883-9)

In The Only Girl in the Car, Kathy Dobie has written an extraordinary and painfully intimate memoir of her coming to womanhood. Bookworm and dreamer, Kathy was a young girl with a tender heart, an adventurer’s spirit, and a child’s terrible confusion about her proper place in the world. As the... Read more >

My Name is Victoria
The Extraordinary Story of one Woman's Struggle to Reclaim her True Identity
Written by Victoria Donda
Translated by Magda Bolin

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Other Press
On Sale: October 18, 2011
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-59051-404-7 (1-59051-404-1)

Argentina’s coup d’état in 1976 led to one of the bloodiest dictatorships in its history–thirty thousand people were abducted, tortured, and subsequently “disappeared.” And hundreds of babies born to pregnant political prisoners were stolen from their doomed mothers and “given” to families with military ties or who were collaborators of the... Read more >

Where the Girls Are
Growing Up Female with the Mass Media
Written by Susan J. Douglas

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: March 28, 1995
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-2530-2 (0-8129-2530-0)

Where the Girls Are is a tour through the confusing and contradictory images of women in American pop culture. Douglas looks back at the television programs, popular music, advertising, and nightly news reports of the past four decades to reveal the decidedly mixed messages conveyed to girls and women coming of... Read more >

The Frailty Myth
Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls
Written by Colette Dowling

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: September 11, 2001
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75815-7 (0-375-75815-1)

The myth of female frailty, with its roots in nineteenth-century medicine and misogyny, has had a damaging effect on women's health, social status, and physical safety. It is Dowling's controversial thesis that women succumb to societal pressures to appear weak in order to seem more "feminine."

The Frailty Myth presents new evidence... Read more >

Red Hot Mamas
Coming into Our Own at Fifty
Written by Colette Dowling

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: February 3, 1997
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-553-37495-7 (0-553-37495-8)

Colette Dowling's uplifting book celebrates the myriad possibilities for women who are edging up to, at, or just beyond 50. "Red hot mamas" are the dozens of women (some famous, some not) who are defying stereotypes to discover renewed power and vitality at midlife. In honest, empowering language, the women share... Read more >

The Woman Behind the New Deal
The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance,
Written by Kirstin Downey

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 23, 2010
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7856-1 (1-4000-7856-3)

One of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s closest friends and the first female secretary of labor, Perkins capitalized on the president’s political savvy and popularity to enact most of the Depression-era programs that are today considered essential parts of the country’s social safety network.

Frances Perkins is no longer a household name, yet... Read more >

Beauty and Cosmetics 1550-1950

Written by Sarah Downing

Format: Trade Paperback, 64 pages
Publisher: Shire
On Sale: February 21, 2012
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-0-7478-0839-8 (0-7478-0839-2)

Exhibiting enormous power or inspiring incredible devotion, throughout history beauty has been women’s chief asset. Each age has required its own standard - a gleaming white brow during the Renaissance, the black eyebrows considered charming in the early 18th century, or the thin lips thought desirable to the Victorians. For those... Read more >

Freedom in the Family
A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights
Written by Tananarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: December 30, 2003
Price: $23.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-44734-0 (0-345-44734-4)

BCALA Literary Award Winner - 2004 (Fiction; Sponsored by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association)

Patricia Stephens Due fought for justice during the height of the Civil Rights era, surrendering her freedom to ensure that the rights of others might someday be protected.Patricia's daughter, Tananarive, grew up deeply enmeshed in... Read more >

Mandela, Mobutu, and Me
A Newswoman's African Journey
Written by Lynne Duke

Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
On Sale: January 21, 2003
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-50398-3 (0-385-50398-9)

Finalist in the non-fiction category of the 3rd Annual Hurston Wright Legacy Awards.

In this stunning memoir, veteran Washington Post correspondent Lynne Duke takes readers on a wrenching but riveting journey through Africa during the pivotal 1990s and brilliantly illuminates a continent where hope and humanity thrive amid unimaginable depredation and horrors.

For... Read more >

The Birth of Venus
A Novel
Written by Sarah Dunant

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: November 30, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6897-2 (0-8129-6897-2)

2005 BOOK SENSE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD, ADULT NON-FICTION

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a... Read more >

In the Company of the Courtesan
A Novel
Written by Sarah Dunant

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: February 6, 2007
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7404-1 (0-8129-7404-2)

My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment.

Thus begins In the Company... Read more >

The Bobbed Haired Bandit
A Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York
Written by Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: April 10, 2007
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7735-6 (0-8129-7735-1)

On January 5, 1924, a well-dressed young woman, accompanied by a male companion, walked into a Brooklyn grocery, pulled a “baby automatic” from the pocket of her fur coat, emptied the cash register, and escaped into the night. Dubbed “the Bobbed Haired Bandit” by the press, the petite thief continued her... Read more >

Elizabeth and Mary
Cousins, Rivals, Queens
Written by Jane Dunn

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 25, 2005
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70820-6 (0-375-70820-0)

The political and religious conflicts between Queen Elizabeth I and the doomed Mary, Queen of Scots, have for centuries captured our imagination and inspired memorable dramas played out on stage, screen, and in opera. But few books have brought to life more vividly than Jane Dunn’s Elizabeth and Mary the exquisite... Read more >

Elizabeth and Mary
Cousins, Rivals, Queens
Written by Jane Dunn

Format: Hardcover, 480 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: January 6, 2004
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-40898-4 (0-375-40898-3)

“The first dual biography of two of the world’s most remarkable women—Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots—by one of Britain’s “best biographers” —The Sunday Times

In a rich and riveting narrative, Jane Dunn reveals the extraordinary rivalry between the regal cousins. It is the story of two queens ruling... Read more >