en-US Fri, 04 Apr 2025 12:10:10 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 57282028 An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers--with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous.

[A] rollicking journey through every aspect of Yahweh's body, from top to bottom (yes, that too) and from inside out ... Ms. Stavrakopoulou has almost too much fun."--The Economist

The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male.

Here is a portrait--arrived at through the author's close examination of and research into the Bible--of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe--and every part of the body in between--this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before.]]> 608 Francesca Stavrakopoulou 0525520457 Rachel 0 to-read 4.26 2021
author: Francesca Stavrakopoulou
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]]> 61190352 An inspiring look at wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet.

The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.

Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Each section of the book—farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans—offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery.

Tenacious Beasts is quintessential nature writing for the Anthropocene, touching on different facets of ecological restoration from Indigenous knowledge to rewilding practices. More important, perhaps, the book offers a road map—and a measure of hope—for a future in which humans and animals can once again coexist.]]> 328 Christopher J. Preston 026204756X Rachel 0 to-read 4.08 2023
author: Christopher J. Preston
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]]> 46064200 New York Times bestselling author of Every Patient Tells a Story, and an inspiration and adviser for the hit Fox TV drama House, M.D., Lisa Sanders has seen it all. And yet she is often confounded by the cases she describes in her column: unexpected collections of symptoms that she and other physicians struggle to diagnose.

A twenty-eight-year-old man, vacationing in the Bahamas for his birthday, tries some barracuda for dinner. Hours later, he collapses on the dance floor with crippling stomach pains. A middle-aged woman returns to her doctor, after visiting two days earlier with a mild rash on the back of her hands. Now the rash has turned purple and has spread across her entire body in whiplike streaks. A young elephant trainer in a traveling circus, once head-butted by a rogue zebra, is suddenly beset with splitting headaches, as if someone were "slamming a door inside his head."

In each of these cases, the path to diagnosis--and treatment--is winding, sometimes frustratingly unclear. Dr. Sanders shows how making the right diagnosis requires expertise, painstaking procedure, and sometimes a little luck. Intricate, gripping, and full of twists and turns, Diagnosis puts readers in the doctor's place. It lets them see what doctors see, feel the uncertainty they feel--and experience the thrill when the puzzle is finally solved.]]> 320 Lisa Sanders 0593136632 Rachel 0 to-read 3.98 2019
author: Lisa Sanders
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.98
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]]> 37572446 The Inner Life of Animals weaves the latest scientific research into how animals interact with the world with Peter Wohlleben's personal experiences in forests and fields.Horses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids. Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices, and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up.In this, his latest book, Peter Wohlleben follows the hugely successful The Hidden Life of Trees with insightful stories into the emotions, feelings, and intelligence of animals around us. Animals are different from us in ways that amaze us-and they are also much closer to us than we ever would have thought.]]> 7 Peter Wohlleben 1518985807 Rachel 0 to-read 3.79 2016
author: Peter Wohlleben
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.79
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]]> 60731167 � why we're in danger of losing many shark species forever
� what scientists, conservationists, and readers can do to help save these iconic predators
� why so much of what you've heard about sharks and how to save them is wrong Exploring the core tenets of shark conservation science and policy, Shiffman synthesizes decades of scientific research and policymaking, weaving it into a narrative full of humor and adventure. Touching on everything from Shark Week to shark fin soup, overfishing to marine sanctuaries, Shiffman reveals why sharks are in trouble, why we should care, and how we can save them. Perfect for shark enthusiasts, Why Sharks Matter is an approachable, informative guide to the world of shark conservation and the passionate, fascinating, brilliant people who work to understand and protect our oceans. This fun read will have you looking at sharks with a fresh perspective and an understanding that the survival of sharks is crucial to the survival of another apex predator—ourselves.]]> 286 David Shiffman 1421443643 Rachel 4 4.19
author: David Shiffman
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.19
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]]> 49098237
Drawing upon her years of research and a wealth of remarkable experience, the world-renowned forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black takes us on a journey of revelation. From skull to feet, via the face, spine, chest, arms, hands, pelvis and legs, she shows that each part of us has a tale to tell. What we eat, where we go, everything we do leaves a trace, a message that waits patiently for months, years, sometimes centuries, until a forensic anthropologist is called upon to decipher it.

Some of this information is easily understood, some holds its secrets tight and needs scientific cajoling to be released. But by carefully piecing together the evidence, the facts of a life can be rebuilt. Limb by limb, case by case � some criminal, some historical, some unaccountably bizarre � Sue Black reconstructs with intimate sensitivity and compassion the hidden stories in what we leave behind.]]> 368 Sue Black 0857526901 Rachel 0 to-read 4.33 2020
author: Sue Black
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.33
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]]> 101438 382 Ben R. Rich Rachel 0 to-read 4.45 1994
author: Ben R. Rich
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1994
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]]> 20663752
Incisive and wryly entertaining, science writer Sandra Hempel brings to life a gripping story of domestic infighting, wayward police behavior, other true-crime poisonings, and an unforgettable foray into the origins of forensic science.ĚýShe also solves this almost two-hundred year-old crime. 6 illustrations]]> 288 Sandra Hempel 0393349888 Rachel 0 to-read 3.25 2013
author: Sandra Hempel
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.25
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]]> 199798305 A historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a new understanding of human history

In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled upon a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head.

Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had imagined that creatures like three-toed giants once lumbered across the land. And if anyone conjured up such a scene, they would never imagine that all those animals could have vanished hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world. Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads readers through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today.]]> 352 Edward Dolnick 198219961X Rachel 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: Edward Dolnick
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.77
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]]> 36903031
Shamans and priests used these plants for their magical attributes, as a means to foretell the future or to commune with the gods.

Discover how a pot of Basil helped to conceal a savage murder.

Learn the truth about the mysterious mandrake, a real plant although many do not realise it.

Jane Austen wrote a conundrum to entertain her family; the answer is one of the plants in the book. Will you be able to solve the mystery?

Death In The Garden is based on Michael Brown's most popular talk, popular as this subject holds a strange interest, for many will enjoy learning about these treacherous and peculiar plants, their defensive and deadly traits, as well as the folklore that has grown around them. This title will appeal to gardeners, horticulturists, nature enthusiasts and anyone who holds an interest in this strange and enchanting corner of the garden. But be warned, many of these deathly plants may already be taking root in your very own garden...]]> 248 Michael Brown 1526708388 Rachel 4 3.64 2018
author: Michael Brown
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.64
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rating: 4
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]]> 33556709
Past Mortems tells Carla's stories of those years, as well as investigating the body alongside our attitudes towards death - shedding light on what the living can learn from dead and the toll the work can take on the living souls who carry it out.

Fascinating and insightful, Past Mortems reveals the truth about what happens when the mortuary doors swing shut or the lid of the coffin closes . . .]]> 294 Carla Valentine Rachel 0 to-read 3.97 2017
author: Carla Valentine
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.97
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]]> 60385275 Mortal Monarchs, medical historian Dr. Suzie Edge examines 1,000 years of royal deaths to uncover the plots, accusations, rivalries, and ever-present threat of poison that the kings and queens of old faced.]]> 256 Suzie Edge 147229422X Rachel 0 to-read 4.30 2022
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name: Rachel
average rating: 4.30
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]]> 15926749
When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new neighbors had little idea of the trouble to come. The Pilgrim Family presented themselves as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal, with their proud piety and beautiful old-timey music, but their true story ran dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa had bulldozed a road through the mountains to the new family home at an abandoned copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the National Park Service and forcing his ghost town neighbors to take sides in an ever-more volatile battle over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins.

In Pilgrim’s Wilderness, veteran Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia unfolds the remarkable, at times harrowing, story of a charismatic spinner of American myths who was not what he seemed, the townspeople caught in his thrall, and the family he brought to the brink of ruin. As Kizzia discovered, Papa Pilgrim was in fact the son of a rich Texas family with ties to Hoover’s FBI and strange, oblique connections to the Kennedy assassination and the movie stars of Easy Rider. And as his fight with the government in Alaska grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive]]> 292 Tom Kizzia 0307587827 Rachel 0 to-read 3.76 2013
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average rating: 3.76
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]]> 11862282
Most studies of the KKK dismiss it as an organization of racists attempting to intimidate minorities and argue that the Klan used religion only as a rhetorical device. Baker contends instead that the KKK based its justifications for hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans, one that employed burning crosses and robes to explicitly exclude Jews and Catholics.

To show how the Klan used religion to further its agenda of hate while appealing to everyday Americans, Kelly Baker takes readers back to its “second incarnation� in the 1920s. During that decade, the revived Klan hired a public relations firm that suggested it could reach a wider audience by presenting itself as a “fraternal Protestant organization that championed white supremacy as opposed to marauders of the night.� That campaign was so successful that the Klan established chapters in all forty-eight states.

Baker has scoured official newspapers and magazines issued by the Klan during that era to reveal the inner workings of the order and show how its leadership manipulated religion, nationalism, gender, and race. Through these publications we see a Klan trying to adapt its hate-based positions with the changing times in order to expand its base by reaching beyond a narrowly defined white male Protestant America.

This engrossing exposé looks closely at the Klan’s definition of Protestantism, its belief in a strong relationship between church and state, its notions of masculinity and femininity, and its views on Jews and African Americans. The book also examines in detail the Klan’s infamous 1924 anti-Catholic riot at Notre Dame University and draws alarming parallels between the Klan’s message of the 1920s and current posturing by some Tea Party members and their sympathizers.

Analyzing the complex religious arguments the Klan crafted to gain acceptability—and credibility—among angry Americans, Baker reveals that the Klan was more successful at crafting this message than has been credited by historians. To tell American history from this startling perspective demonstrates that some citizens still participate in intolerant behavior to protect a fabled white Protestant nation.]]> 342 Kelly J. Baker 0700617922 Rachel 0 to-read 3.54 2011
author: Kelly J. Baker
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.54
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]]> 51720367 A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.

In Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton takes a tour through contemporary American religiosity. As the once dominant totems of civic connection and civil discourse—traditional churches—continue to sink into obsolescence, people are looking elsewhere for the intensity and unity that religion once provided. We're making our own personal faiths - theistic or not - mixing and matching our spiritual, ritualistic, personal, and political practices in order to create our own bespoke religious selves. We're not just building new religions in 2019, we're buying them, from Gwyneth Paltrow's gospel of Goop, to the brilliantly cultish SoulCycle, to those who believe in their special destiny on Mars.

In so doing, we're carrying on a longstanding American tradition of religious eclecticism, DIY-innovation and "unchurched" piety (and highly effective capitalism). Our era is not the dawn of American secularism, but rather a brand-bolstered resurgence of American pluralism, revved into overdrive by commerce and personalized algorithms, all to the tune of "Hallellujah"--America's most popular and spectacularly misunderstood wedding song.]]> 301 Tara Isabella Burton 1541762533 Rachel 0 to-read 3.89 2020
author: Tara Isabella Burton
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.89
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]]> 56437694 “A deep dive into the world of Flat Earth conspiracy theorists . . . that brilliantly reveals how people fall into illogical beliefs, reject reason, destroy relationships, and connect with a broad range of conspiracy theories in the social media age. Beautiful, probing, and often empathetic . . . An insightful, human look at what fuels conspiracy theories.� —Science Since 2015, there has been a spectacular boom in a centuries-old that the earth is flat. More and more people believe that we all live on a pancake-shaped planet, capped by a solid dome and ringed by an impossible wall of ice. How? Why? In Off the Edge, journalist Kelly Weill draws a direct line from today’s conspiratorial moment, brimming not just with Flat Earthers but also anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers, back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s. We learn the natural impulses behind these when faced with a complicated world out of our control, humans have always sought patterns to explain the inexplicable. This psychology doesn’t change. But with the dawn of the twenty-first century, something else has shifted. Powered by Facebook and YouTube algorithms, the Flat Earth movement is growing. At once a definitive history of the movement and an essential look at its unbelievable present, Off the Edge introduces us to a cast of larger-than-life characters. We meet historical figures like the nineteenth-century grifter who first popularized the theory, as well as the many modern-day Flat Earthers Weill herself gets to know, from moms on vacation to determined creationists to neo-Nazi rappers. We discover what, and who, converts people to Flat Earth belief, and what happens inside the rabbit hole. And we even meet a man determined to fly into space in a homemade rocket-powered balloon—whose tragic death is as senseless and absurd as the theory he sets out to prove. In this incisive and powerful story about belief, Kelly Weill explores how we arrived at this moment of polarized realities and explains what needs to happen so that we might all return to the same spinning globe.]]> 245 Kelly Weill 1643750682 Rachel 0 to-read 3.75 2022
author: Kelly Weill
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.75
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]]> 10131648
After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of Light. Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough writes, "Not all pioneers went west." Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about everything. There he saw black students with the same ambition he had, and when he returned home, he would become the most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate, almost at the cost of his life.

Two staunch friends, James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Cooper writing and Morse painting what would be his masterpiece. From something he saw in France, Morse would also bring home his momentous idea for the telegraph.

Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans launched his spectacular career performing in Paris at age 15. George P. A. Healy, who had almost no money and little education, took the gamble of a lifetime and with no prospects whatsoever in Paris became one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the day. His subjects included Abraham Lincoln.

Medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote home of his toil and the exhilaration in "being at the center of things" in what was then the medical capital of the world. From all they learned in Paris, Holmes and his fellow "medicals" were to exert lasting influence on the profession of medicine in the United States.

Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James were all "discovering" Paris, marveling at the treasures in the Louvre, or out with the Sunday throngs strolling the city's boulevards and gardens. "At last I have come into a dreamland," wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom's Cabin had brought her. Almost forgotten today, the heroic American ambassador Elihu Washburne bravely remained at his post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of Paris and even more atrocious nightmare of the Commune. His vivid account in his diary of the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris (drawn on here for the first time) is one readers will never forget. The genius of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the son of an immigrant shoemaker, and of painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, three of the greatest American artists ever, would flourish in Paris, inspired by the examples of brilliant French masters, and by Paris itself.

Nearly all of these Americans, whatever their troubles learning French, their spells of homesickness, and their suffering in the raw cold winters by the Seine, spent many of the happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris. McCullough tells this sweeping, fascinating story with power and intimacy, bringing us into the lives of remarkable men and women who, in Saint-Gaudens's phrase, longed "to soar into the blue." The Greater Journey is itself a masterpiece.]]> 558 David McCullough 1416571760 Rachel 4 3.92 2011
author: David McCullough
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.92
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]]> 13003014 A startling exploration of the history of the most controversial book of the Bible, by the bestselling author of Beyond Belief. Through the bestselling books of Elaine Pagels, thousands of readers have come to know and treasure the suppressed biblical texts known as the Gnostic Gospels. As one of the world's foremost religion scholars, she has been a pioneer in interpreting these books and illuminating their place in the early history of Christianity. Her new book, however, tackles a text that is firmly, dramatically within the New Testament canon: The Book of Revelation, the surreal apocalyptic vision of the end of the world . . . or is it?

In this startling and timely book, Pagels returns The Book of Revelation to its historical origin, written as its author John of Patmos took aim at the Roman Empire after what is now known as "the Jewish War," in 66 CE. Militant Jews in Jerusalem, fired with religious fervor, waged an all-out war against Rome's occupation of Judea and their defeat resulted in the desecration of Jerusalem and its Great Temple. Pagels persuasively interprets Revelation as a scathing attack on the decadence of Rome. Soon after, however, a new sect known as "Christians" seized on John's text as a weapon against heresy and infidels of all kinds-Jews, even Christians who dissented from their increasingly rigid doctrines and hierarchies.

In a time when global religious violence surges, Revelations explores how often those in power throughout history have sought to force "God's enemies" to submit or be killed. It is sure to appeal to Pagels's committed readers and bring her a whole new audience who want to understand the roots of dissent, violence, and division in the world's religions, and to appreciate the lasting appeal of this extraordinary text.]]> 246 Elaine Pagels 0670023345 Rachel 4 3.82 2012
author: Elaine Pagels
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.82
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]]> 71327373 "No one is coming to rescue me. I am going to have to rescue me."

As a twenty-three-year-old singer and the soon-to-be wife of youth pastor Joshua Harris, nothing in Shannon Harris's secular upbringing prepared her to enter the world of conservative Christianity. Soon Joshua's bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye helped inspire a national purity movement, and Shannon's identity became "pastor's wife."

The Woman They Wanted recounts Shannon's remarkable experience inside Big Church--where she was asked to live within a narrow definition of womanhood for almost two decades--and her subsequent journey out of that world and into a more authentic version of herself. Entering conservative American Christianity was like being drawn out to sea, she writes, inexorable and all consuming. Slowly, her worldview was narrowed, her motivations questioned, her behavior examined, until she had been whittled down to an idealized version of femininity envisioned as an extension of her husband and the church. This decidedly patriarchal world, perpetuated even by the other women, began to feel like a slow death. However, when Sovereign Grace Ministries fell apart due to leadership conflicts and Shannon found herself outside church circles for the first time in years, she heard her intuition calling to her again. As she began to shake off the fog of depression and confusion, that voice grew louder. In honoring it, she awakened to the realities in which she had been trapped and found her truest self.

Singular and compelling, The Woman They Wanted will inspire women looking to reestablish connection with themselves, their inner wisdom, and their purpose.]]> 244 Shannon Harris 150648316X Rachel 0 to-read 3.73 2023
author: Shannon Harris
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.73
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]]> 52090 The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann sparked a flurry of debate upon its publication.

This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence,

Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling and unsettled issues of the twentieth century that remains hotly debated to this day.]]> 312 Hannah Arendt Rachel 0 to-read 4.22 1963
author: Hannah Arendt
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.22
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]]> 126918658 The first definitive book that names the massive social movement of people leaving the white evangelical church—the exvangelicals

Growing up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the �80s and �90s, Sarah McCammon was strictly taught to fear God, obey him, and not question the faith. Persistently worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach him, or that her Muslim friend would need to be converted, and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough, McCammon was a rule-follower and--most of the time--a true believer. But through it all, she was increasingly plagued by fears and deep questions as the belief system she'd been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.

After spending her early adult life striving to make sense of an unraveling worldview, by her 30s, she found herself face-to-face with it once again as she covered the Trump campaign for NPR, where she witnessed first-hand the power and influence that evangelical Christian beliefs held on the political right. McCammon also came to discover that she is among a rising generation of the children of evangelicalism who are growing up and fleeing the fold, who are thinking for themselves and deconstructing what feel like the “alternative facts� of their childhood.

Rigorously reported and deeply personal, The Exvangelicals is the story of the people who make up this generational tipping point, including McCammon herself. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, this is the first definitive book that names and describes the post-evangelical movement--identifying its origins, telling the stories of its members, and examining its vast cultural, social, and political impact.]]> 310 Sarah McCammon 1250284481 Rachel 0 to-read 4.20 2024
author: Sarah McCammon
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.20
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]]> 55462976
#ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church’s sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. It also lays the groundwork for not one but many paths of healing from a religious culture of sexual shame, secrecy, and control, and for victims of assault to live full, free, healthy lives.]]> 195 Emily Joy Allison 1506464815 Rachel 0 to-read 4.32 2021
author: Emily Joy Allison
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2021
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]]> 141390706 "Anderson strikes a smart, balanced tone. . . . An exemplary guide to an understudied issue."--Publishers Weekly

Religious trauma is something that happens far more often than most people realize. But religious trauma is trauma.

In When Religion Hurts You , Dr. Laura Anderson takes an honest look at a side of religion that few like to talk about. Drawing from her own life and therapy practice, she helps readers understand what religious trauma is and isn't, and how high-control churches can be harmful and abusive, often resulting in trauma. She shows how elements of fundamentalist church life--such as fear of hell, purity culture, corporal punishment, and authoritarian leaders--can cause psychological, relational, physical, and spiritual damage.

As she explores the growing phenomenon of religious trauma, Dr. Anderson helps readers embark on a journey of living as healing individuals and finding a new foundation to stand on. Recognizing that healing is a lifelong rather than a linear process, she offers markers of healing for those coming out of painful religious experiences and hope for finding wholeness after religious trauma.]]> 240 Laura E. Anderson 1587435888 Rachel 0 to-read 4.38 2023
author: Laura E. Anderson
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.38
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]]> 1976714

The prophets: suffering is a punishment for sin
The book of Job, which offers two different answers: suffering is a test, and you will be rewarded later for passing it; and suffering is beyond comprehension, since we are just human beings and God, after all, is God

Ecclesiastes: suffering is the nature of things, so just accept it
All apocalyptic texts in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: God will eventually make right all that is wrong with the world
For renowned Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, the question of why there is so much suffering in the world is more than a haunting thought. Ehrman's inability to reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of real life led the former pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church to reject Christianity.

In God's Problem, Ehrman discusses his personal anguish upon discovering the Bible's contradictory explanations for suffering and invites all people of faith—or no faith—to confront their deepest questions about how God engages the world and each of us.]]> 304 Bart D. Ehrman 0061173975 Rachel 0 to-read 3.93 2008
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2008
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]]> 15793575
In the late 1500s a Nuremberg man named Frantz Schmidt began to do something utterly remarkable for his era: he started keeping a journal. But what makes Schmidt even more compelling to us is his day job. For forty-five years, Schmidt was an efficient and prolific public executioner, employed by the state to extract confessions and put convicted criminals to death. In his years of service, he executed 361 people and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. Is it possible that a man who practiced such cruelty could also be insightful, compassionate, humane—even progressive?

In his groundbreaking book, the historian Joel F. Harrington looks for the answer in Schmidt’s journal, whose immense significance has been ignored until now. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidt’s medical practice, his marriage to a woman ten years older than him, his efforts at penal reform, his almost touching obsession with social status, and most of all his conflicted relationship with his own craft and the growing sense that it could not be squared with his faith.

A biography of an ordinary man struggling for his soul, The Faithful Executioner is also an unparalleled portrait of Europe on the cusp of modernity, yet riven by conflict and encumbered by paranoia, superstition, and abuses of power. In his intimate portrait of a Nuremberg executioner, Harrington also sheds light on our own fraught historical moment.]]> 320 Joel F. Harrington 0809049929 Rachel 0 to-read 3.99 2013
author: Joel F. Harrington
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2013
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]]> 179311302 512 Natalie Dykstra 1328515753 Rachel 0 to-read 3.96
author: Natalie Dykstra
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.96
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]]> 203164283 From three-inch fang blennies to thirty-foot prehistoric crocodiles, from gaboon vipers to Neanderthals, Bite is a fascinating journey through the natural, scientific, and cultural history of something right in front of—or in—our faces: teeth.

In Bite, zoologist Bill Schutt makes a surprising case: Teeth are responsible for the long-term success of vertebrates. The appearance of teeth, roughly half a billion years ago, was an adaptation that allowed animals with backbones, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, dinosaurs, and mammals to chow down in pretty much every conceivable environment.

But teeth are not just for food. Tusks and fangs have played crucial roles as defensive weapons—glimpsing the upper canines of snarling dogs is all it takes to know that teeth are an efficient means of aggression. Vampire bats use their razor-sharp teeth to obtain a widespread but generally untappable resource: blood. Early humans employed their teeth as tools to soften tough fibers and animal hides. Our teeth project information and social status—the ancient Etruscans were the first to wear tooth bling, and it’s doubtful that George Washington would have been elected president without the false teeth he wore.

So much of what we know about life on this planet has come from the study of fossilized teeth, which have provided information not only about evolution but also about famine, war, and disease. In his signature witty style, Schutt shows us how our continued understanding of teeth may help us humans through current and future crises, from Alzheimer’s disease to mental health issues.]]> 308 Bill Schutt 1643751786 Rachel 0 to-read 3.83
author: Bill Schutt
name: Rachel
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]]> 22470
With magisterial learning and the elan of a born storyteller, Pagels turns Satan’s story into an audacious exploration of Christianity’s shadow side, in which the gospel of love gives way to irrational hatreds that continue to haunt Christians and non-Christians alike.]]> 214 Elaine Pagels 0679731180 Rachel 0 to-read 3.91 1995
author: Elaine Pagels
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1995
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]]> 24724228
The 1920s are famous as the golden age of jazz and glamour, but it was also an era of fevered yearning for communion with the spirit world, after the loss of tens of millions in the First World War and the Spanish-flu epidemic. A desperate search for reunion with dead loved ones precipitated a tidal wave of self-proclaimed psychics—and, as reputable media sought stories on occult phenomena, mediums became celebrities.

Against this backdrop, in 1924, the pretty wife of a distinguished Boston surgeon came to embody the raging national debate over Spiritualism, a movement devoted to communication with the dead. Reporters dubbed her the blonde Witch of Lime Street, but she was known to her followers simply as Margery. Her most vocal advocate was none other than Sherlock Holmes' creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed so thoroughly in Margery's powers that he urged her to enter a controversial contest, sponsored by Scientific American and offering a large cash prize to the first medium declared authentic by its impressive five-man investigative committee. ĚýAdmired for both her exceptional charm and her dazzling effects, Margery was the best hope for the psychic practice to be empirically verified.Ěý Her supernatural gifts beguiled four of the judges. There was only one left to convince...the acclaimed escape artist, Harry Houdini.

David Jaher's extraordinary debut culminates in the showdown between Houdini, a relentless unmasker of charlatans, and Margery, the nation's most credible spirit medium. The Witch of Lime Street , the first book to capture their electric public rivalry and the competition that brought them into each other’s orbit, returns us to an oft-mythologized era to deepen our understanding of its history, all while igniting our imagination and engaging with the timeless Is there life after death?]]> 436 David Jaher 0307451062 Rachel 0 to-read 3.42 2015
author: David Jaher
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2015
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]]> 20893622
'The Maybrick Mystery' had all the makings of a sensation: a pretty, flirtatious young girl; resentful, gossiping servants; rumours of gambling and debt; and torrid mutual infidelity. The case cracked the varnish of Victorian respectability, shocking and exciting the public in equal measure as they clambered to read the latest revelations of Florence's past and glimpse her likeness in Madame Tussaud's.

Florence's fate was fiercely debated in the courtroom, on the front pages of the newspapers and in parlours and backyards across the country. Did she poison her husband? Was her previous infidelity proof of murderous intentions? Was James' own habit of self-medicating to blame for his demise?

Historian Kate Colquhoun recounts an utterly absorbing tale of addiction, deception and adultery that keeps you asking to the very last page, did she kill him?]]> 432 Kate Colquhoun 146830934X Rachel 0 to-read 3.54 2014
author: Kate Colquhoun
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.54
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]]> 131591
In March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox—sisters aged 11 and 14—anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had been hearing strange, unidentified sounds in their house. From a sequence of knocks and rattles translated by the young girls as a "voice from beyond," the Modern Spiritualism movement was born.

Talking to the Dead follows the fascinating story of the two girls who were catapulted into an odd limelight after communicating with spirits that March night. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Americans were flocking to seances. An international movement followed. Yet thirty years after those first knocks, the sisters shocked the country by denying they had ever contacted spirits. Shortly after, the sisters once again changed their story and reaffirmed their belief in the spirit world. Weisberg traces not only the lives of the Fox sisters and their family (including their mysterious Svengali-like sister Leah) but also the social, religious, economic and political climates that provided the breeding ground for the movement. While this is a thorough, compelling overview of a potent time in US history, it is also an incredible ghost story.

An entertaining read - a story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts - Talking to the Dead is full of emotion and surprise. Yet it will also provoke questions that were being asked in the 19th century, and are still being asked today - how do we know what we know, and how secure are we in our knowledge?]]> 324 Barbara Weisberg 0965902560 Rachel 0 to-read 3.58 2004
author: Barbara Weisberg
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.58
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]]> 176443387
Witchcraft is a dramatic journey through thirteen witch trials across history, some famous—like the Salem witch trials—and some on Vardø island, Norway, in the 1620s, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; in France in 1731, during the country’s last witch trial, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; in Pennsylvania in 1929 where a magical healer was labelled a “witch�; in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft became feared, decriminalized, reimagined, and eventually reframed as gendered persecution, Witchcraft takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, and political conspiracy and individual resistance.

Offering a vivid, compelling, and dramatic story, unspooling through centuries, about the men and women who were accused—some of whom survived their trials, and some who did not� Witchcraft empowers the people who were and are victimized and marginalized, giving a voice to those who were silenced by history.]]> 320 Marion Gibson 1668002426 Rachel 0 to-read 3.64 2023
author: Marion Gibson
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
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]]> 8785005 Ěý
Beleaguered by scandal, betrayed by faithless spouses, bedeviled by ambitious children, the kings and queens of Great Britain have been many things, but they have never been dull. Some sacrificed everything for love, while others met a cruel fate at the edge of an axman’s blade. From the truth behind the supposed madness of King George to Queen Victoria’s surprisingly daring taste in sculpture, Behind the Palace Doors ventures beyond the rumors to tell the unvarnished history of Britain’s monarchs, highlighting the unique mix of tragedy, comedy, romance, heroism, and incompetence that has made the British throne a seat of such unparalleled fascination.
Ěý

� stories covering every monarch, from randy Henry VIII to reserved Elizabeth II
� historical myths debunked and surprising “Did you know . . . ?� anecdotes
� four family trees spanning every royal house, from the Tudors to the Windsors]]> 307 Michael Farquhar 0812979044 Rachel 0 to-read 3.62 2011
author: Michael Farquhar
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2011
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]]> 43304435 320 Susannah Stapleton 1509867295 Rachel 0 to-read 3.68 2019
author: Susannah Stapleton
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.68
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]]> 75523493
In early modern England, murder truly was most foul. Trials were gossipy events packed to the rafters with noisome spectators. Executions were public proceedings which promised not only gore, but desperate confessions and the grandest, most righteous human drama. Bookshops saw grisly stories of crime and death sell like hot cakes.

This history unfolds the true stories of murder, criminal investigation, early forensic techniques, high court trials and so much more.

In thrilling narrative, we follow a fugitive killer through the streets of London, citizen detectives clamouring to help officials close the net. We untangle the mystery of a suspected staged suicide through the newly emerging science of forensic pathology. We see a mother trying to clear her dead daughter’s name while other women faced the accusations � sometimes true and sometimes not � of murdering their own children.

These stories are pieced together from original research using coroner’s inquests, court records, parish archives, letters, diaries and the cheap street pamphlets that proliferated to satisfy a voracious public.

These intensely personal stories portray the lives of real people as they confronted the extraordinary crises of murder, infanticide, miscarriage and suicide. Many historical laws and attitudes concerning death and murder may strike us as exceptionally cruel, and yet many still remind us that some things never change: we are still fascinated by narratives of murder and true crime, murder trials today continue to be grand public spectacles, female killers are frequently cast as aberrant objects of public hatred and sexual desire, and suicide remains a sin within many religious organisations and was a crime in England until the 1960s.

Great and Horrible News explores the strange history of death and murder in early modern England, yet the stories within may appear shockingly familiar.]]> 228 Blessin Adams 000850024X Rachel 0 to-read 3.80 2023
author: Blessin Adams
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.80
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]]> 56776249
The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction.

There’s Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people � victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws.

Join lawyer and writer Kate Morgan on a dark and macabre journey as she explores the strange stories and mysterious cases that have contributed to UK murder law. The big corporate killers; the vengeful spouses; the sloppy doctors; the abused partners; the shoddy employers; each story a crime and each crime a precedent that has contributed to the law’s dark, murky and, at times, shocking standing]]> 346 Kate Morgan 0008407339 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00 2021
author: Kate Morgan
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 37570548
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.

In this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally gives these women back their stories.]]> 352 Hallie Rubenhold Rachel 0 to-read 4.07 2019
author: Hallie Rubenhold
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.07
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]]> 98652084 A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum comes a wildly entertaining new history of Rome that uses the lives of 21 extraordinary women to upend our understanding of the ancient world.

The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of "The Doing of Important Things," and as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don't make that history. From Romulus through "the political stab-fest of the late Republic," and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.

Emma Southon's A Rome of One's Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers relegate to the background, or designate as domestic, feminine, or worthless. This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One's Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.]]> 416 Emma Southon 1419760181 Rachel 0 to-read 4.16 2023
author: Emma Southon
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.16
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]]> 201335514
Whether you're in the mood for Lizzie Borden's meatloaf or want to serve up spooky prison stories along with sugar cookies from Alcatraz,ĚýFood to Die ForĚýis your guide to ghoulish gastronomy.

One of America's favorite ghost hunters, Amy Bruni takes you to mysterious hotels, eerie ghost towns, and possessed pubs in this delightfully sinister collection of stories and recipes. Each of the nearly 60 locations inĚýFood to Die ForĚý

Vintage photographs and charmingly creepy stories rooted in historyA noteworthy recipe associated with the people or placeFull-color, captivating, and hauntingly styled food photos to inspire a killer kitchen experienceThis terrifyingly tasty cookbook will bewitch anyone

Has a taste for the paranormal and a hunger to try new foodsLoves history, travel, and culinary curiositiesEnjoys entertaining guests in unique and memorable waysWould get goosebumps making a recipe written 300 years agoĚý

History buffs, thrill-seekers, and foodies will all get shivers seeing the past come to life with every enchanted recipe and delicious tale fromĚýFood to Die For.]]> 281 Amy Bruni 1400245591 Rachel 0 to-read 4.18
author: Amy Bruni
name: Rachel
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]]> 199847335
� A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.�

So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words � intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women � summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living � a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?

In this vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.

We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the �Clitheroe wife abduction�; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the �Camden Town Murder�.

Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Treelifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law � and what it means for women today.]]> 307 Kate Morgan 0008559597 Rachel 0 to-read 4.19
author: Kate Morgan
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.19
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]]> 199531821 256 Colette Shade 0063333945 Rachel 0 to-read 3.62 2025
author: Colette Shade
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.62
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]]> 203020280 Cue The Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.

Nussbaum traces four paths of reality innovation—game shows, prank shows, soap operas, and clip shows—that united in the Survivor format, sparking a tumultuous Hollywood gold-rush. Along the way, we meet tricksters and innovators—from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; Bachelor mastermind Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray, the visionary behind The Real World—along with dozens of crew members and ordinary people whose lives became fodder for the reality revolution. We learn about the tools of the trade—like Candid Camera’s brilliant “reveal� and the notorious Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and the moral outrage that reality shows provoked. But Cue The Sun! also celebrates what made the genre so powerful: a jolt of authentic emotion.

Through broad-ranging reporting, Nussbaum examines seven tumultuous decades, exploring the celebreality boom, reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, and the dark truth behind The Apprentice. A shrewd observer who cares about television, she is the ideal voice for the first substantive cultural history of the genre that has, for better or worse, made America what it is today.]]> 464 Emily Nussbaum 0525508996 Rachel 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Emily Nussbaum
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.94
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]]> 203956638
The figure of the American sheriff has loomed large in popular imagination, though given the outsize jurisdiction sheriffs have over people’s lives, the office of sheriffs remains a gravely under-examined institution. Locally elected, largely unaccountable, and difficult to remove, the country’s over three thousand sheriffs, mostly white men, wield immense power—making arrests, running county jails, enforcing evictions and immigration laws—with a quarter of all U.S. law enforcement officers reporting to them. In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,� who assert that their authority supersedes that of legislatures, courts, and even the president. They’ve protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the “Big Lie� of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing.

How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were “above the law?� What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy?

Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding.

A must-read for fans of Michelle Alexander, Gilbert King, Elizabeth Hinton, and Kathleen Belew.]]> 480 Jessica Pishko 0593471318 Rachel 0 to-read 3.98
author: Jessica Pishko
name: Rachel
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]]> 199798813 This tour de force of investigative journalism—in the vein of The Next Civil War and Why We’re Polarized—depicts the United States of America as a country at a crossroads with the battle between the right and left spilling out from the darkest corners of the internet into the real world with often tragic consequences. Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and probing interviews under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right. This ongoing battle, long fought mainly on the internet, has spilled out into the real world with greater and greater frequency, culminating in the attempted coup on January 6th. Combining her years of on-the-ground reporting, Reeve clearly illustrates this shocking sweep of violence, where this cultural shift came from, and where it is going. She also introduces us to a shocking but powerful cast of characters, such as the creator of 8chan—an online hub for conspiracies and misogynistic rhetoric—and the white power leader who is still pulling the strings from a prison cell. Uncovering the hidden links between these events and how we can prevent further upheavals of this nature, Black Pill is a necessary read for any supporter of democracy.]]> 304 Elle Reeve 1982198885 Rachel 0 to-read 4.18 2024
author: Elle Reeve
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.18
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]]> 101160112 Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet—revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off.

For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms� power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet.

Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.

Extremely Online is the inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.]]> 384 Taylor Lorenz 1982146869 Rachel 0 to-read 3.58 2023
author: Taylor Lorenz
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.58
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]]> 60165391
Five mysterious billionaires summoned theorist Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive the “Event�: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley–style certainty that they and their cohort can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making—as long as they have enough money and the right technology.

In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. In a dozen urgent, electrifying chapters, he confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters—master programmers who want to remake the world from scratch as if redesigning a video game and bankers who return from Burning Man convinced that incentivized capitalism is the solution to environmental disasters—Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so. And he shows how recent forms of anti-mainstream rebellion—QAnon, for example, or meme stocks—reinforce the same destructive order.

This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us how to transcend the landscape The Mindset created—a world alive with algorithms and intelligences actively rewarding our most selfish tendencies—and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. In a thundering conclusion, Survival of the Richest argues that the only way to survive the coming catastrophe is to ensure it doesn’t happen in the first place.]]> 224 Douglas Rushkoff 0393881067 Rachel 0 to-read 3.83 2022
author: Douglas Rushkoff
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
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]]> 54182234 118 Joe Pometto Rachel 0 to-read 4.35
author: Joe Pometto
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.35
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]]> 182761392
Books about cars are usually geared towards a limited male readers, car enthusiasts, or mechanics.Ěý Mechanic Shop Femme’s Guide to Car Ownership and Maintenance is different. In a country where women and members of the LGBTQ+ community are disproportionately impacted by economic injustices, Ěýcar ownership is often the key to lift marginalized individuals out of poverty. ĚýSocial media star and automotive expert Chaya Milchtein is a queer woman herself who is familiar with both the importance and the limitations of the male-dominated industry. For example, Chaya understands that a vehicle is an economic necessity which can provide access to career opportunities, economic security, and physical safety. She also understands that women and LGBTQ+ individuals may find it daunting to visit mechanic shops which are run entirely by men.

In Mechanic Shop Femme’s Guide to Car Ownership and Maintenance , Chaya appeals to readers of all identities and socio-economic backgrounds, arming them with the necessary knowledge to navigate the intimidating automotive space. At its core, this book is an accessible and comprehensive guide that will put readers at ease by providing them with basic knowledge about car ownership and maintenance. From budgeting, to negotiation, to inspection, Chaya encourages her audience to make their own informed decisions regarding their vehicles.ĚýĚý Mechanic Shop Femme’s Guide to Car Ownership and Maintenance is a must-have purchaseâ€� one that will last readers through a lifetime of car ownership.]]> 304 Chaya Milchtein 0316565512 Rachel 0 to-read 4.49 2024
author: Chaya Milchtein
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.49
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]]> 40915764 A revelatory new history of post-colonial African independence movements shows how they were systematically undermined by one nation: the US. This is the untold story of how, over a few vital years, African Independence was strangled at birth.

In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. It was inspired by the example of Ghana itself which, under the charismatic leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, had just thrown off the British colonial yoke - the first African nation to do so. It was moment heady with promise for independence movements across Africa, and for all those who believed colonialism was a moral aberration.

Among the supporters of African independence were some of the leading figures of the American Civil Rights movement. Malcolm X was in Accra and Martin Luther King used Nkrumah's speech as the basis for his own "Free At Last" speech, so clear were the parallels between their own struggle for political equality in the US with that of the African nations. W. E. B. Du Bois moved to Ghana, inspired by the future of independent Africa. Yet among the many official messages of support received by the conference the United States was conspicuously quiet, despite its historic and public opposition to colonialism. Vice President Nixon did attend the celebrations in Ghana and asked a group of black people, "How does it feel to be free?"They answered: "We wouldn't know. We're from Alabama".

The conference was also attended by a slew of strange societies, many of which were fronts, and behind them was the CIA. The CIA was in favor of the end of the British Empire but a pan-African independence movement, one susceptible to Soviet entreaties, looked like a security threat. Through original research and unparalleled insight, Susan Williams reveals how the CIA's baleful influence was felt from South Africa to the Congo as the agency prepared to move in as Africa's colonizers moved out.]]> 651 Susan Williams 1541768299 Rachel 0 to-read 4.17 2021
author: Susan Williams
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.17
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]]> 53054943 The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States.

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.

In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.]]> 320 Vincent Bevins 1541742400 Rachel 0 to-read 4.62 2020
author: Vincent Bevins
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.62
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]]> 52759226 259 Mekong Moe Rachel 0 to-read 2.33
author: Mekong Moe
name: Rachel
average rating: 2.33
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]]> 17797399 Ěý
Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of rescue.
Ěý
Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and “whorephobia,� and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition.
Ěý
Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns,Ěýthey have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workersâ€� rights as human rights.
Ěý
Telling stories of sex workers, from the frontlines of the 1970s sex wars to the modern-day streets of SlutWalk, Chateauvert illuminates an underrepresented movement, introducing skilled activists who have organized a global campaign for self-determination and sexual freedom that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.]]> 272 Melinda Chateauvert 0807061395 Rachel 0 to-read 3.88 2014
author: Melinda Chateauvert
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.88
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]]> 26102729 To Live Freely in This World is the first book to tell the story of the brave activists at the beating heart of the sex workers� rights movement in Africa—the newest and most vibrant face of the global sex workers� rights struggle. African sex worker activists are proving that communities facing human rights abuses are not bereft of agency. They’re challenging politicians, religious fundamentalists, and anti-prostitution advocates; confronting the multiple stigmas that affect the diverse members of their communities; engaging in intersectional movement building with similarly marginalized groups; and participating in the larger global sex workers� rights struggle in order to determine their social and political fate.

By locating this counter-narrative in Africa, To Live Freely in This World challenges disempowering and one-dimensional depictions of “degraded Third World prostitutes� and helps fill what has been a gaping hole in feminist scholarship regarding sex work in the African context. Based on original fieldwork in seven African countries, including Botswana, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda, Chi Adanna Mgbako draws on extensive interviews with over 160 African female and male (cisgender and transgender) sex worker activists, and weaves their voices and experiences into a fascinating, richly-detailed, and powerful examination of the history and continuing activism of this young movement.]]> 272 Chi Adanna Mgbako 1479817562 Rachel 0 to-read 4.73 2016
author: Chi Adanna Mgbako
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.73
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]]> 6389118
The story begins in early 1993, with the discovery of blocks on escort service telephone lines in Orlando area resort PBX systems during large convention bookings. The blocks began in the late 1980s and were not isolated to the Orlando area, but were also transpiring in Las Vegas. Though there have been civil suits filed in Nevada and federal courts over the blocks by other victims of the conspiracy, to this day the practice has evolved and continues unabated by the powerful group that created the conspiracy so long ago. The real story is the relentless pursuit of Vicky Gallas by powerful people with so much to lose if the truth were to be exposed.

For anyone fascinated with the foibles of our criminal justice system, the sensational Orlando connection, and how escort services really work, this is a must-read book.]]> 262 Vicky Gallas 1439229244 Rachel 0 to-read 3.80 2009
author: Vicky Gallas
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.80
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]]> 60812620
By investigating the prostitution of women and girls in 49 countries, the Last Girl First! study illustrates prostitution is at the heart of several patterns of domination such as patriarchy, racism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, class domination, war and militarisation & how the latter shape the massive sexual and economic exploitation of the most marginalised in our societies today.

“What is profoundly disturbing to us is that we are highly visible yet ignored, and that there is a real acknowledgement of poverty and sexism in our countries of origin, yet, we’re described by academics as “migrant sex workers�. It is disturbing that there is some kind of liberal sympathy for Asian women. There is also a much stronger force that is very determined to confirm that the situation we are in -the sexism, the stereotyping, the violence that is committed against us- is our purpose. Even among people that might be our natural allies there is a real determination to have us remain subordinate.�

� Suzanne Jay, Asian Women for Equality]]> CAP International 2958218805 Rachel 0 to-read 4.50 2022
author: CAP International
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.50
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]]> 24886513
"This revealing, moving, and often surprising collection lets you go deep inside the lives of generations of porn stars and explicit performers. It’s an absolute must-read for anyone interested in sex industry politics, sex-positive culture, and porn studies � and for anyone whose friend, lover, or family member has taken their pants off in front of a camera. One after the other, these memoirs add up to a powerful, if ironic, conclusion: Porn stigma is the biggest problem many adult performers face, and it is at least as likely to come from our feminist moms as from prudish conservatives. Once you’ve heard the clear, articulate voices of these porn stars, you’ll never look at a sex movie, or the people who make it happen, the same way again."
� Carol Queen, PhD and author of Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture]]> 320 Jiz Lee 0990557162 Rachel 0 to-read 4.02 2015
author: Jiz Lee
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.02
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]]> 1972100
Prostitutes, strippers, and adult film stars put themselves, and what they do for a living, out on the street, stage, and TV screen every day, but they often keep their working lives hidden from friends, family, and other employers. They do this because sex work is widely considered illegal, unhealthy, and immoral.

Edited by Annie Oakley, Working Sex, New Voices from a Changing Industry features stories and contributions from sex workers—strippers, prostitutes, domes, film stars, phone sex operators, and internet models—who are speaking out. This provocative anthology showcases voices from a vibrant community intent on unmasking the jobs they do with dignity and pride.

Contributors tackling issues of class, gender, race, labor, and sexuality with blazing insight and critical observations include Michelle Tea, Stephen Elliot, Nomy Lamm, Ana Voog, Vaginal Davis, and Mirha-Soleil Ross.]]> 304 Annie Oakley 1580052258 Rachel 0 to-read 3.79 2007
author: Annie Oakley
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2007
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]]> 6009778
Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys is a collection of short memoirs, rants, confessions, nightmares, journalism, and poetry covering life, love, work, family, and yes, sex. The editors gather pieces from the world of industrial sex, including contributions from art-porn priestess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, best-selling memoirist David Henry Sterry (Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent), sex activist and musical diva Candye Kane, women and men right off the streets, girls participating in the first-ever National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth, and Ruth Morgan Thomas, one of the organizers of the European Sex Work, Human Rights, and Migration Conference.

Sex is a billion-dollar industry. Meet the real people who are its flesh and blood.
]]> 333 David Henry Sterry 1593762410 Rachel 0 to-read 3.73 2009
author: David Henry Sterry
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.73
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]]> 36424668
In some places, like New York, selling sex is illegal. In others, like Sweden, only buying it is. In some, like the UK and France, it's legal to sell sex and to buy it, but not to run a brothel or solicit a sale. In New Zealand, it's not illegal at all. In What Do Sex Workers Want?, Juno Mac and Molly Smith - both sex workers - explain what each of these laws do in practice to those doing the work. Addressing each model in turn, they show that prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to.]]> 278 Molly Smith 1786633604 Rachel 0 to-read 4.61 2018
author: Molly Smith
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.61
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]]> 199797924
In her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women’s studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results.

Shane uses her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions. As she takes stock of her relationships—with clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husband—she tells a candid and haunting tale of love, marriage, and (in)fidelity, as seen through the eyes of the perpetual “other woman.�

Braiding the personal and the universal, Shane’s memoir is a merciless and moving love letter to straight men and an indictment of habitual dishonesty, a condemnation of every social constraint acting on heterosexual unions, and a hopeful affirmation of the possibility for true connection between men and women.]]> 192 Charlotte Shane 1982126868 Rachel 0 to-read 3.18 2024
author: Charlotte Shane
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.18
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]]> 202716369 304 Elizabeth Chiarello 0691224773 Rachel 0 to-read 4.09
author: Elizabeth Chiarello
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.09
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]]> 108428
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.]]> 128 Angela Y. Davis 1583225811 Rachel 0 to-read 4.53 2003
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.53
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]]> 48856329
Named after the Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas, the movement's journey through the fractious and sectarian world of mid-20th century revolutionary socialism was unique. Although at times significant, Posadas' movement was ultimately a failure. As it disintegrated, it increasingly grew to resemble a bizarre cult, detached from the working class it sought to liberate. The renewed interest in Posadism today - especially for its more outlandish fixations - speaks to both a cynicism towards the past and nostalgia for the earnest belief that a better world is possible.

Drawing on considerable archival research, and numerous interviews with ex- and current Posadists, I Want to Believe tells the fascinating story of this most unusual socialist movement and considers why it continues to capture the imaginations of leftists today.]]> 272 A.M. Gittlitz 0745340768 Rachel 0 to-read 3.84 2020
author: A.M. Gittlitz
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
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]]> 60310691 A lively tour through the history of US cemeteries that explores how, where, and why we bury our dead

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born ˛Ń±đ±ô±ąľ±±ô±ô±đ’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead.

˛Ń±đ±ô±ąľ±±ô±ô±đ’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it. Cemeteries have given birth to landscape architecture and famous parks, as well as influenced architectural styles. They’ve inspired and motivated some of our greatest poets and authors—Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. They’ve been used as political tools to shift the country’s discourse and as important symbols of the United States' ambition and reach.

But they are changing and fading. Embalming and burial is incredibly toxic, and while cremations have just recently surpassed burials in popularity, they’re not great for the environment either. Over My Dead Body explores everything—history, sustainability, land use, and more—and what it really means to memorialize.

Locales visited in Over My Dead Body
Shawsheen Cemetery � Bedford, Massachusetts
The 1607 Burial Ground � Historic Jamestowne, Virginia
Burial Hill � Plymouth, Massachusetts
Colonial Jewish Burial Ground � Newport, Rhode Island
Monticello’s African American Graveyard � Charlottesville, Virginia
Mount Auburn Cemetery � Cambridge, Massachusetts
Green-Wood Cemetery � Brooklyn, New York
Laurel Grove Cemetery � Savannah, Georgia
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery � Concord, Massachusetts
Central Park � New York, New York
Gettysburg National Cemetery � Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Arlington National Cemetery � Arlington, Virginia
Woodlawn Cemetery � Bronx, New York
Boothill Graveyard � Tombhill, Arizona
Forest Lawn Memorial-Park � Glenwood, California
The Chapel of the Chimes � Oakland, California
Hollywood Forever Cemetery � Los Angeles, California
Nature's Sanctuary � Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]]> 272 Greg Melville 1419754858 Rachel 0 to-read 3.96 2022
author: Greg Melville
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.96
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]]> 107273
In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost scriptures"--including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin brother--to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox Christians"--those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief--and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame.

Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail.]]> 294 Bart D. Ehrman 0195182499 Rachel 0 to-read 4.06 2002
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2002
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]]> 58803154
Journalist Stephanie Guyer-Stevens and anthropologist Françoise Pommaret traveled to the Himalayas to meet seven living Bhutanese female shamans and to help make their stories known. Stephanie and Françoise offer an intimate narrative of these shamans� spiritual experiences and important roles in society. This book also provides an overview of the history of this tradition and a translation of an autobiography of the famous eighteenth-century divine messenger, Sangay Choezom. This insightful and sensitive account is a rare look inside the world of these brave women.]]> 189 Stephanie Guyer-Stevens 1611809185 Rachel 0 to-read 3.69
author: Stephanie Guyer-Stevens
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.69
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]]> 60098288 From the notorious Lizzie Borden to the innumerable, haunted rooms of Sarah Winchester's mysterious mansion this offbeat, insightful, first-ever book of its kind explores the history behind America's female ghosts, the stereotypes, myths, and paranormal tales that swirl around them, what their stories reveal about us--and why they haunt us...

Sorrowful widows, vengeful jezebels, innocent maidens, wronged lovers, former slaves, even the occasional axe-murderess--America's female ghosts differ widely in background, class, and circumstance. Yet one thing unites them: their ability to instill fascination and fear, long after their deaths. Here are the full stories behind some of the best-known among them, as well as the lesser-known--though no less powerful.

Tales whispered in darkness often divulge more about the teller than the subject. America's most famous female ghosts, like New Orleans voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, and Bridget Bishop, the first person executed during the Salem witchcraft trials, mirror each era's fears and prejudices. Yet through urban legends and campfire stories, even ghosts like the nameless hard-working women lost in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire --achieve a measure of power and agency in death, in ways unavailable to them as living women.

Riveting for skeptics and believers alike, with humor, curiosity, and expertise, A Haunted History of Invisible Women offers a unique lens on the significant role these ghostly legends play both within the spook-seeking corners of our minds and in the consciousness of a nation.

Foreword by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Linda D. Addison]]> 368 Leanna Renee Hieber 080654158X Rachel 0 to-read 3.67 2022
author: Leanna Renee Hieber
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.67
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]]> 59894057
Get to the heart of the unexplainable in Adam’s third addition to the “llustrated History� series filled with private seances and ectoplasm to spiritual mediums and spirit photography galore. Fans of conspiracy and strange phenomena will transport themselves across the centuries through diagrammatic illustrations paired with well-researched facts about exorcism, mediums, ghost photos, talking boards, and connections to after life.

Whether you are a ghost fanatic or simply piqued by curiosity, you’ll get a robust deep dive into the experiences of paranormal occurrences, alternative explanations for these occurrences, and our culture’s fascination with them. Prepare to embark on a strange journey that allows skeptical inquiry, or perhaps the possibility of believing in the afterlife!]]> 128 Adam Allsuch Boardman 1913123073 Rachel 0 to-read 3.89
author: Adam Allsuch Boardman
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.89
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]]> 60041102 Two teens. Two diaries. Two social panics. One incredible fraud.

In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD's fearsome reputation, fueling support for the War on Drugs. Five million copies later, Go Ask Alice remains a divisive bestseller, outraging censors and earning new fans, all of them drawn by the book's mythic premise: A Real Diary, by Anonymous.

But Alice was only the beginning.

In 1979, another diary rattled the culture, setting the stage for a national meltdown. The posthumous memoir of an alleged teenage Satanist, Jay's Journal merged with a frightening new crisis—adolescent suicide—to create a literal witch hunt, shattering countless lives and poisoning whole communities.

In reality, Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal came from the same dark place: Beatrice Sparks, a serial con artist who betrayed a grieving family, stole a dead boy's memory, and lied her way to the National Book Awards.

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries is a true story of contagious deception. It stretches from Hollywood to Quantico, and passes through a tiny patch of Utah nicknamed "the fraud capital of America." It's the story of a doomed romance and a vengeful celebrity. Of a lazy press and a public mob. Of two suicidal teenagers, and their exploitation by a literary vampire.

Unmask Alice . . . where truth is stranger than nonfiction.]]> 349 Rick Emerson 1637740425 Rachel 0 to-read 3.93 2022
author: Rick Emerson
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.93
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]]> 57340678 260 Will Sommer 0063114488 Rachel 0 to-read 4.06 2023
author: Will Sommer
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
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]]> 6101996 New York Times bestseller Misquoting Jesus left off, Jesus, Interrupted addresses the larger issue of what the New Testament actually teaches—and it's not what most people think. Here Ehrman reveals what scholars have unearthed:
•The authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was and how salvation works
•The New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later
•Jesus, Paul, Matthew and John all represented fundamentally different religions
•Established Christian doctrines—such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus and the trinity—were the inventions of still later theologians
These aren't idiosyncratic perspectives of just one scholar. They've been the standard widespread views of scholars across a full spectrum of denominations and traditions. Why is it most people have never heard such things? This is the book that pastors, educators and anyone interested in the Bible have been waiting for—a compelling account of the central challenges faced when attempting to reconstruct Jesus' life and message.]]> 304 Bart D. Ehrman 0061173932 Rachel 0 to-read 3.95 2009
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.95
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]]> 112975131
For millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom—a land set apart, a nation uniquely blessed, a people in special covenant with God. This love of country, however, has given way to right-wing nationalist fervor, a reckless blood-and-soil idolatry thatĚýtrivializes the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Alberta retraces the arc of the modern evangelical movement, placing political and cultural inflection points in the context of church teachings and traditions, explaining how Donald Trump's presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated historical trends that long pointed toward disaster. Reporting from half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only convention halls across the country, the author documents a growing fracture inside American Christianity and journeys with readers through this strange new environment in which loving your enemies is "woke" and owning the libs is the answer to WWJD.

Accessing the highest echelons of the American evangelical movement, Alberta investigates the ways in which conservative Christians have pursued, exercised, and often abused power in the name of securing this earthly kingdom. He highlights the battles evangelicals are fighting—and the weapons of their warfare—to demonstrate the disconnect from Contra the dictates of the New Testament, today's believers are struggling mightily against flesh and blood, eyes fixed on the here and now, desperate for a power that is frivolous and fleeting. Lingering at the intersection of real cultural displacement and perceived religious persecution, Alberta portrays a rapidly secularizing America that has come to distrust the evangelical church, and weaves together present-day narratives of individual pastors and their churches as they confront the twin challenges of lost status and diminished standing.

Sifting through the wreckage—pastors broken, congregations battered, believers losing their religion because of sex scandals and political schemes—Alberta If the American evangelical movement has ceased to glorify God, what is its purpose?]]> 506 Tim Alberta 006322688X Rachel 0 to-read 4.42 2023
author: Tim Alberta
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.42
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]]> 50793705 A New York Times bestselling historian of early Christianity takes on two of the most gripping questions of human existence: where did the ideas of heaven and hell come from, and why do they endure?

What happens when we die? A recent Pew Research poll showed that 72% of Americans believe in a literal heaven, 58% in a literal hell. Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. But eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught.

So where did the ideas come from?

In clear and compelling terms, Bart Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. Some of these accounts take the form of near death experiences, the oldest on record, with intriguing similarities to those reported today.

One of Ehrman’s startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but numerous competing views. Moreover, these views did not come from nowhere; they were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. Only later, in the early Christian centuries, did they develop into the notions of eternal bliss or damnation widely accepted today.

As a historian, Ehrman obviously cannot provide a definitive answer to the question of what happens after death. In Heaven and Hell, he does the next best thing: by helping us reflect on where our ideas of the afterlife come from, he assures us that even if there may be something to hope for when we die, there is certainly nothing to fear.]]> 327 Bart D. Ehrman 1501136739 Rachel 0 to-read 4.01 2020
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.01
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]]> 34466869 The “marvelous� (Reza Aslan, bestselling author of Zealot), New York Times bestselling story of how Christianity became the dominant religion in the West.

How did a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries? In The Triumph of Christianity, early Christian historian Bart D. Ehrman weaves the rigorously-researched answer to this question “into a vivid, nuanced, and enormously readable narrative� (Elaine Pagels, National Book Award-winning author of The Gnostic Gospels), showing how a handful of charismatic characters used a brilliant social strategy and an irresistible message to win over hearts and minds one at a time.

This “humane, thoughtful and intelligent� book (The New York Times Book Review) upends the way we think about the single most important cultural transformation our world has ever seen—one that revolutionized art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics, economics, and law.]]> Bart D. Ehrman 1508238332 Rachel 0 to-read 3.89 2018
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.89
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]]> 25816892 326 Bart D. Ehrman 0062285203 Rachel 0 to-read 3.88 2016
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
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]]> 34324525
Often seen as the author of timeless Christian theology, Paul himself heatedly maintained that he lived and worked in history’s closing hours. His letters propel his readers into two ancient worlds, one Jewish, one pagan. The first was incandescent with apocalyptic hopes, expecting God through his messiah to fulfill his ancient promises of redemption to Israel. The second teemed with ancient actors, not only human but also angry superhuman forces, jealous demons, and hostile cosmic gods. Both worlds are Paul’s, and his convictions about the first shaped his actions in the second.
Ěý
Only by situating Paul within this charged social context of gods and humans, pagans and Jews, cities, synagogues, and competing Christ-following assemblies can we begin to understand his mission and message. This original and provocative book offers a dramatically new perspective on one of history’s seminal figures.]]> 336 Paula Fredriksen 0300225881 Rachel 0 to-read 3.97
author: Paula Fredriksen
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.97
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]]> 71327434
The Bible is full of giants tromp through the land of milk and honey; Leviathan swims through the wine-dark sea. What we often believe is that God reliably vanquishes the monsters and protects us from harm. But when we look closer, we find that most of these monsters aren't God's opponents--they are God's entourage. These shape-shifters, boundary crossers, and hybrid creatures often act with stunning brutality, all in God's employ. In fact, every type of peculiar being in God's company threatens, injures, tortures, or kills on behalf of the divine will. And each type of monster reflects a facet of God's own monstrosity.

Confronting God's monsters--and the God-monster--may be uncomfortable, but the Bible is richer for their presence. The biblical writers' unflinching depictions of the monstrous God create space for our own grief, anger, dissatisfaction, and protest. God's Monsters invites us to wrestle honestly and rigorously with the monstrosity of the biblical God, perhaps to discover that if God can be held accountable, so too can those in God's entourage.]]> 304 Esther J. Hamori 1506486339 Rachel 0 to-read 4.01
author: Esther J. Hamori
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]]> 8713068 Bart D. Ehrman, the New York Times bestselling author of Jesus, Interrupted and God’s Problem reveals which books in the Bible’s New Testament were not passed down by Jesus’s disciples, but were instead forged by other hands—and why this centuries-hidden scandal is far more significant than many scholars are willing to admit. A controversial work of historical reporting in the tradition of Elaine Pagels, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan, Ehrman’s Forged delivers a stunning explication of one of the most substantial—yet least discussed—problems confronting the world of biblical scholarship.

]]> 307 Bart D. Ehrman 0062012614 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00 2011
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 20149192
The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief that looked very different in the fourth century than it did in the first.

A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.

Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.]]> 416 Bart D. Ehrman Rachel 0 to-read 4.05 2014
author: Bart D. Ehrman
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.05
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]]> 198563770
America runs on women—women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force , acclaimed Sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo.

Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic; a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals. Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies.

Tracing present-day policies back to their roots, Calarco reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country’s social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. She leads us to see women's labor as the reason we've gone so long without the support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how women’s work maintains the illusion that we don't need a net.

Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.]]> 336 Jessica Calarco 0593538129 Rachel 0 to-read 4.21 2024
author: Jessica Calarco
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average rating: 4.21
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]]> 57570035 A richly illustrated history of the Gothic across a wide range of media, including architecture, literature, and film

The word Gothic conjures associations with the dark and melancholy, the weird and feared, and haunted places and people. In Gothic, Roger Luckhurst offers readers an unprecedented look at the ways this uncanny style has manifested itself through architecture, literature, film, art, video games, and more. From the works of Victor Hugo and E. T. A. Hoffmann to Southern Gothic, ancient folklore, and classic horror movies, Luckhurst explores how an aesthetic that began in the margins has been reinvented through the centuries to become part of mainstream global culture.

Organizing his wide-ranging history by theme, Luckhurst begins with Gothic architecture and form, including such elements as the arch, the house, and ruins. He considers how the Gothic is depicted in rural and urban settings, as well as in the wilderness and borderlands. And he delves into Gothic traditions and settings around the world, from the sublime Alps and Australian outback to the Arctic wasteland, from the dark folkloric realm of the forest to the postindustrial landscapes of abandoned hospitals and asylums, and then beyond the bounds of the planet to unknowable cosmic horror. Luckhurst investigates the monsters that mirror ourselves and society, and demonstrates that as the Gothic has traveled across the globe and through time, it has morphed according to the shape of our changing fears and anxieties.

Filled with a wealth of color illustrations, Gothic will enthrall anyone yearning to lift the veil on our fascination with the eerie, morbid, and supernatural.]]> 288 Roger Luckhurst 0691229163 Rachel 0 to-read 4.29 2021
author: Roger Luckhurst
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.29
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]]> 126918628 A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.

With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections and the upcoming decision in Brackeen v. Haaland likely to revoke the Indian Child Welfare Act, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard as a response to this moment.]]> 311 Gretchen Sisson 1250286786 Rachel 0 to-read 4.37 2024
author: Gretchen Sisson
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.37
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]]> 177185884
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potter’s fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?

In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will.

The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew. These ceremonies, springing up across the country, reaffirm our shared humanity and help mend our frayed social fabric.

Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, The Unclaimed urges us to expand our circle of caring—in death and in life.]]> 336 Pamela Prickett 0593239059 Rachel 0 to-read 4.02 2024
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name: Rachel
average rating: 4.02
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]]> 145624768
"It was not the Baby BoomersĚýwho ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." Far from the repressedĚýtraditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated.ĚýAmerican physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s missionĚýto reshape humanityĚýthrough a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocksĚýan untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, andĚýthe founders of the Information Age.

As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New GuineaĚýto the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story forĚýpsychedelic science emerges.]]> 384 Benjamin Breen 1538722372 Rachel 0 to-read 3.84 2024
author: Benjamin Breen
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.84
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]]> 176443714
We’ve all heard of Amway, Mary Kay, Tupperware, and LuLaRoe, but few know the nefarious way they and countless other multilevel marketing (MLM) companies prey on desperate Americans struggling to make ends meet.

When factories close, stalwart industries shutter, and blue-collar opportunities evaporate, MLMs are there, ready to pounce on the crumbling American Dream. MLMs thrive in rural areas and on military bases, targeting women with promises of being their own boss and millions of dollars in easy income—even at the risk of their entire life savings. But the vast majority�99.7%—of those who join an MLM make no money or lose money, and wind up stuck with inventory they can’t sell to recoup their losses.

Featuring in-depth reporting and intimate research, Selling the Dream reveals how these companies—often owned by political and corporate elites, such as the Devos and the Van Andels families—have made a windfall in profit off of the desperation of the American working class.]]> 320 Jane Marie 1982155779 Rachel 0 3.75 2024
author: Jane Marie
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.75
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]]> 216655033 A clinical psychologist who regularly deals with some of society's most vulnerable exposes and debunks the predatory pseudoscience and grift of the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry and points us towards a better way to take care of our mental health.

Can the unbroken gaze of a lone man on a stage in front of hundreds of people truly alleviate their mental distress? Can Berlin Wall pills or a coffee enema cure depression? Can we improve our mental health with past-life regression therapy, cold-water shock therapy, rebirthing therapy? Wellness grifters and alternative-health snake oil salesmen are everywhere these days, and when our medical systems are under stress (and we are, too!) these costly purveyors of false hope are worse than a waste of money—they can lead us to delay badly needed care from real professionals, exacerbate our conditions and, in the most tragic of cases, even kill us.
Ěý Ěý Today, people looking to care for their mental health face a market with at least 600 “brandsâ€� of psychotherapy—and counting. Most are ineffective, and many could be harmful. There exist countless unregulated providers of mental health services in the $5.6 trillion USD wellness industry and alternative medicine community looking to exploit people’s financial and emotional vulnerabilities. The world of mental healthcare is very much caveat buyer beware.
Ěý Ěý Having seen so many of his patients hurt by the pseudoscience circulating in the industry, Dr. Jonathan N. Stea is on a mission to expose its harm and protect the public from mental health misinformation. In a landscape of rampant burnout and at a time when mental health concerns are at a fever pitch, Mind the Science provides hope and real information to those who have been touched by mental illness, have been misled by false marketing, or are simply curious about the relationship between science and mental health.]]> 264 Jonathan N. Stea 1039008232 Rachel 0 to-read 4.13
author: Jonathan N. Stea
name: Rachel
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]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Rachel 0 to-read 4.21 2023
author: Naomi Klein
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.21
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]]> 62653934 384 Derek Beres 1039005535 Rachel 0 to-read 4.02
author: Derek Beres
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]]> 195790601
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.� Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con� right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk� took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals� whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.]]> 432 John Ganz 0374605440 Rachel 0 to-read 4.09 2024
author: John Ganz
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.09
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]]> 207567756 An investigation into the rise of the Christian right over the last half-century that lays out the grim vision Evangelicals are enforcing on our democracy.

All across America, a storm is gathering: from book bans in school libraries to anti-trans laws in state legislatures; firebombings of abortion clinics and protests against gay rights. The Christian Right, a cunning political force in America for more than half a century, has never been more powerful than it is right now—it propelled Donald Trump to power, and it won’t stop until it’s refashioned America in its own image.

In Wild Faith, critically acclaimed author Talia Lavin goes deep into what motivates the Christian Right, from its segregationist past to a future riddled with apocalyptic ideology.

Using primary sources and firsthand accounts, Lavin introduces you to “deliverance ministers� who carry out exorcisms by the hundreds; modern-day, self-proclaimed prophets and apostles; Christian militias, cults, zealots, and showmen; and the people in power who are aiding them to achieve their goals.

Along the way, she explores anti-abortion terrorists, the Christian Patriarchy movement, with its desire to place all women under absolute male control; the twisted theology that leads to rampant child abuse; and the ways conspiracy theorists and extremist Christians influence each other to mutual political benefit.

From school boards to the Supreme Court, Christian theocracy is ascendant in America—and only through exploring its motivations and impacts can we understand the crisis we face. In Wild Faith, Lavin fearlessly confronts whether our democracy can survive an organized, fervent theocratic movement, one that seeks to impose its religious beliefs on American citizens.]]> 304 Talia Lavin 0306829193 Rachel 0 to-read 4.26
author: Talia Lavin
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.26
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]]> 194803883 The riveting story of five families shattered by pernicious, pervasive conspiracy theories, and how we might set ourselves free from a crisis that could haunt American life for generations.

“SHED MY DNA�: three excruciating words uttered by a QAnon-obsessed mother, once a highly respected lawyer, to her only son, once the closest person in her life. QAnon beliefs and adjacent conspiracy theories have had devastating political consequences as they’ve exploded in popularity. What’s often overlooked is the lasting havoc they wreak on our society at its most basic and intimate level—the family.

In The Quiet Damage, celebrated reporter Jesselyn Cook paints a harrowing portrait of the vulnerabilities that have left so many of us susceptible to outrageous falsehoods promising order, purpose, and control. Braided throughout are the stories of five American families: an elderly couple whose fifty-year romance takes a heartbreaking turn; millennial sisters of color who grew up in dire poverty—one to become a BLM activist, the other, a hardcore conspiracy theorist pulling her little boy down the rabbit hole with her; a Bay Area hippie-type and her business-executive fiancé, who must decide whether to stay with her as she turns into a stranger before his eyes; evangelical parents whose simple life in a sleepy suburb spirals into delusion-fueled chaos; and a rural mother-son duo who, after carrying each other through unspeakable tragedy, stop speaking at all as ludicrous untruths shatter a bond long thought unbreakable.

Charting the arc of each believer’s path from their first intersection with conspiracy theories to the depths of their cultish conviction, to—in some cases—their rejection of disinformation and the mending of fractured relationships, Cook offers a rare, intimate look into the psychology of how and why ordinary people come to believe the unbelievable. Profound, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written, The Quiet Damage lays bare how we have been taken hostage by grifters peddling lies built on false hope—and how we might release our loved ones, and ourselves, from their grasp.]]> 250 Jesselyn Cook 059344325X Rachel 0 to-read 4.47 2024
author: Jesselyn Cook
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.47
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]]> 12552598 The Invention of the White Race, Allen details the creation of the "white race" by the ruling class as a method of social control, in response to labor unrest precipitated by Bacon's Rebellion. Distinguishing European Americans from African Americans within the laboring class, white privileges enforced the myth of the white race through the years and has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over the entire working class.

Since publication in the mid-nineties, Invention has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. Volume One utilizes Irish history to show the relativity of race and racial oppression as a form of social control. Volume Two details the development of racial oppression and racial slavery in colonial Virginia and, more broadly, Anglo-America. A new introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry discusses Allen's contributions, critical reception and continuing importance.]]> 758 Theodore W. Allen 1844677710 Rachel 0 to-read 4.30 1975
author: Theodore W. Allen
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1975
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]]> 58999173
In The Colony, bestselling investigative journalist Sally Denton picks up where the initial, incomplete reporting on the attacks ended, and delves into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their homestead—Colonia LeBaron—is a portal into the past, a place that offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an arid and dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with smartphones and machine guns. Rooting her narrative in written sources as well as interviews with anonymous women from LeBaron itself, Denton unfolds an epic, disturbing tale that spans the first polygamist emigrations to Mexico through the LeBarons� internal blood feud in the 1970s—started by Ervil LeBaron, known as the “Mormon Manson”—and up to the family’s recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader, Keith Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he witnessed in Colonia LeBaron.

A descendant of polygamist Mormons herself, Denton explores what drove so many women over generations to join or remain in a community based on male supremacy and female servitude. Then and now, these women of Zion found themselves in an isolated desert, navigating the often-mysterious complications of plural marriage—and supported, Denton shows, only by one another.

A mesmerizing feat of investigative journalism, The Colony doubles as an unforgettable account of sisterhood that can flourish in polygamist communities, against the odds.]]> 288 Sally Denton 163149807X Rachel 0 to-read 3.44 2022
author: Sally Denton
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.44
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]]> 59227926 From a historian and senior editor atĚýAtlas Obscura,Ěýa fascinating account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms. For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one reason to take the train all the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, one sure to garner disapproval from fellow passengers. On the American frontier, the new state offered a tempting freedom often difficult to obtain elsewhere: divorce.

With the laxest divorce laws in the country, five railroad lines, and the finest hotel for hundreds of miles, the small city became the unexpected headquarters for unhappy spouses—infamous around the world as The Divorce Colony. These society divorcees put Sioux Falls at the center of a heated national debate over the future of American marriage. As clashes mounted in the country's gossip columns, church halls, courtrooms and even the White House, the women caught in the crosshairs in Sioux Falls geared up for a fight they didn't go looking for, a fight that was the only path to their freedom.

In The Divorce Colony, writer and historian April White unveils the incredible social, political, and personal dramas that unfolded in Sioux Falls and reverberated around the country through the stories of four very different women: Maggie De Stuers, a descendent of the influential New York Astors whose divorce captivated the world; Mary Nevins Blaine, a daughter-in-law to a presidential hopeful with a vendetta against her meddling mother-in-law; Blanche Molineux, an aspiring actress escaping a husband she believed to be a murderer; and Flora Bigelow Dodge, a vivacious woman determined, against all odds, to obtain a "dignified" divorce.

Entertaining, enlightening, and utterly feminist, The Divorce Colony is a rich, deeply researched tapestry of social history and human drama that reads like a novel. Amidst salacious newspaper headlines, juicy court documents, and high-profile cameos from the era's most well-known players, this story lays bare the journey of the turn-of-the-century socialites who took their lives into their own hands and reshaped the country's attitudes about marriage and divorce.]]> 304 April White 0306827662 Rachel 0 to-read 3.52 2022
author: April White
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
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]]> 114095943
On Incel Island, somebody’s about to get laid…to rest.]]> 95 Margaret Killjoy 195891102X Rachel 0 to-read 3.86 2023
author: Margaret Killjoy
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/17
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]]> 575350 476 Yuri Slezkine 0801481783 Rachel 0 to-read 3.95 1994
author: Yuri Slezkine
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/17
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]]> 262303

In response to these and other questions, Sex after Fascism fundamentally reconceives central topics in twentieth-century German history. Among other things, it changes the way we understand the immense popular appeal of the Nazi regime and the nature of antisemitism, the role of Christianity in the consolidation of postfascist conservatism in the West, the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s-1970s, as well as the negotiations between government and citizenry under East German communism. Beginning with a new interpretation of the Third Reich's sexual politics and ending with the revisions of Germany's past facilitated by communism's collapse, Sex after Fascism examines the intimately intertwined histories of capitalism and communism, pleasure and state policies, religious renewal and secularizing trends.


A history of sexual attitudes and practices in twentieth-century Germany, investigating such issues as contraception, pornography, and theories of sexual orientation, Sex after Fascism also demonstrates how Germans made sexuality a key site for managing the memory and legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.]]> 368 Dagmar Herzog 0691130396 Rachel 0 to-read 4.09 2005
author: Dagmar Herzog
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/17
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]]> 25851489 129 Patricia M. Salmon 1625847688 Rachel 0 to-read 3.66 2013
author: Patricia M. Salmon
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> 55867888
FromĚýNew York TimesĚýbestselling author Sam Kean comes the gripping, untold history of science's darkest secrets, “a fascinating book [that]Ěýdeserves a wide audienceâ€� (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Science is a force for good in the world—at least usually. But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—no matter the cost. Bestselling author Sam Kean tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process.

The Icepick Surgeon masterfully guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra’s dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison’s mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren’t all safely buried in the past. Many of them, Kean reminds us, still affect us today. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to current vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care. Kean even takes us into the future, when advanced computers and genetic engineering could unleash whole new ways to do one anotherĚýwrong.

Unflinching, and exhilarating to the last page, The Icepick Surgeon fuses the drama of scientific discovery with the illicit thrill of a true-crime tale. With his trademark wit and precision, Kean shows that, while science has done more good than harm in the world, rogue scientists do exist, and when we sacrifice morals for progress, we often end up with neither.]]> 368 Sam Kean 0316496502 Rachel 0 to-read 4.01 2021
author: Sam Kean
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
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British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" - from the railways to the rule of law - was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialization and the destruction of its textile industry.

In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy.]]> 360 Shashi Tharoor 938306465X Rachel 0 to-read 4.17 2016
author: Shashi Tharoor
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
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