Beacon Broadside

E-Book Suggestions: Our Most Popular of 2012

Did you unwrap an e-reader this holiday season? Or did you treat yourself to one? (Don't worry, we won't judge.) Here are Beacon's most popular e-book titles for 2012 along with a few suggestions for titles sure to be on next year's bestseller list. Download one or two and see why they've inspired people to click and read.  

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword. Online Teacher's Guide

At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.

"One of the great books of our time." 
—Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People

"One of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought in the last fifty years."
—Carl R. Rogers (1959)

 

Kindred by Octavia Butler 

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

Read the first two chapters on Scribd.

View the reading group guide: HTML or PDF. 

View the discussion guide for UU communities: HTML or PDF.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

"Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact . . . the novel one returns to, again and again."
—Harlan Ellison

"One cannot finish Kindred without feeling changed. It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now." 
—Sam Frank, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

"In Kindred, Octavia Butler creates a road for the impossible and a balm for the unbearable. It is everything the literature of science fiction can be." 
—Walter Mosley

 

The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

In this beautiful and lucid guide, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh offers gentle anecdotes and practical exercise as a means of learning the skills of mindfulness--being awake and fully aware. From washing the dishes to answering the phone to peeling an orange, he reminds us that each moment holds within it an opportunity to work toward greater self-understanding and peacefulness.

"Thich Nhat Hanh's ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"He has immense presence and both personal and Buddhist authority. If there is a candidate for 'Living Buddha' on earth today, it is Thich Nhat Hanh."
-Roshi Richard Baker, author of Original Mind: The Practice of Zen in the West

 

All Souls by: A Family Story from Southie Michael Patrick MacDonald

Kindle | Nook | Apple iBookstore

View the teachers' guide: PDF or HTML

View the readers' guide: HTML or community guide:PDF

A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald's Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. 

 

The Cure for Everything! Untangling Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness, and Happiness by Timothy Caulfield

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

Read an excerpt on Scribd

In The Cure for Everything, health-policy expert and fitness enthusiast Timothy Caulfield debunks the mythologies of the one-step health crazes, reveals the truths behind misleading data, and discredits the charlatans in a quest to sort out real, reliable health advice. He takes us along as he navigates the maze of facts, findings, and fears associated with emerging health technologies, drugs, and disease-prevention strategies, and he presents an impressively researched, accessible take on the production and spread of information in the health sciences.

 

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz, and Dr. Steven Woloshin

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

Read an exerpt on Scribd

Drawing on twenty-five years of medical practice and research, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and his colleagues, Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz and Dr. Steven Woloshin, have studied the effects of screenings and presumed preventative measures for disease and "pre-disease." Welch argues that while many Americans believe that more diagnosis is always better, the medical, social, and economic ramifications of unnecessary diagnoses are in fact seriously detrimental. Unnecessary surgeries, medication side effects, debilitating anxiety, and the overwhelming price tag on health care are only a few of the potential harms of overdiagnosis. 

 

Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels by Hella Winston

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

When Hella Winston began talking with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn for her doctoral dissertation in sociology, she was surprised to be covertly introduced to Hasidim unhappy with their highly restrictive way of life and sometimes desperately struggling to escape it. Unchosen tells the stories of these "rebel" Hasidim, serious questioners who long for greater personal and intellectual freedom than their communities allow. In her new Preface, Winston discusses the passionate reactions the book has elicited among Hasidim and non-Hasidim alike.

"Winston . . . builds fascinating case studies, inviting readers into her interviewees' conflicted, and often painful, lives . . . show[ing] us a Hasidic underworld where large families and a lack of secular education have resulted in extreme poverty and some serious at-risk behavior among youth. Her story of courage and intellectual rebellion will inspire anyone who has ever felt like a religious outcast." 
-Publishers Weekly, starred review

 

Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo

Kindle | Nook | Apple iBookstore

Read an excerpt. 

Readers' Guide for Dark Tide

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters was playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window-"Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!"

A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour. It demolished wooden homes, even the brick fire station. The number of dead wasn't known for days. It would be years before a landmark court battle determined who was responsible for the disaster.

 

Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish by Joe Mackall

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

Joe Mackall has lived surrounded by the Swartzentruber Amish community of Ashland County, Ohio, for over sixteen years. They are the most traditional and insular of all the Amish sects: the Swartzentrubers live without gas, electricity, or indoor plumbing; without lights on their buggies or cushioned chairs in their homes; and without rumspringa, the recently popularized "running-around time" that some Amish sects allow their sixteen-year-olds.

Over the years, Mackall has developed a steady relationship with the Shetler family (Samuel and Mary, their nine children, and their extended family). Plain Secrets tells the Shetlers' story over these years, using their lives to paint a portrait of Swartzentruber Amish life and mores. During this time, Samuel's nephew Jonas finally rejects the strictures of the Amish way of life for good, after two failed attempts to leave, and his bright young daughter reaches the end of school for Amish children: the eighth grade. But Plain Secrets is also the story of the unusual friendship between Samuel and Joe. Samuel is quietly bemused—and, one suspects, secretly delighted—at Joe's ignorance of crops and planting, carpentry and cattle. He knows Joe is planning to write a book about the family, and yet he allows him a glimpse of the tensions inside this intensely private community. 

 

A Queer and Pleasant Danger

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

Read an excerpt on Scribd

“I was born male and now I’ve got medical and government documents that say I’m female—but I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man. . . .”

Scientologist, husband and father, tranny, sailor, slave, playwright, dyke, gender outlaw—these are just a few words which have defined Kate Bornstein during her extraordinary life. For the first time, it all comes together inA Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kate Bornstein’s stunningly original memoir that’s set to change lives and enrapture readers.

Wickedly funny and disarmingly honest, this is Bornstein’s most intimate book yet. With wisdom, wit, and an unwavering resolution to tell the truth (“I must not tell lies”), Bornstein shares her story: from a nice Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey to a strappingly handsome lieutenant of the Church of Scientology’s Sea flagship vessel, and later to 1990s Seattle, where she becomes a rising star in the lesbian community. In between there are wives and lovers, heartbreak and triumph, bridges mended and broken, and a journey of self-discovery that will mesmerize readers.

 

The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

Read an excerpt on Scribd

From the time she is nine years old, biking to the farmland outside her suburban home, where she discovers a disquieting world of sleeping cows and a "Private Way" full of the wondrous and creepy creatures of the wild-spiders, deer, moles, chipmunks, and foxes-Lauren Slater finds in animals a refuge from her troubled life. As she matures, her attraction to animals strengthens and grows more complex and compelling even as her family is falling to pieces around her. Slater spends a summer at horse camp, where she witnesses the alternating horrific and loving behavior of her instructor toward the animals in her charge and comes to question the bond that so often develops between females and their equines. Slater's questions follow her to a foster family, her own parents no longer able to care for her. A pet raccoon, rescued from a hole in the wall, teaches her how to feel at home away from home. The two Shiba Inu puppies Slater adopts years later, against her husband's will, grow increasingly important to her as she ages and her family begins to grow. 

The $60,000 Dog is Lauren Slater's intimate manifesto on the unique, invaluable, and often essential contributions animals make to our lives. As a psychologist, a reporter, an amateur naturalist, and above all an enormously gifted writer, she draws us into the stories of her passion for animals that are so much more than pets. She describes her intense love for the animals in her life without apology and argues, finally, that the works of Darwin and other evolutionary biologists prove that, when it comes to worth, animals are equal, and in some senses even superior, to human beings. 

 

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | Apple iBookstore

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in "The Harlem Ghetto" to a sobering "Journey to Atlanta." 

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright's work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise. 

Notes is the book that established Baldwin's voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin's own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American. 

 

Pre-order this title sure to be a hit in 2013

Prairie Silence by Melanie Hoffert

Kindle | Nook | Apple iBookstore

Read an excerpt on Scribd

Melanie Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets. A land where she imagines standing at the bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor; trees are the large alien plants reaching for the light; and the sky is the water’s vast surface, reflecting the sun. Like most rural kids, she followed the out-migration pattern to a better life. The prairie is a hard place to stay—particularly if you are gay, and your home state is the last to know. For Hoffert, returning home has not been easy. When the farmers ask if she’s found a “fella,” rather than explain that—actually—she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject. Meanwhile, as time passes, her hometown continues to lose more buildings to decay, growing to resemble the mouth of an old woman missing teeth. This loss prompts Hoffert to take a break from the city and spend a harvest season at her family’s farm. While home, working alongside her dad in the shop and listening to her mom warn, “Honey, you do not want to be a farmer,” Hoffert meets the people of the prairie. Her stories about returning home and exploring abandoned towns are woven into a coming-of-age tale about falling in love, making peace with faith, and belonging to a place where neighbors are as close as blood but are often unable to share their deepest truths. 

In this evocative memoir, Hoffert offers a deeply personal and poignant meditation on land and community, taking readers on a journey of self-acceptance and reconciliation. 

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Adrienne Rich: 1929-2012

The poet Adrienne Rich died yesterday at the age of 82. We ran this post in 2007 for Jewish Book Month, looking at her poetry through the lens of her Jewish identity. The author is Stephen Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf). We republish it today in memory of Rich and her transformative, challenging, and courageous body of work. 

Photo by Robert Giard

You can find Adrienne Rich in anthologies of Jewish American poetry, but most of her many admirers do not think of her first (if at all) as a Jewish poet: they think of her as a feminist poet, as a political poet, as a GLBT activist, as a talented artificer in traditional metrical forms (during the 1950s) as a maker of  harshly original free verse (during the 1960s), as a woman who challenged herself to overcome "the fact of being separate" (as she put it in the early 1970s) in order to speak to and about other people's needs. Though Rich's father was Jewish (as was her late husband), she did not identify herself with any religion for most of her writing life: in high school, she recalled, "I am quite sure I was seen as Jewish (with a reassuringly gentile mother) in that double vision that bigotry allows." Her ambitious, assimilationist father, however, "did not give me the choice to be a Jew."

Rich's 1982 essay "Split at the Root," from which those sentences come, describes her long-delayed decision to call herself Jewish in print. If you read Rich's poem "Jerusalem" (1966) you will see her view religious heritage as an excuse for violence and a trap: "What I dream of the city," she writes, "is how hard it is to leave." An even earlier poem, "At the Jewish New Year," insisted on Rosh Hashanah that "this day is merely one/ Of thirty in September," and that "whatever we strain to forget/ Our memory must be long": "we" here means not Jews but assimilated Jews, Jews who want to distance themselves (but cannot distance themselves enough) from their shared religious past. [Ed's note: The New Yorker has unlocked this poem in their archives.]

Rich's later poems, by contrast, show her reclaiming Judaism as something to which she says she might want to belong. These poems often address the Baltimore family in which she grew up. "Grandmothers" (1980), for example, pays belated tribute to Hattie Rice Rich, the poet's father's mother, whose "sweetness of soul was a mystery to me," but in Rich's youth "a convenience for everyone": "you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg," "took the street-car downtown shopping/ endlessly for your son's whims, the whims of genius," and "All through World War Two the forbidden word/ Jewish was barely uttered in your son's house."

Rich is a poet of confrontation, one whose imagination flares at shows of defiant strength, and in this poem she can defy her Jewish father by acknowledging, as he did not want to acknowledge, the hard and quiet work done by her grandmother in bringing him up, work that Arnold Rich (in his daughter's telling) overlooked.  Rich has two grandmothers, but "Grandmothers" has three parts: one part for her maternal grandmother, who "married straight out of the convent school," one part for Hattie Rice Rich, Arnold's mother, and one part for Adrienne herself, entitled "Granddaughter," in which she describes herself as "born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind," and newly interested in "'blood,' the all-powerful awful theme."

By "blood" Rich means, here, not the shedding of blood (as she did in "Jerusalem") but the lines of descent, the passing down of habits and beliefs (accompanied, in this instance, by passed-down genes), which enable Rich, the daughter of a Jew and a non-Jew, to call herself Jewish, and to explore, in middle age, the aspects of Judaism that said the most to her. And that is what she did in the book she wrote after finishing "Grandmothers," the book she would call Your Native Land, Your Life.  That book includes Rich's most accomplished poem on a Jewish theme, "Yom Kippur 1984," named for the day of fasting, self-examination and repentance that occurs near, but not at, the start of each Jewish year.

"Yom Kippur, 1984" explores the twinned Jewish obligations—especially relevant on Yom Kippur— to consider one's own life, to reflect on one's actions inwardly, as an individual, and the obligation—for observant Jews, a matter of Jewish law; for Rich, perhaps, a matter of ethics—to be with other Jews at certain times (Jewish law requires a minyan, at least ten Jews praying together, before certain prayers can be said). "Yom Kippur, 1984" begins:

What is a Jew in solitude?
What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

[Read the full poem at the Poetry Foundation website.]

Rich sees Jewish affiliation, the decision to call oneself a Jew, as one example among many of protective solidarity: "the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew/ the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be/ a woman's footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman's god."  She then admits, vexing herself, that "I also love separateness." Like almost all poets, she needs some time alone, unhindered by what other people expect her to say, whether in a synagogue or at a dinner table. Can she identify herself with a group—with Jews, for example—and still preserve the solitude, the distance from expectations, which all poets need?  The poem ends not by answering but by repeating the question, and asking what it would mean in a just world, a world in which we no longer wanted group identifications—religions, nations, labels of many kinds—for mutual protection, and could no longer use them to keep other people away.

Not coincidentally Rich uses very long, end-stopped lines for this poem: she has said that she associates these lines not just with the poetry of the Hebrew Bible but with Walt Whitman, that great poet of connections among Americans, and with Robinson Jeffers, the Californian poet of American misanthropy and solitude. Neither Whitman nor Jeffers were Jewish, but Rich, here, says that she is: she takes a Jewish occasion to reconsider the choices she has made—about where to live, how to spend her time and energy, how to write—and in doing so identifies her own poetic practice with a kind of ethically oriented self-examination we might think of as Jewish too.  On Yom Kippur Jews are asked to consider the previous year as a series of acts and decisions taken or declined; the Kol Nidre prayer, in which we ask divine forgiveness for obligations that we could not have carried out, is part of the service, but so too is the reminder that if we owe something to another human being, we must fulfill our obligation to that human being, not to a divine substitute.

Rich has used her Jewish material here to think both about family and about herself alone, to think both about solitude and about obligation. She will choose solitary reflection over participation in rituals and social occasions that seem to her false or oppressive (that's one reason she famously refused to accept the National Medal for the Arts). And yet her temperament has always drawn her also to shared tasks, to the ways in which people can work together to improve their lot. That is the Jewish mitzvah of tikkun olam, often and rightly invoked as a religious justification for political activism, and it is one of the ways that Rich, "split at the root" and alert to her contradictions, finds herself, still, writing Jewish books.

From Fan Fiction to Best Seller: How an NSFW Twilight Tale Turned into a Dream Book Deal

Tanya Erzen is an Associate Professor of religion and American studies at Ohio State University. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It.

Edward Cullen is a twenty-something ruthless CEO who meets Bella when she interviews him for her college newspaper. They experience a magnetic attraction, but he harbors a nasty secret: the only way he can have a relationship with her is if she agrees to sign a written contract agreeing to be his submissive. Edward expects a recalcitrant Bella to engage in whippings, handcuffing, and other bondage games. At one point, when Bella asks, “Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Edward?” his response is, “No Isabella, it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I f$#k . . . hard. ... Come. I want to show you my playroom.”

This delightfully predictable (at least in the world of porn) exchange is to be found not in he famously abstinent pages of the Twilight saga, but in “Master of the Universe,” formerly the most-read Twilight fan fiction story online, and now, in its new incarnation as Shades of Grey, a novel about to receive a 750,000 first print run from Vintage. MofU, as it was known to the fanpire cognoscenti, was written in giddily awaited installments by Snowqueens Icedragon or “Mistress Icy.” “MofU is my own special brand of heroin, an addiction I will have to go into rehab for,” one of the thousands of devoted readers raved. Now, in the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed), Edward and Bella have morphed into Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele (copyright!) and Mistress Icy is using her pen name, E.L. James. 

MofU was the gritty anecdote to Twilight’s relentless abstinence, part of the vast fan fic parallel universe where the most popular stories are what writers informally call “smut.” It's a genre that re-envisions the relationships in Twilight as sexually explicit and often raunchy. From “clean smut” to “hardcore,” instead of meadows and dazzling vampires, there is promiscuity, sexual abuse, incest, bondage, and sex addiction. In “The Training,” Bella “lives to serve her Master…” In "Never Sleep in a Strange Man’s Bed," Bella is awakened by a stranger named Edward who climbs into bed with her: “She was rubbing her firm little ass against me and moaning! Holy hell and all the devils in it!” In The List, a sexually frustrated Bella catalogues all the ways she’d like to have sex with Edward once they’re married. “To Do: Against the tree in the meadow, on our lab table, on his leather couch . . .” You get the idea.

The pleasure of reading the Twilight series for millions of fans resides in the books’ titillating fantasy of sexual postponement. Readers endure thousands of pages of erotic tension with Edward and Bella panting at each other with quivering lips and interrupted kisses. Even when they do have sex in Breaking Dawn, the final novel, Twilight fans only get a blank space between when Edward and Bella go to bed on their honeymoon and wake up to drifting feathers, a shattered headboard and her black-and-blue body.  

The stories that crowd the top-ten lists of fan fiction like MofU provide plenty of salacious sex but stick to a romantic premise. No matter if Edward is a dominant in a bondage relationship, a “smooth-talking motherfucker” who likes to pick up girls in bars for casual sex, or a commitment-averse architect who has never had a long-term relationship: Bella and Edward are soul mates, destined to be together forever. The insatiable demand for books like “Fifty Shades” speaks to the power of the fantasy of true love and the redemption of the damaged hero awakened by the love of the right woman who is either sexually innocent or virginal. Like Twilight, “Fifty Shades” delivers on the romance novel fantasy that a relationship initially based solely on sex will turn into blissful marriage. Anastasia’s virginity ensnares and entrances sexually voracious Christian Grey until he realizes that his feelings for her are emotional rather than just sexual, and his treatment of her becomes kind, solicitous, and caring.

The fairy-tale success story of James is also seductive for fans, especially the hundreds of hopeful fanfic writers who long to be the next Stephenie Meyer, whose first attempt at a novel was Twilight. Or, they could be the next Amanda Hocking, whose self-published vampire romance novels, My Blood Approves, landed her the million dollar book deal with St. Martin’s Press. And this takes us back to the real romance, to our contemporary narrative of hope and longing: that in our age of mundane and ubiquitous celebrity, the story you’ve written online could catapult you from obscurity to celebrated writer. And a seven figure advance.

Photo: Book page in a heart necklace by PrettyLittleCharmsUK on Etsy.

Recommended Reading for Those Thinking about "The Help": Like One of the Family

Over the past couple of weeks, the reaction to the novel and film The Help has made for some illuminating reading regarding race, history, and literature. Among the most thoughtful pieces we've read this week was from the Association of Black Women Historians, who said:

[T]his statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism. 

They outline their substantitive objections to the film in the statement, and conclude by saying, "In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment."

The statement includes a recommended reading list, which we reproduce below.

Fiction:

Like One of the Family: Conversations from A Domestic’s Life, Alice Childress (Beacon Press)

The Book of the Night Women by Marlon James (Riverhead)

Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neeley (Penguin)

The Street by Ann Petry (Mariner Books)

A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight (Anchor)  

Non-Fiction:

Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph (Cambridge University Press)

To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors by Tera Hunter (Harvard University Press)

Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)

Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis (Smithsonian)

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody (Dell)

The first book on the list, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life by Alice Childress, is excerpted below. The novel is comprised of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge. The book was originally published in the 1950s by a small publisher in Brooklyn (Independence Press), but Beacon Press brought out a new edition of it in 1986 with an introduction by the literary and cultural critic Trudier Harris.

The conversations in the book were first published in Freedom, the newspaper edited by Paul Robeson, and later in the Baltimore Afro-American. Childress is probably best-known for her book A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, and was also an accomplished playwright as well as a Tony-nominated actress. Before her success as a writer, she lived a life without economic advantages. In the introduction to the Beacon Press edition of Like One of the Family, Harris writes:

Chidress's upbringing and struggles in New York effectively influenced the kind of writer she would become. She says of herself: "I attempt to write about charactes without condescension, without making them into an image which some may deem more useful, inspirational, profitable, or suitable." She has also commented that she concentrates "on portraying have-nots in a have society, those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor and/or condescending clinical, social analysis."

Before these ideals could be realized, however, Childress had to serve a long apprenticeship. ... She pursued a variety of jobs, including assistant machinist, photo retoucher, saleslady, and insurance agent as she worked relentlessly to gain audiences for her work as a playwright, actress, and novelist. She also did domestic work for a few months; the day she quit she surprised her employer by throwing her keys at her head. The woman later asked her to return to work. This "only work" that Childress could find turned out to be valuable, for it provided her with firsthand experienece of the job situation she would later depict in Like One of the Family.

---

If You Want to Get Along With Me

from Like One of the Family by Alice Childress (Beacon Press, 1986)

Marge, ain't it strange how the two of us get along so well? . . . Now you see there! Why do you have to get so sensitive? . . . No, I was not reflecting on your personality or making any kind of digs! . . . Well, if you'll give me a chance I'll try to explain what I mean . . . I've known you for years and although you've got your ways . . .Yes, yes, I know I've got mine . . . but the important thing is that we go right on being friends . . . for example, remember the time you borrowed my best white gloves and lost them? . . . I know that I spilled punch on your blue satin blouse! . . . Now, wait a minute, girl! Are we goin' to have a big argument over how friendly we are!

I said all of that to say this. Today I worked for Mrs. M . . . and she is an awful nice lady when she wants to be, but she can get on my nerves something terrible. . . . No, I do not mean that you get on my nerves too, and if you keep pickin' up on every litte thing I say, I'm gonna get up and go on home. . . . Well, gettin' back to Mrs. M . . ., she can make me downright uncomfortable! . . . Yes, you know what I mean, she turns my workaday into a real socializin' session, and her idea of socializin' is to ask me a million questions. . . . "What do you do after work, Mildred?" and "Do you have a lot of friends?" and "Are you married?" and "Do you have a boyfriend" and "Do you save your money?" and "Do you like to read?" and "Do you people like this or that?" . . . By you people she means colored people... and I can tell you she can wear my nerve-cells pretty near the breaking point. . . . I know you know!

Well, at first I tried to get used to it because she is so nice in other ways . . . I mean like not followin' me around and dippin' into every thing I'm doing . . . yes, I appreciate that. . . . She lets me do my work, and then if anything isn't quite pleasin' to her she will tell me afterwards but it usually turns out that she's satisfied. Also I like the fact that she is not afraid of a little work herself, and many a day we've worked side by side on jobs that was too much for me to handle all alone. Also she makes the children call me Miss Jonhson. . . . Sure, whenever anybody has so many good ways, you hate to be pointin' out the bad ones. . . . But question, question, question... and it wasn't only the questions. . . . Honey, she could come out with the most gratin' remarks! . . . Honestly, she made such a point of tellin' me about how much she liked and admired Negroes, and how sorry she felt for their plight, and what a fine, honest, smart, and attractive woman was workin' for her mother and so forth and so on and so forth until it was all I could do to keep from screamin', "All right, back up there and take it easy!"

Well, the upshot of it all was that I began to pick her up a little here and there in order to put her on the right track. For example, I'd say to her, "What's so strange about that woman being honest and attractive?" Well, Marge, she'd look so stricken and hurt and confused that I'd find myself feelin' sorry for her. . . . No, I didn't stop altogether but I'd let things go along a bit and then I'd have to pick her up on something again, and over a period of five or six weeks I had to jack her up several times. . . . Girl! all of a sudden she turned coldly polite and quiet and I can tell you that it was awful uncomfortable and strained in the house.

I guess I could have stood the strain but it began to tear me up when she'd say things like "May I suggest" and "Do you mind if I say" and "If it's all right with you." . . . When I had my fill of that I came right out and asked her, "Mrs. M . . ., what is the matter, you look so grieved and talk so strange 'til I don't know what to think?" She looked at me accusingly and said, "I'm afraid to say anything to you, Mildred. It seems that every time I open my mouth something wrong comes out and you have to correct me. It makes me very nervous because the last thing I want to do is hurt your feelings. I mean well, but I guess that isn't enough. I try to do the right thing and since it keeps coming out wrong I figured I'd just keep quiet. I . . . I . . . want to get along but I don't know how."

Marge, in that minute I understood her better and it came to my mind that she was doing her best to make me comfortable and havin' a doggone hard go of it. After all, everything she's ever been taught adds up to her being better than me in every way and on her own she had to find out that this was wrong. ... That's right, she was tryin' to treat me very special because she still felt a bit superior but wanted me to know that she admired me just the same."

"Mrs. M ...," I said, "you just treat me like you would anybody else that might be workin' for you in any kind of job. Dont' be afraid to talk to me because if you say the wrong thing I promise to correct you, and if you want to get along you won't mind me doing so. After all, if I got into all your personal business and wanted to know everything about your life and your husband and your friends, pretty soon you would be forced to correct me even though it might make me uncomfortable." "Oh, Mildred," she says, "I didn't realize . . ." "Of course you didn't," I cut in, "but can't you see that it's unfair to push a one-sided friendship on me?" "Mildred," she says, "I wanted to be friendly." "Now of course you did," I answered, "but, for example, when you told me the other day that you're going to drop by my house and see me sometime I don't appreciate that because I never invited you, and you never had me to your house except to do a day's work." She looked down at her hands as I went on, "I don't think it's fair that you can invite yourself to my house and I can't tell you that I'll be over here for tea on Sunday afternoon."

Marge, she shook her head sadly. "You mean that there is nothing that we have in common, nothing that we can talk about?" "I didn't say that at all," I sad, "but let's just relax and feel our way along and not try to prove anything, and before you know it everything will go along easy-like."

She smiled then, "You mean you don't want to be treated special?" "Well, I do and I don't," I answered; "because I knew a woman once who was awful rude to me and said that was the way she was with everybody, no matter what color, and she didn't want to treat me special. I told her that if that was her general way then I'd appreciate her treatin' me special and I'd bet that other folks would like the change, too." Marge, Mrs. M . . . fell out laughin' and says, "Mildred, people are the limit!" ... And I guess she's right too. . . . No indeed, I don't take that time and bother with most folks because when I run into a mean, hateful one who comes chatterin' around me about "What do you do after work?" I just give her a short smile and say, "Oh first one thing and then another." And by the time she's figured that out, I'm in another room busy doin' something else! . . . That's right, but, as I said, Mrs. M . . . is a nice person, so I told her. 

Mary Oliver reads "The Summer Day"

In honor of the first day of summer (and a glorious first day it is here at the top of Beacon Hill), here is some inspiration from Mary Oliver. She reads her poem, "The Summer Day," the audio of which is available on At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver. The poem first appeared in House of Light, and was reprinted in her National Book Award-winning New and Selected Poems: Volume One. 

Echoing the words of the poet, we ask "[W]hat is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

Mary Oliver reads "The Summer Day"

When Science Fiction Changed: Joanna Russ, In Memoriam

Stephen Burt is the author Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, as well as several other books of poetry and criticism. He writes about poetry, contemporary literature, graphic novels, and science fiction for The New York Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation and The Believer, among others. He is Professor of English at Harvard University, where he teaches a very popular course on science fiction. 

When science fiction changed, Joanna Russ—as much as any writer— changed it; and when society changed— becoming less sexist, more open to women's ambitions, more open to women who love women, though there is still so very far to go—Russ's work played no small part. Russ, who died last month at age 74, began publishing sf fifty years ago. She made a name among science fiction fans for her unconventional, violent heroine Alyx and for more than two decades of strong short stories, among them the often reprinted "When It Changed" and the perfectly wrought medieval tale "Souls." Russ had a long career as an academic, at Cornell University, the University of Washington and elsewhere; she earned prominence, too, as a feminist critic, taking on topics within and outside genre fiction, most notably in How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) a classic statement to set beside the only slightly earlier feminist prose of Kate Millett, Sandra Gilbert, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Adrienne Rich.

But Russ will long and rightly be identified with her third novel, The Female Man. Completed in 1971, not published till 1975, and recognized immediately as coruscating feminist polemic, it's also a rapid, compelling work of sf, an intricate metafiction, and a good read. In that book, "Joanna," identified with the author, meets three versions of herself, brought together by interdimensional time travel. Jeannine Dadier hails from an alternate America where the Great Depression continues to the present day (i.e. 1969); opportunities for women there (at least, for women like Jeannine) seem even more circumscribed, sex roles more hypocritical and constricting, than in the real United States. Janet Evason (the "son" means "daughter") visits them both from a far future culture called Whileaway, an efficient, appealing single-sex society whose philosophy and biotech Janet describes. She introduces herself with a sentence that identified the book as science fiction at the time: "My mother's name was Eva, my other mother's name Alicia; I am Janet Evason." She continues: "When I was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf alone, on North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle."

Whileaway is hardly the first single-sex feminist utopia, but it's crisply described, with little sentimentality, wry summary ("They work too much. They are incredibly tidy"), and vivid set scenes. Janet's remembered adventures back on Whileaway make a neat contrast with the bitter satire, self-referential devices, bleakly essayistic fragments, and inset playlets (drawn from Eric Berne's Games People Play) that show up the sexist effects, not only of malign individuals, but of American habits, assumptions, and institutions, in 1969, 1975, and still today. The narrator tells us that she has become a man (thus the title) in the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir's "One is not born a woman, but becomes one": to assume a position of power, to speak for oneself, to create new worlds, Joanna must therefore become something else.

Science fiction delivers a promise and a warning. It also delivers hope: depicting imagined futures, events and characters not possible here and now, sf says that things can and will be otherwise—that what we have seen already is not all there is. That's what Janet said, with uncommon force, in 1975: not just that women can hunt and fight duels and explore the Arctic and be the government, but also that women can love other women, raise children with other women, and experience sexual pleasure without men. While in Joanna's time, Janet falls hard for Laura, a disaffected teenager who likes to imagine that she's Genghis Khan, enjoys mathematics, and needs to be saved from false consciousness: "I'm a victim of penis envy (said Laura) so I can't ever be happy or lead a normal life." While Laura, slowly, awakens, Jeannine flounders, caught between two wrong-choice guys. Jeannine, like Joanna, could benefit from a loud, strong, well-organized feminist movement (not that Jeannine's world is likely to see one), but she could also benefit from a "Whileawayan communications device": "'I found it on Janet's bed,' said Jeannine, still whispering... 'I can't figure out what it is. You hold it by the handle and if you move this switch it buzzes on one end, though I don't see why, and another switch makes this piece move up and down.'"

The Female Man is funny, terse, eclectic, self-conscious and thoughtful, as well as angry-- it has a lot to be angry about. "Mothers have to sacrifice themselves to their children, both male and female," one of Russ's narrators explains, "so that the children will be happy when they grow up; though the mothers themselves were once children and were sacrified to in order that they might grow up and sacrifice... and when their daughters grow up, they will be mothers and they will have to sacrifice, so that you begin to wonder whether the whole thing isn't a plot to make the world safe for (male) children. But motherhood is sacred and mustn't be talked about." Russ stood out, and still stands out today, as a fiction writer willing to own her anger, brusquely or at length, directly or sarcastically; a talented prose stylist willing to stand for (without confining herself to) a cause. She later resolved, in a letter her critics quote, "I will not trust anyone who isn't angry": it's a distrust that The Female Man recommends.

But to praise The Female Man (as political work and as writing) this way is to make the book sound too much like an essay: it's also a novel, with a brisk plot and a moral conundrum near the end. I said that Joanna has three alter egos, but for most of the book we see just two. The last one shows up more than halfway through: Jael Reasoner, "a specialist in disguises," comes from a world where Manlanders and Womanlanders have long been at war. She also has retractable claws, like the superhero Wolverine. Jael's world and life, though intermittently thrilling, turn out to be as grotesque and appalling as Janet and Whileaway are appealing; are the two worlds secretly interdependent? Does Jael need Janet's help—and does Whileaway require Jael's? What should Joanna do? The Female Man finally goes beyond pastel, peaceable single-sex utopias, beyond the hopeful prescriptions of liberal feminism, into a far harsher place. "Rape is one of the Christian mysteries," one of her narrators (but which one?) decides; in consequence, she has to commit a murder—"with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul." It may be that the replacement of a patriarchal culture, a rape culture, by something more friendly to women requires some sort of Fanonian, empowering, retributive time of violence.

Or it may not be. "I don't like didactic nightmares," one of Russ's narrators also admits. The Female Man almost becomes a didactic nightmare, just as it almost becomes a programmatic utopia; but it is neither—it's a taut and memorable invention that the future is going to continue to read, not just as a document (though it is one) of 1970s radical feminism, a fiction of lesbian liberation, a milestone in sf, but as a successful experiment in narration, a forceful political novel that (like all the best political novels) holds questions that won't go away.

Revising Huck Finn, Revising History

Today's post is from Thomas Norman DeWolf, a frequent speaker at colleges and conferences around the country on the legacy of slavery, undoing racism, and healing from historic trauma. Tom is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. This post originally appeared on his blog.

Mark Twain defined a “classic” book as one “which people praise and don’t read.” He should know. How many of you have read Huckleberry Finn? This “classic” has been condemned, banned, or people attempted to ban it, in a variety of locations, and for various reasons, since it was first published in 1885. Back then it was banned because Twain had the audacity to create a character, Jim, who was not only black, but as human–and as fully developed–as the other major characters in the story. Jim is not only fully human, but the hero of the story. It ran contrary to everything white Americans had been raised to believe; that white America had been built upon since its founding.

When I was in junior high school in the 1960′s, several of my black classmates wanted the book banned from our school library for a different reason: because Twain regularly refers to Jim with the “n” word, which they found deeply offensive. Many teachers in K-12 classes struggle with how to teach this masterpiece, about which Hemingway said, “All American writing comes from that.” It is challenging to explain to kids today the context in which Huck Finn was written. I believe I understand the difficulties teachers face.

Caveat: in the interest of full disclosure, I’m a white man writing about a book that was written by a white man–albeit one who died 100 years ago in a very different era. I encourage readers to ponder these facts as you consider my words. I also encourage you to consider what others have written, like Princeton Professor Melissa Harris-Perry or author Earl Ofari Hutchinson for instance. Further disclosure: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the best book I’ve ever read. No one else can ever write the “Classic American Novel.” It has already been published. This is it.

A new version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now being published by New South Books. Twain scholar Alan Gribben is the editor. He has replaced the “n” word with the word “slave.” I’m sure Dr. Gribben and New South Books have the noblest of intentions; to get Twain back into K-12 classrooms.

And there are many reasons why this is a really bad idea. I’ll focus on two:

1. Utilizing the word “slave” perpetuates one of the dehumanizing aspects of the system of slavery. Describing someone who was owned by another as a “slave” strips away her or his humanity–reduces that person to a commodity. They were enslaved people, not slaves.
2. I understand the challenge that educators face, but what are classrooms for if not to struggle with difficult subjects in order to wrestle with them? The one way we will finally heal from the legacy of slavery is to talk about all  aspects of it no matter how difficult, awkward, and hurtful those conversations may be. Hiding behind an alternative word–and a poorly chosen one at that–does not teach students to deal honestly with truth; it does nothing to teach people to struggle together with difficult subjects; it does nothing to help with healing from the historic trauma that continues to afflict the people of the United States. It perpetuates injustice and ignorance.

When my grandchildren are old enough to enjoy and learn from Huckleberry Finn I hope they’ll read it the way Twain wrote it. I trust their parents–and hopefully their teachers–to work with them to understand the context of the times in which Twain lived and wrote, the horrible system of slavery that drove the entire economy of our nation, and why it is important to understand and talk about these issues.

We’ve all heard that the roads in Hell are paved with good intentions. This new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a well-intentioned mistake. Read the original. Then read it–and discuss it–with your children.

Department of Congratulations

Kudos to nonprofit publisher Bellevue Literary Press, an independent press run out of New York University's School of Medicine, for Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Tinkers. Boston-area independent bookstore Brookline Booksmith adds to the applause for Harding, a local author, and Galleycat re-airs its interview with Danielle Ofri, editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review.

Danielle Ofri: Doctor-Writers: What Are the Ethics?

Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients (View the YouTube book trailer.) You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

There is a veritable epidemic of doctor-writers out there. What is going on?

Are doctors suddenly in the kiss-and-tell mode? What about confidentiality? Professionalism? HIPAA?

As one of the aforementioned doctor-writers, I look upon this trend with both awe and trepidation.  I suspect that that this flourishing literary phenomenon relates to the public’s fascination and fear about all things medical. It also relates to the falling away of previous, pedestal-like images of doctors and doctoring. Lastly, it may have occurred to the medical profession-- and this has taken a few centuries, it seems-- that doctors have profound emotional reactions to the work we do, and that exploring these reactions may offer benefit to both patient and doctor.

Whatever the reason, this literary genre appears to be here to stay, and it is worth considering the ethical implications. Legally, there doesn't appear to be much beyond protecting identity and avoiding libel.

Don Belton: Voodoo for Charles

This post is quite a bit longer than what we usually publish here at Beacon Broadside, but we hope that you'll take the time to read it in its entirety. The story is by author Don Belton, and was included in Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, which was edited by Belton and published by Beacon Press in 1995. Don Belton's death on December 27th was a great loss, and we feel that this essay offers a fine example of the power and humanity of his work.

On Christmas morning in 1991 I telephoned my nephew. I have two nephews: Charles, who had only just turned nineteen the week before, and Wayne, Jr., who is somewhere in his middle twenties by now. These are the children of my brother's first marriage. My nephews grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where much of my early childhood was spent, but that was before the conflagration of the 1967 riot and the razing of what remained of the city by the local, state, and federal governments in the name of an urban renewal which is yet to come. While Newark was not an easy city to live in, it was still, in any case, from the late 50s to the mid-60s (when I lived there with my great-grandmother in the black district called the Hill) a city. Today Newark is the ghost of a city. Its statistics for AIDS, black-on-black crime, infant mortality, and unemployment bear witness to dissolution.

Charles was living in Newark in 1991. I had not spoken to him in over four years. I hadn't seen him in a longer time. The last time we'd spoken was by telephone. (For several years now, I seem to talk to the members of my family only on the phone.) By 1991 I still felt unresolved about our last conversation. I had been visiting my parents' house in Philadelphia, while they were away on a trip. "Uncle Don," Charles had said to me on the phone back then, "Where's Grandad and Gramma? I want to tell them I got shot."

Helene Atwan: Sonia Sanchez Celebrates Her 75th Birthday

Today's post is from Helene Atwan, Director of Beacon Press. She recently attended the 75th birthday celebration of Sonia Sanchez, an award-winning poet, playwright, activist, and scholar whose work includes Shake Loose My Skin and the forthcoming Morning Haiku.

On Saturday, September 12, I had the joy and privilege of sharing in poet Sonia Sanchez's 75th birthday celebration, at her home in Philadelphia.

The lovely old house and fall garden freshly planted with mums of all colors were jam-packed with celebrants. Some were crowded into the music room picking out tunes on Sonia's baby grand piano, which had been given to her by Max Roach, the world-renown Jazz musician and composer, and which had traveled with her over five states before being planted here and covered with photos, awards, and precious memorabilia. When two musicians started playing Monk, poet Amiri Baraka came by to recite and even sing. Others were taking turns on Sonia's native drum set, making wonderful music. Among the musical guests in attendance were Ursula Rucker, and Evan Solot, along with the two women to whom Sonia dedicated her book, Shake Loose My Skin, former lead singer Bernice Reagon and vocalist Adisa Douglas of Sweet Honey and the Rock.

Guests were busy devouring spicy b-b-q wings and tangy collards, and admiring the art that crowds every wall, every surface, every nook and cranny in the 1940s Germantown house. African sculptures, all of women, from all over the continent, stood guard imposingly in the entry. In this photo, poet Eugene Redmond stands next to one of the most impressive in Sonia's collection, a Nimba statue from the Baga people of Guinea.

Kath Weston: The Homeless Readers of Tokyo

Kath Weston grew up working-class, dreamed of becoming a writer, put in time on the street, and trained as an anthropologist on scholarship at the University of Chicago and Stanford. She has taught at Arizona State, Harvard, Wellesley, Brandeis, and Tokyo University. She is the author of Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor.

Remember that old party game in which everyone has to grapple with a deceptively simple question: If you were stranded on a desert island, what book would you take with you? In the working-class suburbs of Chicago where I grew up, answers ranged from the classics (The Souls of Black Folk, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare) to the religious (the Bible, the Qur'an) to the voluminous (War and Peace) to the cliché (Robinson Crusoe, ha ha ha!). It was a question meant to entertain and perhaps to reveal something about a person's values. Who would have thought that, thirty years later, the same question would be posed in earnest by people caught in a global economic meltdown?

Dispossession in a place like Tokyo has come to be symbolized by the archipelago of blue-tarp tents that dot the city, islands of homelessness tucked away into the recesses of parks like Ueno and Yoyogi. Around the city's train stations people who have lost their jobs patch together even more makeshift lives, heading to the underground arcades for warmth and shelter, then heading out again in search of work or small change. Many of these scenes would be familiar to people who have watched the rise of inequality in the United States. As the sun descends behind Shibuya's skyscrapers, men fish aluminum cans out of trash barrels to redeem for cash. Women scrub vegetables for the evening meal in public water fountains. Bedrolls spread out on the grass. A recent flurry of news reports professed shock at discovering such islands of need in the midst of plenty. In truth, these tent cities have been occupied for quite some time. And there are some scenes that never seem to make it into the coverage of financial crisis.

Carlos A. Ball: The Silver Lining in the California Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Upholding Proposition 8

Today's post is from Carlos A. Ball, Professor of Law at the Rutgers University School of Law (Newark). He has written extensively on gay rights issues and is the author of The Morality of Gay Rights: An Exploration in Political Philosophy. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.

Now that it has been a week since the California Supreme Court's decision upholding Proposition 8, it is a good time to take stock of what is happening with same-sex marriage not only in California, but also in other parts of the country. For those of us who support LGBT rights, the California court's decision was disappointing and frustrating. But in the long run, I think that the LGBT rights movement will benefit politically as a result of the court's ruling.

I say this because if the court had struck down Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, that would have created a political firestorm in California and elsewhere. Although there is a solid legal argument to be made that Proposition 8 should have been struck down because it was inconsistent with core principles contained in the state constitution, the politics behind the case are more complicated. If the court had sided with the plaintiffs, many would have seen the ruling as an affront to basic democratic values. The court, after all, would have overturned the expressed preference of a majority of Californians who voted in the November election.

There can be no doubt that if the court had struck down the Amendment, conservative political activists would have used the ruling to fire up their supporters by attacking the court for its supposed activism and lack of accountability. That kind of anti-judicial rhetoric has unfortunately proven quite effective in convincing voters in more than half the states to approve constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.

Reading on the Kindle: Notes from a Beacon Press Staffer

Beacon is now selling several hundred books a month via Amazon's Kindle program--Man's Search For Meaning, Sowing Crisis, and Kindred are among our best-selling titles in the Kindle store. So far, we have one resident devotee of the elegant e-reader: Sales Assistant Sara Hatch. Beacon Broadside asked her a few questions about Kindle and what she's using it to read.

Tell our readers a little bit about yourself.
At Beacon, I work with our marketing department on Sales, Ebooks, and help with updates to our website. I’m a graduate of Boston University with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism. I grew up in Connecticut and have lived in Boston, D.C., and London. I’ve written for several publications including Roll Call and the New London Day. I got my start in publishing at MIT Press. In my spare time, I read and watch movies and TV on my computer.

How long have you had a Kindle?
I’ve had it for about a week now.

Speaking as a consumer--and not as an employee of a publishing house--do you think that the $9.99 price for a new book is a good value?
A lot of the books I've bought aren’t $9.99, more like $5 or $6 dollars, which is a nice value. I think if it's a brand new hardcover and you can get it for $9.99, it's a steal. Books are so expensive, and they're my one extravagance, so it's nice to be able to spend $5 or $6 dollars on a book that would cost me $7 or more in a store. I can also carry several books around with me at once, which is good for me since I generally don't read just one book at a time.

What books do you have on your Kindle?
I have the collected works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and sixteen Dickens novels. They have relatively cheap collections of several authors like that. It cost me about $7 total for all of those, a great deal. I also have two books by Charlaine Harris from the “Sookie Stackhouse” series (which is the basis for the HBO series “True Blood”) and a sample of a book by Kim Harrison, another fantasy writer. You can download a sample from any book on Kindle for free, which is a really nice feature.

Has using the Kindle made your bag lighter, or do you still carry a bunch of traditional books around?
I’m not sure if my bag will ever be light but I definitely don’t carry as many books any more.

Have your reading habits changed?
I don't think they've changed. I think it’s a lot easier to read on my morning commute since the Kindle is a lot less cumbersome. I have a 45 minute commute both ways so I can get a lot of reading down.

Do you have any Beacon Press books on your Kindle?
Not yet, but I hope to put some on at some point. I can email manuscripts straight to my Kindle—an awesome feature.

Not Lost in Translation: Beacon’s Reach Overseas

Today's post is from Reshma Melwani, Beacon’s Foreign Rights Assistant. Since joining Beacon a little over a year ago, Reshma has overseen countless translation deals; this post explores some of her more inspiring deals and their significance in today's world. When she’s not selling foreign rights for Beacon, Reshma works as a freelance writer in Boston.

During his inauguration, President Barack Obama spoke of the strength of our "patchwork heritage," describing America as "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers... shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth." Weeks later, these words still reverberate within me.

Perhaps, because, like my country, I too am a product of a "patchwork heritage"-- purposefully shaped by many cultures, molded by many languages.

I spent monsoon summers in Bombay, watching my aunts bargain for glass bangles and silk saris at bustling bazaars. I enjoyed warm winters with my maternal grandparents in Indonesia. Rather than a bowl of cereal, I woke up to a steaming bowl of spicy fried rice topped with an over-easy egg. I cherish my memories of lazy afternoons in Spain, taking a siesta on the cool tile floor alongside my paternal grandparents.

I've worshipped in Catholic churches, Islamic mosques, and temples both Hindu and Buddhist. I've grown up with an agnostic mother, a meditating father, and everything else in between. I am who I am precisely because of my "patchwork heritage."

But even in my day-to-day life in Boston, as a foreign rights liaison at Beacon Press, I see President Obama's words materialize. I bear witness to the steps the international publishing community is taking to embrace other cultures and promote tolerance.

Link Roundup: Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Recent Reviews

Scott Horton, in his always excellent blog at Harpers, skewers the "New McCarthyism" in a defense of Rashid Khalidi. More commentary in support of Khalidi, a respected scholar at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, is flooding the web and mainstream media. Check out this piece in the Washington Post and this DailyKos diary responding to it, and this video posted at Talking Points Memo where John Judis concedes that this campaign is even dirtier than the Bush-Dukakis campaign.

Bill Ayers recently spoke on education in New York.

Rev. Forrest Church discussed his memoir Love & Death and his diagnosis of terminal esophageal cancer on NPR's Fresh Air.

Kate Clinton proposes action for Nov. 5th, whether or not Prop. 8 is defeated in California.

Looking for some good reading? Five librarians got together to compile this list of the Best of the Best of University Presses. Watch their presentation on BookTV. Two Beacon Press books, Once in a Promised Land and Without a Map, made the list.

A quick look at some reviews of recent Beacon Press releases:

PopMatters on The Porning of America

New Orleans Times-Picayune on Confessions of an Eco-Sinner

Cape Cod Times on The Muse of the Revolution

Winston-Salem Journal on Saving Paradise

And recently on Beacon Broadside:

Greenspan Passes the Buck by Marilyn Sewell

Zombie Jamboree in Texas by Glenn Branch

Factory Farms, Dirty Water, and the Bible: Part One and Part Two by Mark Winne

Nobel Prize – Is There an American Eligible?

Today's post is from Rick Ayers, co-author (with Amy Crawford) of Great Books for High School Kids: A Teacher's Guide to Books That Can Change Teens' Lives, author of Studs Terkel's Working, a Teaching Guide and co-creator (with students) of the Berkeley High Slang Dictionary. Ayers blogs about politics at the Huffington Post.

The American literary establishment is crying foul. The comments of Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this week have provoked great patriotic upswellings. Engdahl suggested that the U.S. literary establishment is "too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

Did this observation give us pause, make us hesitate, push us to ask for clarification? Indeed not. Americans don't take insults like this easily and the media took a quick break from following Sarah Palin's every utterance to chatter about the dis from these upstart Europeans. But, you know, Horace Engdahl might just have something there. We do translate too little of world literature – complaining, apparently, that such works would not sit well with the American literary sensibility. We do not really, as a culture, betray much curiosity about the world.

Link Roundup: Chaplaincy, New vs. Old Media, and More Basketball

In the department of jobs you may not have known existed, Kate Braestrup is the chaplain for the Maine Game Warden Service. Lest you think that she spends her time blessing moose and praying for trout, read this excerpt of her book, Here if You Need Me: A True Story (Little, Brown), featured in UUWorld last November. She describes the complex and emotionally raw situations she encounters in her work in a fascinating interview on Speaking of Faith this weekend.

The Hartford Courant, in a sign of the times for the traditional print daily, will lay off a quarter of its newsroom staff and slash a quarter of its news pages. Jon Fine at Businessweek discusses the "bloodbath," and includes an internal email explaining the "re-invention" of the paper.

Re-inventing a newspaper is a huge undertaking under the best of circumstances. Doing it with significantly reduced resources in a tight timeframe is even more challenging. Now, we must forge ahead with that work while we make the tough decisions about who will go and who will stay.

The Courant is owned by the Tribune Company, which also announced cuts at another of its big papers, the Baltimore Sun.  Gloomy days for newspapers, indeed.

The reporters now updating their resumes may find "My Career: The Remix" by Amy Alexander (co-author of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans) interesting reading. Alexander discusses her twenty-year career in journalism, how she's moved from being a "journalist" to a "content producer," and how the seismic shift from old to new media will play out for journalists of color and the people whose stories they tell:

As America's demographic face continues to become browner and poorer, who will lead and execute coverage of that evolution? How well will this particular zeitgeist be described and contextualized for consumers who are living it—and who are growing agitated by its gradual, relentless creep? Not to say that only journalists of color can write about people of color, but let's be real: Would the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story have consumed so much ink and airspace if more black journalists controlled the levers of power in big newsrooms?

Traces of the Trade, a documentary about one family's encounter with their ancestors' role in the slave trade (a journey also chronicled in Thomas DeWolf's Inheriting the Trade), is airing this week on PBS stations around the country as part of their P.O.V. series. Check your local listings for air times this weekend, and while you're at the PBS website, read an excerpt of the book. DeWolf has posted on Beacon Broadside about the 2008 Presidential Campaign, the film's showing at the Sundance Film Festival, and the 200^th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

We ran a post earlier this week suggesting some good poetry to read for Pride Month. NPR offers one librarian's suggestions for prose.

And to continue this week's attention to women's basketball, yesterday JaVale McGee was picked 18^th in the NBA draft by the Washington Wizards. His mother, Pamela McGee, played for two seasons in the WNBA. This is the first time a son of a WNBA player has been drafted to the NBA, but it surely won't be the last.

Poetry for Pride Month

Today's post is from Stephen Burt, author of The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (Columbia University Press). His essays and articles on modern and contemporary poetry have appeared in many journals in America, Britain, and elsewhere, among them American Literary History, Boston Review, London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale Review. Burt is an Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. 

There have been gay poets—or, at least (if you prefer historical accuracy) poets who presented same-sex erotic passion—for as long as poetry has been written down; maybe longer. Think of Sappho, whose name has referred for centuries both to the idea of eros between women and to the ancient idea of lyric itself: think of what may be her single most famous poem, "He seems to me equal to a god, that man/ Who sits beside you," its first sentence a feint towards opposite-sex desire, its substance an homage to the young woman Sappho loves. Shakespeare's sonnets, most of them addressed to a comely young man, have inspired centuries of arguments about his erotic investment in, "the master-mistress of my passion." Walt Whitman insisted that he wrote for, and about, both women and men, but what records there are tell us that he loved men; he put his poems about same-sex love ("adhesiveness," as he called it) in a discrete segment of his lifework, Leaves of Grass, entitled "Calamus" (after the phallic plant of the same name): Whitman inspired what later became gay movements as his poetry circulated internationally—in England, Edward Carpenter and J. A. Symonds thought they had found in his work a model for gay Utopia. Federico Garcia Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman" called together, under Whitman's name, the stigmatized homosexual men of the Old and New World, trying to wring new lives from their frequent self-hate.

Searching for Empathy in the Written Word

Today's post is from Suzanne Kamata, editor of Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. Kamata is fiction editor at the online magazine Literary Mama, and her work has appeared in Utne Reader; Brain, Child; Literary Mama; and It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters. Her novel Losing Kei was published earlier this year by Leapfrog Press.

I'm the kind of person who looks to literature to make sense of life, so when I learned that my daughter was deaf and had cerebral palsy, I sobbed for a while and then I logged onto Amazon.com. I was looking for deep and sustaining stories to guide me on the long path ahead, and while I found many cheery volumes offering hope and inspiration, that wasn't exactly what I wanted. I needed to know that others had felt the same kind of pain, fear, and anger that I was feeling, and I wanted a better idea of how my daughter's disability would affect my marriage, my son, my work, and other aspects of our lives. The best novels, short stories, and memoirs can pull us into the lives of their characters and provide a deeper understanding of others, while poetry can distill and illuminate moments that longer essays gloss over.

I didn't find as many books as I'd hoped, and I wondered why. According to the March of Dimes Global Report on Birth Defects, every year 8 million babies worldwide are born with genetic birth defects. Hundreds of thousands more are born with serious birth defects of post-conception origin. So where were all the novels about parenting a child with cerebral palsy? Or a deaf child? Or one with muscular dystrophy or Down syndrome? Could it be that those in the trenches were too busy to write? After all, parenting a child with disabilities takes a lot of time - a lifetime. Some of us have to help our children move from room to room, from wheelchair to toilet, from house to hospital or therapy center. Some of our children cannot be left alone, or cannot live unsupervised even as adults.