Black History Month

Martin Luther King Jr.: The King Legacy

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Jack Halberstam: Gaga Feminism

"Jack Halberstam-the king of feminism-has managed to make sense of pregnant men, Lady Gaga, gay marriage, and the advent of the bromance in this provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics. Gaga Feminism is as fun as it is illuminating." —Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs and staff writer at the New Yorker

Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies?

In Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, J. Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real lived experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage.

Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity.

Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, Gaga Feminism is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.

Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Acts of Faith is his story of growing up Muslim in America and how he came to believe in religious pluralism. This highly acclaimed book is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people.

Anita Hill: Reimagining Equality

http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2286

From the heroic lawyer who spoke out against Clarence Thomas in the historic confirmation hearings twenty years ago, Anita Hill's first book since the best-selling Speaking Truth to Power

"This ambitious book provides just as dignified and well intentioned a performance as the one she gave at those hearings." —Megan Buskey, The New York Times Book Review

Through the stories of remarkable African American women, including her own great-great-grandmother, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Baltimore beauty-shop owner and housing-crisis survivor Anjanette Booker, Anita Hill demonstrates that the inclusive democracy our Constitution promises must be conceived with home in mind. From slavery to the Great Migration to the subprime mortgage meltdown, Reimagining Equality takes us on a journey that sparks a new conversation about what it means to be at home in America and presents concrete proposals that encourage us to reimagine equality.

Kate Bornstein: A Queer and Pleasant Danger

Kate Bornstein is a performance artist and playwright who has authored several award-winning books, including her memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today.

Before They're Gone: Hiking our National Parks with kids

Before They're Gone: A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks by Michael Lanza

A longtime backpacker, climber, and skier, Michael Lanza knows our national parks like the back of his hand. As a father, he hopes to share these special places with his two young children. But he has seen firsthand the changes wrought by the warming climate and understands what lies ahead: Alaska's tidewater glaciers are rapidly retreating, and the abundant sea life in their shadow departs with them. Encroaching tides threaten beloved wilderness coasts like Washington's Olympic and Florida's Everglades. Less snowfall and hotter summers will diminish Yosemite's world-famous waterfalls. And it is predicted that Glacier National Park's 7,000-year-old glaciers will be gone in a decade.

To Lanza, it feels like the house he grew up in is being looted. Painfully aware of the ecological-and spiritual-calamity that global warming will bring to our nation's parks, Lanza sets out to show his children these wonders before they have changed forever.

He takes his nine-year-old son, Nate, and seven-year-old daughter, Alex, on an ambitious journey to see as many climate-threatened wild places as he can fit into a year: backpacking in the Grand Canyon, Glacier, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and along the wild Olympic coast; sea kayaking in Alaska's Glacier Bay; hiking to Yosemite's waterfalls; rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park; cross-country skiing in Yellowstone; and canoeing in the Everglades.

Through these poignant and humorous adventures, Lanza shares the beauty of each place and shows how his children connect with nature when given "unscripted" time. Ultimately, he writes, this is more their story than his, for whatever comes of our changing world, they are the ones who will live in it.

Mary Oliver

The poems of Mary Oliver, read by the poet as well as Maria Shriver and Vice President Joe Biden

Alfie Kohn

Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The author of several books and scores of articles, he lectures at education conferences and universities as well as to parent groups and corporations.
Kohn's criticisms of competition and rewards have been widely discussed and debated, and he has been described in Time magazine as "perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores."