3.5 stars Gloria Steinem is a giant in American feminism, and someone I only truly know about from secondary sources. She’s written a lot, and I had read none of it until her most recent work, My Life on the Road. Regarding her own life, it’s not comprehensive: it’s a series of vignettes from, appropriately, encounters she had while on the road. It does start with a bit of background into her fascinating childhood, which saw her family endlessly traveling from place to place, driven […]
Connecting Across Continents and Time
Best for: Anyone interested in fighting back. In a nutshell: A mixture of interviews and speech transcripts that seeks to connect struggles for freedom across the world. Line that sticks with me: “But those protest movements would not have been necessary – it would not have been necessary to create a mid-century Black freedom movement had slavery been comprehensively abolished in the nineteenth century.” Why I Chose It: I decided to kick off participation in my fifth Cannonball Read with this book because I am […]
It’s a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist.
Rebecca Solnit’s publisher was giving away free copies of “Hope in the Dark” in the days after the election, and I jumped all over it as fast as I could. I loved Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me” which, among other things, made it clear that she is an expert on many things besides misogyny and feminism. And boy, is she. “Hope in the Dark,” which is an examination of the history of civil disobendience and social change, was the salve, and the inspiration/kick-in-the-butt, and […]