Previously Reviewed by Ms. Magazine
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The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
 At the heart of Louise Erdrich's incandescent novel stands a tree. Roots deep in the North Dakota soil, it's the family tree of generations of "bold and passionate" French-Chippewa Métis peoples and the more earthbound German and Norwegian immigrants who live in and around the small town of Pluto. ...
Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age by Susan K. Cahn
 As public policy wars over morality rage unabated, the bodies of teenage girls and young women remain the battleground, making this book an urgent read. In Sexual Reckonings, historian Susan Cahn examines how black and white teenage girls threw off patriarchal sexual standards and negotiated new...
Caspian Rain by Gina Nahai
 Like drops of acid, Gina Nahai's words burn the pages of this moving novel about the fate of women in prerevolutionary Iran. This Iranian American writer, a transplant from Tehran to California in the wake of the 1979 revolution, conjures up resilient women contending with a society in transition...
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
 The lilting, Creole voices of two admirable brothers, their lives separated for three decades by political strife in Haiti. A child's wounded heart, toughened by the years she was left behind when her parents fled their tumultuous homeland. The longing and guilt of exile, separation, loss in...
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
 In the last 20 years, the proliferation of Asian writers in Europe and the Americas has grown into a lovely chorus of voices, opening our eyes to the lives of people and cultures we've only known from a distance. Xiaolu Guo's debut English-language novel takes us a step further into the complicated ...
Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women by Caryl Rivers
 Are you frustrated by the endless parade of "chain reaction" stories that jump from network and cable TV to newspapers, magazines and the blogosphere, claiming that the nation's female politicians are not fit to lead, the children of working women are terrified by day care and a woman's brain is...
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
 President Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, but even he would be horrified by the Faustian bargain we see in today's neoliberal model of globalization. Not to be confused with the political liberalism of John Stuart Mill, neoliberalism is characterized by investigative...
Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System by Silja J. A. Talvi
 NHI, or no humans involved, is police jargon for the morgue remains of women prostitutes and African Americans. It's no accident that the phrase, which neatly expresses our society's flippancy toward suffering borne by the socalled underclass, sports a hip acronym. Language can reveal the...
The Cleft by Doris May Lessing
 Doris Lessing begins The Cleft with an epigraph from the poet Robert Graves: "Man does, woman is." This is the kind of oracular essentialism that has taken a beating in the past 40 years, yet Lessing appears to agree with it. Men, she writes in a brief foreword, "lack the solidity of women, who...
Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy by Zillah Eisenstein
 As women gain more seats in public office, why is the world not a safer place for women (or, for that matter, for children and men), Zillah Eisenstein asks in Sexual Decoys. She suggests this is because some of these women, as well as some people of color, are sexual and racial decoys: They mask...
A Handbook to Luck
by Cristina Garcia
Nineteen Minutes
by Jodi Picoult
Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women
by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Lose Your Mother
by Saidiya Hartman
Ines of My Soul: A Novel
by Isabel Allende
Secondhand World
by Katherine Min
Unbowed: A Memoir
by Wangari Maathai
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