Books like My Mama's Dead Squirrel by Mab Segrest

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels." ---------- Also contained in: - [The Third Life of Grange Copeland / Meridian / The Color Purple][1] [1]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18025207W/The_Third_Life_of_Grange_Copeland_Meridian_The_Color_Purple

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance. This New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of. ([source][1]) [1]: http://rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/

A collection of fifteen essays written between 1976 and 1984 gives clear voice to Audre Lorde's literary and philosophical personae. These essays explore and illuminate the roots of Lorde's intellectual development and her deep-seated and longstanding concerns about ways of increasing empowerment among minority women writers and the absolute necessity to explicate the concept of difference—difference according to sex, race, and economic status. The title Sister Outsider finds its source in her poetry collection The Black Unicorn (1978). These poems and the essays in Sister Outsider stress Lorde's oft-stated theme of continuity, particularly of the geographical and intellectual link between Dahomey, Africa, and her emerging self.

Brit Bennett’s chart topping novel, The Vanishing Half, is a story that tracks the lives of twin African American twin sisters who, after witnessing the murder of their father, run away at age 16. One sister begins passing as white and the other sister remains true to her identity. The Vanishing Half explores the intricacies of identity, family, and race in a provocative, but compassionate way.

Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species. Though the gifts of wildish nature come to us at birth, society's attempt to "civilize" us into rigid roles has plundered this treasure, and muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. Without Wild Woman, we become over-domesticated, fearful, uncreative, trapped. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and cantadora storyteller, shows how woman's vitality can be restored through what she calls "psychic archeological digs" into the ruins of the female unconscious. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes uses multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories chosen from over twenty years of research that help women reconnect with the healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype. Dr. Estes collects the bones of many stories, looking for the archetypal motifs that set a woman's inner life into motion. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes has created a lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it s a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making. Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and childrearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club. And to the girl whose father is the club's undisputed champion mythmaker, they exude a fatal glamour - one that lifts her from ordinary life. But there are other lies. Darker, more hidden. Her mother's unimaginable past threatens the family's very sanity. Mary Karr looks back through younger eyes to exorcise those demons: a mad, puritanical grandmother; a vast inheritance squandered in one year flat; endless emptied bottles; and the darknesses inflicted on an eight-year-old girl. This voice explodes with antic, wit, stripped of self-pity. Miraculously, it makes a journey into joy. Here is a "terrific family of liars redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth."

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

A boy investigates a squirrelly situation to track down his missing stories in this charming ode to book lovers of all kinds. Spencer loves to read. He reads a book every night. But one morning his favorite book goes missing, and in its place is a tulip. Spencer searches high and low, but he can't find his book. The next morning another book is missing, a nut in its place. And the morning after that, another book is missing. What is happening to Spencer's books? When he finds out, Spencer devises a surprising solution that will delight readers (and librarians) everywhere.

This is one of those rare books that let us see with a fresh and startling clarity the underlying causes, meaning, and influence through time of profound a cultural phenomenon. In it, a brilliant young scholar traces the roots of our modern consumer culture to the sentimental society of Victorian America. With originality and sympathetic wit, Ann Douglas explores the alliance, beginning in 1820, of two disenfranchised groups: the women of the middle class and the liberal Protestant clergy, both increasingly relegated to the edges of society (to the parlor, to the Sunday School, to the libraries) by the prevailing entrepreneurial forces. Ann Douglas shows us the ladies and the ministers cultivating a realm of "influence," becoming the cultural custodians, taking control of the schools, preaching a reverence for the very qualities that society imposed upon them: timidity, piety, childish naivete, a disdain for the competitive forces in the larger world. She gives us the missing social history of the Protestant minister in the Northeast, and the subtle decline of his inherited theology. She takes us through the magazines the women and the ministers edited (Ladies' Magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, The Ladies' Repository), through the etiquette books, into the saccharine biographies of ministers and the books about women that the ministers wrote (among them, Woman Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature) in which they tried to fix the correct "feminine" role or elaborate on woman's "beautiful errand." She gives us the contemporary novels and tracts—lachrymose, narcissistic, riotously quirky, forgotten now but then wildly popular (The Empty Crib, Stepping Heavenward, as well as such scandalous books as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated). We see the authors, through their works, colonizing, even domesticating, heaven (heaven has houses, streets, pianos, food, and clothing), projecting the dead as a kind of consecrated leisure class in a celestial retirement village, conveying the impression that death widened their appointed sphere: the church, faith, manners, morals. . . . We see the prayer manuals and the flood of almost necrophiliac pamphlets that the Victorians devoured. . . . We see the women and the ministers competing for spiritual leadership in the community as they became more and more self-immersed. We see vapidity masquerading as a sacred innocence, the moral life as a perpetual childhood, the church becoming progressively more anti-intellectual, the middle-class woman idealized not as doer but as n display case for the clothes and the pretty objects that man could lay at her feet, tragically contributing to her own exploitation, undermining all that was most authentic and creative in contemporary theology, romanticism, feminism. . . . With a masterful grasp of the tentures and the tensions of Victorian life, Ann Douglas gives us, in counterpoint, the important work of the Romantics who were forced to exist without popular support—among them, Margaret Fuller, rejecting the feminine ideal propounded in the ladies' magazines, striking out to cultivate a sense of history, and a placesquarely within it, and Herman Melville, writing his vigorously anti-sentimental dramas of the sea and the city; both of them exalting the ideal of the singular self and soul that their culture increasingly disregarded. This is a work of inspired scholarship and rich allusive power—an involving and fascinating portrait of Victorian America: its literature, its theology, its cultural legacy.—1977 jacket

At an exclusive boarding school in the late 1960's, an unnamed girl keeps a journal so that she can read it some day and "know exactly what happened to me when I was sixteen."