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The Lonely Soldier--the inspiration for the documentary The Invisible War--vividly tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006--and of the challenges they faced while fighting a war painfully alone. More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman, and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation, sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness...
National Reading Group Month "Great Group Reads" selection "[Helen Benedict] has emerged as one of our most thoughtful and provocative writers of war literature." —David Abrams, author of Fobbit and Brave Deeds, at the Quivering Pen "No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict. . . . Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading." —Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls "Fierce and vivid and full of hope, this story of trauma and resilience, of love and family, of mutual aid and solidarity in the aftermath of a brutal ...
In 1960, when her husband, Rupert, a British diplomat, is posted to the remote Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean, Penelope is less than thrilled. But she never imagined the danger that awaited her family there. Her sun-kissed children run barefoot on the beach and become enraptured by the ancient magic, or grigri, in the tropical colonial outpost. Rupert, meanwhile, falls under the spell of a local beauty who won't stop until she gets what she wants. Desperate to save her marriage, Penelope turns to black magic, exposing her family to the island's sinister underbelly...
Background information on the author's interviews with Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, Beverly Sills, Paule Marshall, Bernard Malamud, Jessica Mitford, Leonard Michaels, Bertrand Bard, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Benedict examines press treatment of four notorious sex crimes from the past decade and shows how victims are labelled either as virgins or vamps, a practice she condemns as misleading and harmful.
Nineteen-year-old Kate Brady joined the army to bring honor to her family and to the Middle East. Instead, she finds herself in a forgotten corner of the Iraq desert in 2003, guarding a makeshift American prison. There, Kate meets Naema Jassim, an Iraqi medical student whose father and little brother have been detained in the camp. Kate and Naema promise to help each other, but the war soon strains their intentions. Like any soldier, Kate must face the daily threats of combat duty, but as a woman, she is in equal danger from the predatory men in her unit. Naema suffers bombs, starvation, and the loss of her home and family. As the two women struggle to survive and hold on to the people they love, each comes to have a drastic and unforeseeable effect on the other’s life. Culled from real life experiences of female soldiers and Iraqis, Sand Queen offers a story of hope, courage and struggle from the rare perspective of women at war.
Tired of looking after her daughter's baby, a Dominican cleaning lady in New York concocts a scheme to have it adopted by a rich woman. The drama begins when the daughter decides she wants her baby back. By the author of A World Like This.
Joyce finds herself living the merciless life of a Greek peasant woman, at the command of people steeped in religion, misogyny, superstition, and their experience of war.".
When seventeen-year-old Madge, a bi-racial girl living in a small Pennsylvania town populated by bigots, decides to change the world for the better, she starts by "adopting" a four-year-old boy she finds abandoned in New York City.
Inspired by a brother's high school science project--a perpetual motion machine that could save the world-- The Perpetual Motion Machine is a memoir in essays that attempts to save a sibling by depicting the visceral pain that accompanies longing for some past impossibility. The collection has been a science project in its study of memory, in the calculation and plotting of the moments that make up a childhood. The preparation has been "in the field" in that it is built upon the gathering of lived experience; the evidence is photo albums, family interviews, and anecdotes from friends. The project has been one giant experiment--to see if they can all make it out alive.