Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
After the Pain
As a poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and critic, Gayl Jones has always resisted labels in her quest to find a liberating voice for black women and herself. With a poet's lyricism and a musician's ear for rhythm, she continually seeks new ways to confront the barriers, traumas, insecurities, and prejudices oppressing black women, and, by extension, all women. After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones is the first comprehensive collection of essays dedicated solely to the exploration of Jones's work. Ranging from analyses of her use of language and music to reevaluations of her representation of sexuality and gender roles to examinations of the oft-overlooked connections between Latin America and African Americans, each of these essays investigates Jones's desire to continually complicate the process of identity formation.
Reading Is My Window
Drawing on extensive interviews with ninety-four women prisoners, Megan Sweeney examines how incarcerated women use available reading materials to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures. Foregrounding the voices of African American women, Sweeney analyzes how prisoners read three popular genres: narratives of victimization, urban crime fiction, and self-help books. She outlines the history of reading and education in U.S. prisons, highlighting how the increasing dehumanization of prisoners has resulted in diminished prison libraries and restricted opportunities for reading. Although penal officials have sometimes endorsed reading as a means to control prisoners, Sweeney illuminates the resourceful ways in which prisoners educate and empower themselves through reading. Given the scarcity of counseling and education in prisons, women use books to make meaning from their experiences, to gain guidance and support, to experiment with new ways of being, and to maintain connections with the world.
The Story Within Us
This volume features in-depth, oral interviews with eleven incarcerated women, each of whom offers a narrative of her life and her reading experiences within prison walls. The women share powerful stories about their complex and diverse efforts to negotiate difficult relationships, exercise agency in restrictive circumstances, and find meaning and beauty in the midst of pain. Their shared emphases on abuse, poverty, addiction, and mental illness illuminate the pathways that lead many women to prison and suggest possibilities for addressing the profound social problems that fuel crime. Framing the narratives within an analytic introduction and reflective afterword, Megan Sweeney highlights th...
Prison Librarianship Policy and Practice
Prisoners are in a grey area regarding library services. Prison libraries violate many tenets of librarianship, with the justification of maintaining order. The field is de-professionalized--many positions are filled by persons without degrees in library science, and corrections administrators often write policy for services. Critics cite the need to implement public library service models despite practical difficulties. This book investigates state, national and international policies on prison libraries, reviews literature on the topic and describes partnerships between prisons and public libraries. Results from a national survey and follow-up interviews are included, providing a full narrative of policy outcomes in U.S. prisons.
Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership
How a preoccupation with charismatic leadership in African American culture has influenced literature from World War I to the present
Terrorism
What is terrorism? Why do people commit acts of terrorism? What can be done to stop terrorists? Find out more about why people commit acts of violence against innocent people and start forming your own opinions about what should be done to address this worldwide threat.
Reading Beyond the Book
Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the first critical analysis of mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, USA, and Canada based on original interviews and surveys with readers and event organizers. The resurgence of book groups has inspired new cultural formations of what the authors call "shared reading." They interrogate the enduring attraction of an old technology for readers, community organizers, and government agencies, exploring the social practices inspired by the sharing of books in public spaces and revealing the complex ideological investments made by readers, cultural workers, institutions, and the mass media in the meanings of reading.
Recovering Identity
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women's identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as "criminal-addicts." While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women's stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions' promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women's vulnerability to violence.
Exit and Voice
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Sometimes leaving home allows you to make an impact on it—but at what cost? Exit and Voice is a compelling account of how Mexican migrants with strong ties to their home communities impact the economic and political welfare of the communities they have left behind. In many decentralized democracies like Mexico, migrants have willingly stepped in to supply public goods when local or state government lack the resources or political will to improve the town. Though migrants’ cross-border investments often improve citizens’ access to essential public goods and create a more responsive local government, their work allows them to unintentionally exert political engagement and power, undermining the influence of those still living in their hometowns. In looking at the paradox of migrants who have left their home to make an impact on it, Exit and Voice sheds light on how migrant transnational engagement refashions the meaning of community, democratic governance, and practices of citizenship in the era of globalization.
Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels
Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison's seven later novels, revealing each novel's unconventional idea of love as expressed in a new and experimental narrative form.
