Inclusive Collection: B

"In a work that beautifully demonstrates the rewards of closely observing nature, Elisabeth Bailey shares an inspiring and intimate story of her uncommon encounter with a "Neohelix albolabris" --a common woodland snail."

"By focusing upon the lives, work, and activism of specific, often unacknowledged, migrant populations, the contributors present a more comprehensive vision of the South Asian presence in the United States."

"The Gullah culture, though borne of isolation and slavery, thrived on the US East Coast sea islands from pre-Civil War times until today, and nowhere more prominently than on Hilton Head Island, SC. On this small barrier island descendants of the first generations of Gullah people continue to preserve Gullah language, customs, arts, and cuisine. The three authors of Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956 are among those descendants, and in this book, they chronicle the amazing history of their secluded community from the Civil War through the 1950s, when real estate development connected Hilton Head Island to the mainland with a bridge."

"Deaf people are usually regarded by the hearing world as having a lack, as missing a sense. ... In this bold intervention into ongoing debates about disability and what it means to be human, experts from a variety of disciplines ... advance the concept of Deaf Gain and challenge assumptions about what is normal."

"A Los Angeles transgender school volunteer traces her work with four students whose otherwise typical teen experiences were uniquely shaped by their circumstances, in an account that describes their efforts to resolve identity challenges."

"Examines the lives and careers of over fifty African-American artists, and the relation of their work to prevailing artistic, social, and political trends in America and throughout the world." Cortor is covered on pp. 272-279.

"Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home,' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive."

"Beginning in 1970 with her arrest in connection with a courtroom shootout, then moving through her trial and acquittal, the book traces Davis's life and work during the subsequent decades and her influential career as a public intellectual. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis's political writings, the book also features interviews with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected those materials."

"The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty twentieth- and twenty-first-century painters, photographers, sculptors, mixed-media assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists."

"This book is a compact, exceptionally diverse introduction to the history of Black women, from the first African woman who arrived in America to the women of today."

"This book gives voice to the experiences of women of color--women of African, Native American, Latina, East Indian, Korean, and Japanese descent--as students pursuing terminal degrees and as junior and senior faculty members navigating the academy, grappling with the dilemmas encountered by others and themselves as they exist at the intersections of their work and identities. Women of color are frequently relegated--on account of both race and womanhood--into monolithic categories that perpetuate oppression, subdue and suppress conflict, and silence voices."

Fiction. "Anita lives in Karachi's biggest slum. Her mother is a maalish wali, paid to massage the tired bones of rich women. But Anita's life will change forever when she meets her elderly neighbour, a man whose shelves of books promise an escape to a different world. On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, whose father owns half the city and expects great things of him. But when a beautiful and rebellious girl joins his school, Monty will find his life going in a very different direction. Sunny's father left India and went to England to give his son the opportunities he never had. Yet Sunny doesn't fit in anywhere. It's only when his charismatic cousin comes back into his life that he realises his life could hold more possibilities than he ever imagined. These three lives will cross in the desert, a place where life and death walk hand in hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice."

"Essays explore female to male transsexualism, cross-dressing, and people who have ambiguous genitalia."

Each essay "addresses how Asian-American writers reflect and shape their cultural identities in fiction" and draws "attention to the diversity within the Asian communities of the United States and Canada ...."

"Columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a "race book." But as violence against Black people--both physical and psychological--seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms."

"This straight-forward and reader-friendly text provides strategies for P-12 educators who are interested in ensuring the cultural and academic excellence of African American students. It presents a careful balance of published scholarship, a framework for culturally relevant teaching, and research-based cases of teachers who excel at teaching Black children.

"Natasha Bowens's quest to explore her own roots in the soil leads her to unearth a larger story, weaving together the seemingly forgotten history of agriculture for people of color, the issues they face today, and the culture and resilience they bring to food and farming."

"Anthology that places the Deaf on center stage, thus offering them to represent the two worlds (of the hearing & of the deaf) from a Deaf perspective."

"These engaging true stories show that for most of American history, the law was an enemy to the Black Woman. Using perseverance, tenacity, intelligence and faith, she turned the law into a weapon to combat discrimination, a prestigious occupation, and a platform from which she could lift others as she rose."

"Though often dismissed as frivolous spectacles, sociologist Katherine McFarland Bruce builds a convincing case for the importance of Pride parades as cultural protests at the heart of the LGBT community. Weaving together interviews, archival reports, quantitative data, and ethnographic observations at six diverse, contemporary parades in New York City, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Burlington, Fargo, and Atlanta, Bruce describes how Pride parades are a venue for participants to challenge the everyday cultural stigma of being queer in America, all with a flair and sense of fun that are absent from typical protests."

Fiction. "Lilith Lyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected, by miraculously powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: Their own children."