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Backstreet Boys
by Anna Louise GoldenWhen they say Quit Playing Games With My Heart, you better listen-- 'cause they're the Backstreet Boys, one of the hottest boy-bands ever to take the stage. These five ultra-fine guys have won the hearts of millions. So step back into their awesome world and see what made them tick at this exciting, early stage of their careers. An insider's look back at the band: Howie Dorough was the peacemaker of the group. But watch out-this flirtatious hunk was also known as the "Latin lover." Kevin Richardson, as the group's gorgeous oldest member, sometimes had to be the responsible one. Nick Carter, the band's youngest member, wasn't called "Chaos" for nothing-- this blond-haired, blue-eyed cutie was a major prankster! Brian Littrell, a big-time hottie, was the comedian of the bunch-- Jim Carrey was his idol, and he loved to play practical jokes. AJ McLean, deeply romantic-- he wrote the band's love ballads, and this sexy songster was rarely seen without his trademark sunglasses.Fall in love all over again with the Backstreet Boys as they celebrate more than twenty years of top-charting success.
Backstreet Mom: A Mother's Tale of Backstreet Boy AJ McLean's Rise to Fame, Struggle with Addiction, and Ultimate Triumph
by Denise I. McLean Nicole P. GotlinFeatured on "Oprah" and "Good Morning America. Backstreet Mom is the story of one single mother's courageous battle to save her son could be the story of any woman with a child in trouble. There's more money at stake, more public attention and a larger than life career in the balance. An integral part of the Backstreet Boys from the very beginning, AJ McClean's mother, Denise, traveled with the group and served as their publicist and fan club coordinator. In close proximity to the successes and heartbreaks of her son's career, Denise watched her son's painful descent into alcoholism and depression. This revealing account tells the tale of AJ's rise to superstardom, his decline into addiction, and his struggles through rehab, and offers a look at the harsh world of the music industry. Any mother who's ever faced the pain of a child unraveling will find herself in the pages of this honest and inspiring memoir.
Backwards, in High Heels: Faith Whittlesey, Ronald Reagan's "Madam Ambassador" in Switzerland and the West Wing
by Thomas Carty“Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did,” so the saying goes, “but she did it backwards and in high heels.” Faith Whittlesey popularized this quotation during the 1980s, and many books attribute the line to her. The message clearly resonated with a generation of American men and women coming to age in the late 20th century, when all things seemed possible. In this book Faith Whittlesey gives concrete meaning to the quotation through her life and career as an effective “Madam Ambassador” in the worlds of both money and politics. Raised in western New York State by highly motivated Irish-American parents of limited means, she worked to reach an eminent position as Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador to Switzerland (twice), and to serve as the highest-ranking woman on Reagan’s White House staff from 1983–1985. There she occupied the West Wing office soon to be Hillary Clinton’s, and as a widow (since 1974) with three children provided a female influence of her own to a presidential culture well before it was fashionable.In addition to her activities in U.S. policy and politics, for more than 30 years Whittlesey has proven to be one of the most important liaisons between the United States and Switzerland, a sister republic as well as financial superpower. Whether operating from her second floor office in the White House’s West Wing or the bucolic Ambassador’s residence in Bern, Switzerland, Whittlesey made a practice to advocate Reagan’s policies through thoughtful debate and persuasive argumentation.After leaving government service, she practiced private-sector diplomacy, serving from 1989 as Chairman and then Emeritus of the American Swiss Foundation, which endeavors to promote understanding between the two nations, organizing several private high-level delegations to visit China, and participating, both publicly and also at times “behind the scenes,” in discussion of the most significant public policy issues of recent decades.This book provides a fascinating look into how one woman, despite daunting obstacles, was able to achieve exceptional influence, thence use her position for the furtherance of common good.
Bacon in Moscow
by James Birch'A rollicking cultural adventure before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the meteoric rise of contemporary art in the nineties' Grayson PerryThis funny and personal memoir is the account of an audacious attempt by James Birch, a young British curator, to mount the ground-breaking retrospective of Francis Bacon's work at the newly refurbished Central House of Artists, Moscow in 1988.Side-lined by the British establishment, Birch found himself at the heart of a honey-trap and the focus for a picaresque cast of Soviet officials, attachés and politicians under the forbidding eye of the KGB as he attempted to bring an unseen western cultural icon to Russia during the time of 'Glasnost', just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.Bacon in Moscow is the story of the evolution of an exhibition that was at the artistic and political heart of a sea of change that culminated with the fall of the USSR.
Bad Animals: A Father's Accidental Education in Autism
by Joel YanofskyJoel Yanofsky tried for years to start this memoir. "It's not just going to be about autism," he told his wife, Cynthia. "It's going to be about parenthood and marriage, about hope and despair, and storytelling, too." "Marriage?" Cynthia said. "What about marriage?" A veteran book reviewer, Yanofsky has spent a lifetime immersed in literature (not to mention old movies and old jokes), which he calls shtick. This account of a year in the life of a family describes a father's struggle to enter his son's world, the world of autism, using the materials he knows best: self-help books, feel-good memoirs, literary classics from the Bible to Dr. Seuss, old movies, and, yes, shtick. Funny, wrenching, and unfailingly candid, Bad Animals is both an exploration of a baffling condition and a quirky love story told by a gifted writer.
Bad Blood: A Memoir
by Lorna SageNobody's unhappy family was ever quite like that of Lorna Sage, whose ruthlessly funny, excruciating, inspiring memoir Bad Blood won England's Whitbread Biography Award. She grew up in the '40s on the Welsh border, in the crossfire between her grandparents, a bitter, bibulous, bookish vicar resembling Jack Sprat and his short, "fat doll" of an ignorant wife. He preached earthy sermons about how one might prefer for a wife "Martha before dinner, Mary after dinner." His wife's "notion of marriage [was] that a man signed you up to have his wicked way with you and should spend the rest of his life paying through the nose." Grandma blackmailed the vicar with his diary of adultery, in which she scribbled vicious comments invaluable to the family historian. She gobbled sweets; he drank, fumed, and helped make Lorna Sage a noted literary critic. -Amazon.com
Bad Blood: A Memoir (Perennial Non-fiction Promotion Ser. #Vol. 9)
by Lorna SageBestselling author Lorna Sage delivers the tragicomic memoirof her escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post-WWII Britain—and thestory of the weddings and relationships that defined three generations of herfamily—in Bad Blood, an internationalbestseller and the winner of the coveted Whitbread Biography Award. Readers ofbooks like Angela’s Ashes and The Liar’s Club as well as fans ofSage’s own lucid and penetrating writing will be captivated by the book thatthe New York Times Book Review said“fills us with wonder and gratitude. . . . Few literary critics have everwritten anything so memorable.”
Bad Blood: The Secret Life of the Tour de France
by Jeremy WhittleEven the biggest cycling fan can one day wake up to find that he has lost his faith Bad Blood is the story of Jeremy Whittle's journey from unquestioning fan to Tour de France insider and confirmed sceptic. It's about broken friendships and a sport divided; about having to choose sides in the war against doping; about how galloping greed and corporate opportunism have led the Tour de France to the brink of destruction.Part personal memoir, part devastating exposé of a sport torn apart by drugs and scandal, Bad Blood is a love letter to one man's past, and a warning to cycling's future.‘Whatever you think about doping, you must read this book ... Well-balanced, considered, compelling’ RouleurShortlisted for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year
Bad Boy
by Michael Stone Eric FischlIn Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved. In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art--his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings. Bad Boy follows Fischl's maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.
Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft
by Fredric Alan MaxwellIn Jan. 2000 Bill Gates gave his responsibilities & the title CEO of Microsoft to his best friend, Steve Ballmer, who had been at Gates's side almost since the company's earliest days. Ballmer's life is an incredible story of tremendous ambition, genius, arrogance, & charisma. This enlightening biography -- based on in-depth study & interviews with former Microsoft insiders -- provides the complete, controversial narrative of one of the technology industry's most influential & talked-about figures. It is also the definitive story of the Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer relationship, from their 1974 meeting at a Harvard dorm. The book shows how Ballmer & Gates work together & provides a revealing look at one of the masterminds of the technological age.
Bad Boy of Gospel Music: The Calvin Newton Story (American Made Music Series)
by Russ Cheatham“I messed up,” Calvin Newton lamented, after wasting thirty years and doing time in both state and federal prisons for theft, counterfeiting, and drug violations. “These were years of my life that I could have been singing gospel music.” During his prime, he was super-handsome, athletic, and charged with sexual charisma that attracted women to him like flies to honey. Atop this abundance was his astounding voice, “the voice of an angel.” This book is his prodigal-son story. Audacious, Newton never turned down a dare, even if it meant climbing on the roof of a speeding car or wading into a freezing ocean. As a boy boxer, he was a Kentucky Golden Gloves champ who k.o.’ed his opponent in twenty-three seconds. By his late teens he had been recruited by the Blackwood Brothers, the number-one gospel quartet in the world. In his mid-twenties while he was singing Christian songs with the Oak Ridge Quartet, Newton’s mighty talent and movie-star looks took him deep into hedonism--reckless driving, heavy romancing, and addictive pill popping. As 1950s rock ‘n’ roll began its invasion of gospel, he and two partners formed the Sons of Song, the first all-male gospel trio. Long before the pop sound claimed contemporary Christian music, the Sons of Song turned gospel upside down with histrionic harmony, high-styled tuxedos, and Hollywood verve. Their signature song, “Wasted Years,” foreshadowed Newton’s punishing fall. This biography looks back at the destructive lifestyle that wrecked a sparkling career. When well into his sixties, Newton turned his life around and was able to confront his demons and discuss his prodigal days. He talked extensively with Russ Cheatham about his self- destruction and the great personal expense of his own bad-boy choices and late redemption. In this candid biography, one of gospel’s all-stars discloses a messed-up life that vacillated between achievement and failure, fame and infamy, happiness and grief.
Bad Boy of Music
by George AntheilThe memoirs of George Antheil, 1900-1959. No musician has ever written memoirs such as these, until the much later work of Ned Rorem, perhaps partly because few musicians can write, and chiefly because no musician, not even the most wild-haired, has had a life like the one George Antheil is currently enjoying. Witty, glittering, packed full of the bizarre, these pages record the fabulous career of an extraordinary pianist, composer, and writer who got his introduction to music in plebeian Trenton when two innocent-looking old ladies covered up a jailbreak by thundering on the piano. After Trenton, nothing about George Antheil's life has been plebeian. Practicing the piano sixteen hours a day, he toured Europe, played French compositions in Germany, married a Hungarian in Paris, and there became a leader of Left Bank iconoclasts. In 1929 he returned to America for the performance of his "Ballet Mécanique" (scored for machines and airplane propeller), which caused a sensation among critics and sent him penniless back to Europe. In 1933 he returned again to America, where he led an even more checkered career, writing several books, magazine articles which have since become famous, and indulging his favorite hobby of, obviously, glandular criminology. Then he went to Hollywood, did the score for The Scoundrel, ran an advice-to-the-lovelorn column called "Boy Advises Girl," and composed a highly successful Fourth Symphony. If the mere framework of his life is colorful, the details are even more so. Like those of Oscar Levant's A Smattering of Ignorance, his pages are alive with famous personalities: the eccentric Stravinsky, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Stokowski, Dalí, Hedy Lamarr, to mention a few. But Bad Boy of Music is also a serious yet never obscure inside story of how it feels and what it takes to be a concert artist--a sober story abundant in illuminating and profound thoughts upon music and art in general.
Bad Boy: A Memoir (Amistad Ser.)
by Walter Dean MyersInto a memoir that is gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable, Walter Dean Myers richly weaves the details of his Harlem childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: a loving home life with his adopted parents, Bible school, street games, and the vitality of his neighborhood. <P><P>Although Walter spent much of his time either getting into trouble or on the basketball court, secretly he was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer. But as his prospects for a successful future diminished, the values he had been taught at home, in school, and in his community seemed worthless, and he turned to the streets and his books for comfort. Here in his own words is the story of one of the strongest voices in children's and young adult literature today.
Bad Boys of the Black Hills: ...and Some Wild Women, Too
by Barbara FiferThe lively romp details some of the Wild West's most engaging stories, specifically in the Black Hills and Deadwood, home to prostitutes and poets, desperadoes and dancehall girls, fortune tellers and fugitives. Readers will meet a host of rowdies ranging from madams to stagecoach robbers, from tall-tale tellers to killers.
Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance
by Mike ScardinoAn adrenaline-fueled read that will stay with you long after the you turn the final page, BAD CALL is a "compulsively readable, totally unforgettable"* memoir about working on a New York City ambulance in the 1960s. (*James Patterson)Bad Call is Mike Scardino's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, young Mike spends his days speeding from one chaotic emergency to another. His adventures take him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers are suffering, and dying, in unimaginable ways. Learning on the job, Mike encounters all manner of freakish accidents (the man who drank Drano, the woman attacked by rats, the man who inflated like a balloon), meets countless unforgettable New York characters, falls in love, is nearly murdered, and gets an early and indelible education in the impermanence of life and the cruelty of chance. Action-packed, poignant, and rich with details that bring Mike's world to technicolor life, Bad Call is a gritty portrait of a bygone era as well as a bracing reminder that, though "life itself is a fatal condition," it's worth pausing to notice the moments of beauty, hope, and everyday heroism along the way.
Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels
by Paul Pringle"Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism... when institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability."—The New York TimesFor fans of Spotlight and Catch and Kill comes a nonfiction thriller about corruption and betrayal radiating across Los Angeles from one of the region's most powerful institutions, a riveting tale from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who investigated the shocking events and helped bring justice in the face of formidable odds. On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is one of the biggest employers in L.A., and it casts a long shadow.But what he couldn’t have foreseen was that this tip would lead to the unveiling of not one major scandal at USC but two, wrapped in a web of crimes and cover-ups. The rot rooted out by Pringle and his colleagues at The Times would creep closer to home than they could have imagined—spilling into their own newsroom.Packed with details never before disclosed, Pringle goes behind the scenes to reveal how he and his fellow reporters triumphed over the city’s debased institutions, in a narrative that reads like L.A. noir. This is L.A. at its darkest and investigative journalism at its brightest.
Bad Dog!
by Lin JensenWhat would happen if, instead of bolting your doors against the intrusion of demons you invited them in? Bad Dog! is a vivid testament to the unforeseen love, beauty, and redemption discovered in the most difficult times and places. It reads like a collection of closely linked short stories (think JD Salinger) but is in fact a work of literary nonfiction (think Robert Fulgham, or Augusten Burroughs). Bad Dog! will appeal to anyone who has fallen into dark places and wants to climb back into the light. With quietly crafted poetic language of a quality rarely seen in spiritual books, Lin Jensen tells the stories of his remarkably difficult life: his tumultuous early years on a struggling Midwestern turkey farm, his failed marriage, and the search for meaning that led him eventually to become a Zen teacher. The raw and earthy lessons of Bad Dog! cut to the quick with an understated power, and the reader is left at the end of each chapter subtly transformed, able to reflect more deeply and more fruitfully on the struggles of our own lives. Lin Jensen's writing has rare poetic and literary merit. Lin Jensen received the Best Nonfiction/Spiritual Book award from Today's Librarian for his previous book, Uncovering the Wisdom of the Heartmind. He has taught writing in various colleges and universities for over twenty years, and continues to teach Buddhist ethics and practices at Chico State University. He is the founding teacher and senior teacher emeritus of the Chico Zen Sangha, in Chico, California, where he lives with his wife.
Bad Dyke: Salacious Stories From a Queer Life
by Allison MoonFurry-style fox hunts, breaking into waterparks, and masturbating in trees. It's all just part of the queer life of author and sex-educator Allison Moon. <p><p> This collection of 18 memoirs celebrates the humor and tenderness of falling in and out of love and in and out of bed.
Bad Education: Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them
by Matt Goodwin'Buy this book' DOUGLAS MURRAY'An urgent call for reformation’ DAVID GOODHARTTHE EXPLOSIVE NEW BOOK FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF NATIONAL POPULISM AND VALUES, VOICE AND VIRTUE.Depressed tutors and disillusioned students. Funding crises and falling standards. Culture wars and campus protests. Welcome to the broken world of academia. Welcome to Bad Education.-------------------------Our universities are broken. Established as sanctuaries of truth and higher learning, they are now decaying institutions that are failing a generation of young people. Consumed by funding and admissions crises, mired in political scandal and governed by self-interest, their founding principles have been corrupted. This explosive book shows us why, and what we must do to fix them.Matt Goodwin spent decades working as an academic in some of the world’s leading universities, delivering underfunded courses to increasingly disengaged lecture theatres, sitting on rudderless committees, counselling depressed colleagues and concerned students, watching standards slip and academic integrity decline.At the heart of this crisis is an increasingly politicised campus. Once bastions of free speech, forums for open debate and incubators of bold new ideas, our universities are increasingly becoming monocultures, ruled by an ideology that is silencing respected voices, stifling discussion and violently shutting down diverse opinion, betraying intellectual freedom and failing to deliver the very basics of an education.Unflinching, shocking and urgent, this first-hand account provides an insider's view of how the founding principles of academia are in decline and why we should all consider what this means for the students of today, tomorrow and the world they will shape.
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism
by Lewis R. GordonLewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human.
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
by Carmen CallilThis brilliant book tells the story of one of history's most despicable villains and conmen -- Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and 'Commissioner for Jewish Affairs', who managed the Vichy government's dirty work, 'controlling' its Jewish population. Born into an established, politically moderate family, Louis Darquier ('de Pellepoix' was a later affectation) proceeded from modest beginnings to dissemble his way to power, continually reinventing himself in conformity with an obsession with racial purity and the latent anti-Semitism of the French Catholic Church. He was the ultimate chancer: always broke, always desperate for attention, social cachet, women and drink, he became 'one of the few men to put on weight during the Second World War', and after it was over he decamped to Spain, never to be brought to justice for having sent thousands of Jews, men, women and children, to the camps. Early on in his career he married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of fantasy and deception, and together they had a child, Anne Darquier, whom they promptly abandoned to grow up in England under an oppressive mantle of silence. Her tragic story of honourable but exhausting ambition is woven through the narrative. In Carmen Callil's masterful and harrowing account, Darquier's ascent to power during the years leading up to the Second World War comes to mirror the rise of French anti-Semitism and the role it played in the horrors that were to follow. It is a portrait of a society as fragmented and desperate as any before the war, trading miserable second-rate philosophies in search of meaning and power, and of how the people of Vichy turned a blind eye to the shameful things being done under their noses.
Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism
by Andrew FefferIn late summer 1940, as war spread across Europe and as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression, an anticommunist hysteria convulsed New York City. Targeting the city’s municipal colleges and public schools, the New York state legislature’s Rapp-Coudert investigation dragged hundreds of suspects before public and private tribunals to root out a perceived communist conspiracy to hijack the city’s teachers unions, subvert public education, and indoctrinate the nation’s youth. Drawing on the vast archive of Rapp-Coudert records, Bad Faith provides the first full history of this witch-hunt, which lasted from August 1940 to March 1942. Anticipating McCarthyism and making it possible, the episode would have repercussions for decades to come. In recapturing this moment in the history of prewar anticommunism, Bad Faith challenges assumptions about the origins of McCarthyism, the liberal political tradition, and the role of anticommunism in modern American life. With roots in the city’s political culture, Rapp-Coudert enjoyed the support of not only conservatives but also key liberal reformers and intellectuals who, well before the Cold War raised threats to national security, joined in accusing communists of “bad faith” and branded them enemies of American democracy. Exploring fundamental schisms between liberals and communists, Bad Faith uncovers a dark, “countersubversive” side of liberalism, which involved charges of misrepresentation, lying, and deception, and led many liberals to argue that the communist left should be excluded from American educational institutions and political life. This study of the Rapp-Coudert inquisition raises difficult questions about the good faith of the many liberals willing to aid and endorse the emerging Red scare, as they sacrificed principles of open debate and academic freedom in the interest of achieving what they believed would be effective modern government based on bipartisanship and a new and seemingly permanent economic prosperity.
Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist
by Sesali BowenFrom funny and fearless entertainment journalist Sesali Bowen, Bad Fat Black Girl combines rule-breaking feminist theory, witty and insightful personal memoir, and cutting cultural analysis for an unforgettable, genre-defining debut. <p><p> Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to hustle, stay on her toes, and champion other Black women and femmes as she navigated Blackness, queerness, fatness, friendship, poverty, sex work, and self-love. Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism, profiling game-changing artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monae. But despite all the beauty, complexity, and general badassery she saw, Bowen found none of that nuance represented in mainstream feminism. Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism meets today's hip-hop. <p><p> Bad Fat Black Girl offers a new, inclusive feminism for the modern world. Weaving together searing personal essay and cultural commentary, Bowen interrogates sexism, fatphobia, and capitalism all within the context of race and hip-hop. In the process, she continues a Black feminist legacy of unmatched sheer determination and creative resilience. <p><p> Bad bitches: this one’s for you.
Bad Feminist: Essays
by Roxane Gay“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.” — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?A New York Times BestsellerBest Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New York • Oprah.com • Miami Herald • Book Riot • Buzz Feed • Globe and Mail (Toronto) • The Root • Shelf AwarenessA collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generationIn these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.
Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship
by Tiffany Watt SmithA smart and thought-provoking memoir, history, and cultural critique about the turmoil and complexity of female friendship Our culture today is inundated with narratives about the strength of female friendship, whether through images of girl power, BFFs, or work wives. Yet cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith has always found her own life much messier. She has had dramatic friend breakups, friendships that felt like too much or not enough, friendships that drifted into silence, and friendships built on convenience rather than a meeting of minds. And there are older cultural scripts to contend with: the competitive rival, the jealous backstabber, the underminer, the fair-weather friend. We have all been bad friends. It’s impossible to be a perfect one; as Watt Smith points out, women’s friendships have long been magnified, scrutinized, praised, and admonished, creating a legacy of impossible ideals. In Bad Friend, Watt Smith reflects on her own experience and thoroughly mines the rich cultural history of female friendship to look for a new paradigm that might encompass the struggles along with the joy.