Sara Marcus, “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution” (Harper Perennial, 2010)
Harkening out of the United State’s Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile made a big enough splash that their names and songs are still recognized by many rock fans. And tho...
3 Jul 20121h
Elizabeth Goldsmith, “The King’s Mistresses” (PublicAffairs, 2012)
As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were...
29 Jun 201243min
Nwando Achebe, “The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe” (Indiana University Press, 2011)
When I saw Nwando Achebe‘s book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011), I thought: “Really? A female king? Cool!” It turns out Ahebi Ugbabe was not only a f...
29 Jun 20121h 13min
Timothy Grainey, “Beyond ‘Bend It Like Beckham’: The Global Phenomenon of Women’s Soccer” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match of t...
22 Jun 201254min
Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, “Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, tur...
8 Jun 20121h 16min
Sally Bedell Smith, “Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch” (Random House, 2012)
The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, E...
1 Jun 201242min
Erin D. Chapman, “Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Whoever states the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words” grossly underestimates. So Erin D. Chapman shows in Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford Unive...
29 Mai 20121h 13min
Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011)
When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how man...
23 Mai 20121h 16min
