Liza Featherstone's Selling Women Short is a well-researched, carefully outlined indictment of Wal-Mart's poor treatment of its female employees. The book is primarily a report on the pending class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart, which looks to come to trial in the next year or two and pits 1.6 million women against Wal-Mart. The book seems to have been hastily edited--there are the occasional obvious typo and some avoidable repetition; however, for anyone interested in discrimination or the behemoth that is Wal-Mart, this one's definitely worth a read.
Hee! What a riot Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is. Seriously--it's a really fun book. I don't often read things labelled as "Science," but this was a good idea. Roach discusses many issues concerning dead human bodies. Some of the chapters and topics are a little bit disturbing, but the irreverent, yet respectful tone Roach brings to the writing makes it readable and fun. I wouldn't recommend it for the overly squeamish, or for thos prone to fears regarding transportation (cars, planes, or trains), but if you enjoy black humor and reading about people who do work that one could never imagine existing, you'd probably get a kick out of Stiff.
Post-Christmas, I read Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons on the advice of my mother, who had received it for Christmas and read it in approximately 1.5 sittings.
It's amazing. It really is. Barry calls it "autobiofictionalography," and as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what it is because it just got me somewhere in my stomach. The bright colors and drawings temper the emotional impact enough that the reader is kept from completely reeling, or crying, or both, and the package as a whole is attractive and precise.
Barry's observations about childhood, and adolescence in particular, are completely astute and revelatory, even though the topics are universal. Salon.com appears to have several of the "demons" online (the book is a collection of vignettes that Barry has called "demons"), and this is one of my favorites.
Zoe Heller's What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal is delightful. Shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, this is a novel about female friendship, with a narrator who ends up being more interesting than the scandal she writes about. This is an extremely quick read--I read it in one day while traveling home for Christmas. It's not necessarily the most literary thing in the world, but it is carefully crafted and deft, and actually made me laugh out loud twice, which is not easy. I really recommend it for anyone who is looking for a fun read. Since I tend to overload on nonfiction of a depressing kind, this was a welcome respite.
This will be the first of several book reviews that are forthcoming since I've really hit my pleasure-reading stride after finishing the semester.
I had, up until a couple weeks ago, been a very, very bad potential teacher/education student because I had never read anything by Jonathan Kozol. Savage Inequalities is his most famous book, but I read Ordinary Resurrections after it was given to me as a gift.
It's a book about education, but it's even more about poverty and religion and spirituality. Kozol has a remarkable ability to paint portraits of real children without seeming patronizing, and without even seeming to be trying to describe them. He manages to bring the afterschool program he writes about to vivid life, even though he does an equally powerful job describing the desolate environment surrounding the program.
I would be tempted to suggest this book be read in tandem with Random Family, which I read earlier this year (feels like years ago at this point). Both tackle the South Bronx, and are powerful in their results.