#ReadWomen2014 Non-Fiction: 'The End of Men' by Hanna Rosin

This book gets a pretty sweet shout-out in the new season of 'Orange is the New Black,' which I enjoyed immensely (the new season and the Hanna Rosin shout-out). Not surprisingly, Mr. Healy's summary is woefully and hilariously inaccurate, but the joke does point out that the book has a very unnecessarily inflammatory headline, and in this day and age, it comes across as the book equivalent of click bait.

I urge you to look past the incredibly awful title and try to enjoy and appreciate Rosin's well-researched presentation of contemporary gender dynamics and her very insightful analysis. Each chapter includes both the kind of anecdotal/narrative evidence you should grow to expect from a talented journalist over at The Atlantic, as well as a clear and occasionally dry presentation of statistical data. The book is largely concerned with the disproportionate number of women obtaining college degrees and gainful employment, and I think it would be particularly interesting when read in tandem with Jimmy Carter's new book on women's issues A Call to Action. Rosin presents the reader with all the manifold ways in which women are higher achieving than their male counterparts, while Carter focuses on all the ways women continue to be oppressed, including the educated and employed first-world women Rosin is concerned with.

#ReadWomen2014 Non-Fiction: 'A Call to Action' by Jimmy Carter

Obviously, the message behind #ReadWomen2014 is that women authors have been largely neglected, which is why the hashtag is used exclusively in reference to female authors. Just this once, however, I’m going to advocate a book about women by a male author-- not just any male author, but former US president, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and prolific author Jimmy Carter. Yes, he is a man, but the sole focus of the book is on the deplorable conditions in which women are expected to live and operate around the world, with particular focus on the role world religions have played in this oppression.  And really, male authors still only make up about 10% of the books I recommend, so I feel okay letting this one slide.

Is it completely terrible to admit that this book initially caught my eye (at Literati in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an all-time favorite book store of mine) because of its gorgeous, sumptuous blue cover?  If you, like me, have a tendency to fetishize books as physical objects, this book’s aesthetic powers alone make it worth buying.  When I read the title (in embossed gold!) I knew I had to have it.  In some ways it reads like a long list of transgressions against women, so I had to pace myself through the chapters.  I really appreciated the way global issues were seamlessly woven in with more national and local issues that have been getting a lot of media coverage lately, including the Stubenville rape case. I highly doubt that the book will turn out to be as influential as it should be, but at the very least I so appreciate a man with incredible reach and power aligning himself with women’s issues.

#ReadWomen2014 Non-Fiction: 'Redefining Realness' by Janet Mock

LGBTQ activist Janet Mock gained national attention when a profile of her experience, ‘I Was Born a Boy' was published in Marie Claire magazine in 2011. I didn’t become aware of her until the press tour for her new book Redefining Realness, when Mock gained notoriety for her very bad-ass takedowns of Piers Morgan and Katie Couric, whose misunderstanding of trans issues was utterly embarrassing.

I was really anxious to read her book, purely for its educational value. Trans culture is deeply complex and demands so much understanding and sensitivity. In my own efforts to be respectful I am often too scared to say or think anything about it, assuming that I cannot, and will never, understand trans experience. So I really appreciated the opportunity to gain her perspective from a memoir that is so deeply personal. 

While I wanted and expected lots of didacticism, I was really blown away by its sheer literary merits; that sounds like a backhanded compliment, which is not my intention. Good writers are few and far between, and Mock happens to be an excellent writer and a great trans activist.

Not only that, her own literary experiences are woven throughout and comprise major components in her personal development. I could read literary memoirs all day long, so it was a nice surprise to find that her memoir about gender and identity happened to also veer in that direction. And most importantly, she read and loved many books that I also loved at the same age, and cites Zadie Smith as her number one author crush.  

Her tone establishes a kind of intimacy between author and reader that is so hard to form and maintain, and yet it never impedes her authority as a trans woman. More generalized information about trans culture is incorporated into her own experiences so organically that it manages to be both enlightening and simultaneously pleasurable.  

My only criticism is that I dearly wish the publisher had gone with a different cover; in many ways this looks like a generic memoir, which it isn’t.  It will probably look dated ten years from now, and such a landmark book in LGBTQ culture deserves better.