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.

A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power

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.