About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Angela Garbes
Positive Booklist ... slim and affirming ... Garbes thoughtfully but not bitterly critiques the twin forces of capitalism and colonialism that render care work invisible, especially devaluing the women and people of color who shoulder so much of it in and out of the home. Maintaining an inclusive premise for the book, Garbes defines mothering as an action not confined to gender or biology. Topical reflections from a diversity of authors further lend to the book’s inclusive vision of care work and nourishing community—a vision Garbes commits to raising her own two daughters toward with sincerity.
Liz Scheier
Positive Booklist Sometimes raw and other times wry, Scheier recounts the combinations of adventure and abuse, love and terror her mother, Judith, engendered ... Scheier’s final pages are a moving confession of learning how to love her own children the \'correct\' amount without subjecting them to the damaging extremes of a mother’s love.
Barrett Holmes Pitner
Rave Booklist Pitner draws on European philosophy movements to fill the linguistic void and analyze its bleak, often paradoxical effects. His philosophical explorations build on and circle back to each other to form a cohesive, effectively structured analysis. Narrative moments from Pitner’s personal journey toward understanding ethnocide provide a human story balancing his profound linguistic analysis. Pitner’s insightful, entirely original argument provides a fascinating new way to understand American national culture and to reclaim identities suppressed by ethnocide.
Chris Hedges
Positive Booklist Hedges calls on us to question our view of incarcerated people and our understanding of education’s purpose.
Elly Fishman
Positive Booklist Trauma and fear darken the pages, but commitment from Sullivan’s staff provides hope in the book and the refugee students’ lives ... Fishman honors Sullivan’s work in turning around a previously failing school and caring for students, and fosters understanding for the disparate yet shared trauma of student refugee experiences.
Deborah Copaken
Positive Booklist ... candid, confessional ... At times darkly humorous, at times despondent, Copaken’s very relatable memoir is a strong act of self-assertion.
Leigh Patel
Positive Booklist A particularly poignant censure is aimed at universities’ theatrically professed diversity and inclusion efforts, which Patel contends do not actually interrupt settler colonialism and indeed exploit the labor of people of color. Patel offers tangible examples of how settler colonialism is an ongoing, still-living practice. For example, departments studying marginalized peoples are still beholden to white, corporate models of promotion and measurements of success, and universities displace communities by buying land in historical neighborhoods. Thought-provoking interrogation for academics and reformers.
Abigail Tucker
Positive Booklist ... humorous ... moving and amusing ... [Tucker\'s] conclusion—that maternal instinct indeed exists—comes with a warning: it is neither joyfully innate nor a magical enlightenment, but rather a volatile transmogrification, a sort of birth a woman herself undergoes ... Using clever, colorful, figurative language and a warm, conversational tone, Tucker documents the complex challenges women who become mothers face. Readers might come in to learn what baby cuddles do to the brain, be tempted to leave over the poop talk and placenta eating, but ultimately stay for the acknowledgment Tucker gives to the unique experience of motherhood.
Jo Napolitano
Positive Booklist Their powerful narratives, framed by excellent use of statistics contextualizing the human rights issues at stake, span an exodus from genocidal countries to an American federal court. Napolitano uses just enough of the case’s legal issues and proceedings to create an accessible courtroom drama. Ultimately, Khadidjah and Mahamed’s story becomes an indictment of educational inequities and injustices experienced by schoolchildren in America: underfunded schools, outsourcing to private entities to save money, unequal access to high-quality instructional programs, lack of specialists, culturally unresponsive climates, subjective admission criteria, physical discipline of students, and, most damagingly, a system more concerned with state-reported graduation numbers than student learning. Napolitano’s book should be the next step for people horrified by the plight of refugees, undocumented people, and unaccompanied minors.
Reuben Jonathan Miller
Rave Booklist Interweaving personal memoir and qualitative data in narrative form, sociology professor Miller’s Halfway Home is reminiscent of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) in its exploration of the \'supervised society\' and \'carceral citizenship\' of mass incarceration that systematically prevent former prisoners from participating in society ... Miller’s experiences with finding a home for his formerly incarcerated brother show how people enter a post-prison life precariously dependent on the whims of parole officers or favors from strangers. Thus, Miller arrives at his ultimate plea for \'radical politics of community and hospitality that would take us far beyond the limits of a moral calculus based on public safety or fear of retribution.\'