Gender Studies

"A heroic work of journalism on what must rank as one of the foremost catastrophes of modern history."—The New York Times

"In an engaging biography, Miller shows that even though the flag story is riddled with improbabilities, the life of the woman who came to be known as Betsy Ross is worth recovering . . . Through skillful use of small details, Miller sustains her repeated assertion that the future Betsy Ross was often 'only a handshake away' from the men who made the Revolution . . . Miller's admiring biography will warm the hearts of those who love the Betsy Ross legend. It may also convince skeptics (Miller refers to them as 'naysayers') that there is something in the flag stories worth considering."—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The New York Times

"As delicious as a day spent with your funniest, smartest friend, this collection is also a call to action, inspiring readers to fight the fear of female power. As the many writers in here show, few wrongs are righted without a bitchfest first."—Cristina Page, author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex

"There was a time, believe it or not, when our bodies worked for us, instead of the other way around. In her new book, Bodies, British author and psychologist Susie Orbach examines how science, culture and globalization have upended our relationships to our corporeal selves, turning us from master into slave. Good looks and peak fitness are no longer a happy biological gift, she argues, but a ceaseless pursuit. The idea: People around the world—men included—now treat their bodies as vanity projects: every pore, curve and feature is an opportunity for self-improvement. Instead of a tool for production, the body is a production in itself. In our culture, beauty is an ambition like any other metric of success, and body hatred is the West's silent export. The evidence: How much do you need? When Orbach penned her first book 31 years ago, the bestseller Fat Is a Feminist Issue, bulimia and anorexia were barely on the radar. Now parents digitally enhance their kids' baby pictures, the cosmetic-surgery industry is growing by $1 billion a year, we can genetically screen our embryos, and scientists grow bioengineered organs in labs. The conclusion: As nips and tucks and tweaks become more acceptable, we may no longer treat the human body as a God-given accident of biology, but Orbach implores us to take some pleasure in our bodies as they are—to take them, she writes repeatedly, 'for granted.'"—Jesse Ellison, Newsweek

"A coming-of-age story, coming-out story, a Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph, Call Me by Your Name is also an open question. It is an exceptionally beautiful book that cannot quite bring itself to draw the inevitable conclusion about axis-shifting passion that men and women of the world might like to think they will always reach—that that obscure object of desire is, by definition, ungraspable, indeterminate and already lost at exactly the moment you rush so fervently to hold him or her."—Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review