Reader's Place: March 1, 2023
In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re examining the lives and work of the following formidable women.
Beautiful country: A memoir , by Qian Julie Wang, 2021. (Catalog)
When seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China. Wang channels her childhood perspective, illuminating the cruelty and indignity of America's immigration system, while also crafting a narrative of resilience from her family's small moments of joy: their first slice of pizza, "shopping days" when the family would unearth unlikely treasures in Brooklyn's trash, and the necessary escape she found in books at the local library.
Readme.txt: A memoir, by Chelsea Manning, 2022. (Catalog)
While working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq for the United States Army in 2010, Chelsea Manning disclosed more than seven hundred thousand classified military and diplomatic records that she had smuggled out of the country on the memory card of her digital camera. In 2011 she was charged with twenty-two counts related to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military records, and in 2013 she was sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison. Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman.
Ride-or-die: A feminist manifesto for the well-being of Black women, by Shanita Hubbard, 2022. (Catalog)
Author, adjunct professor of sociology and former therapist Hubbard disrupts the Ride-or-die complex – the assumption a Black woman will do anything for her family, friends and significant other, even at the cost of her own well-being – and argues that this way of life has left Black women exhausted, overworked, overlooked, and feeling depleted.
Guardians of the trees: A journey of hope through healing the planet, by Kinari Webb, M.D., 2021. (Catalog)
After graduating with honors from the Yale School of Medicine, Webb traveled to Borneo, listening to local communities about their solutions for how to both protect the rainforests and improve their lives. Founding two non-profits, Health in Harmony in the U.S. and ASRI in Indonesia, Webb and her local and international teams partnered with rainforest communities, building a clinic, developing regenerative economies, providing educational opportunities, and dramatically transforming the region.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau