There are plenty of great puberty books out there for young people with vaginas. Helloflo: The Guide, Period.: The Everything Puberty Book for the Modern Girl is not one of them. Written by HelloFlo founder Naama Bloom and stamped with her company branding, The Guide, Period promises to be a fantastic addition to a pre-teen’s arsenal of body-awareness books, but it simply doesn’t deliver. Continue reading
Tracking her rise from humble beginnings to acclaimed author and self-made anthropologist, Peter Bagge‘s Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story charts the life of the Harlem Renaissance’s most famous woman writer, fast-forwarding through her life in bold technicolor to give us the woman, the myth, the legend: Zora Neale Hurston. Continue reading
A few writing books have become must-reads for any aspiring English-language novelist: Stephen King’s On Writing, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. This year, Colum McCann‘s Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice joins that list. Consisting of 52 essays crammed with no-nonsense advice, Letters is a must-read for any Aspiring Writer. Continue reading
Even after decades of U.S. military involvement, the Middle East remains a mystery to many — if not most — people in the West. In Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, Sarah Glidden offers a work of meta-journalism that chronicles the experiences of a small band of reporters as they trek through areas many of us may never visit to gather the stories of individuals impacted by U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The result is an intimate view of the journalistic process, accented with its own reporting on the lives of both journalists and their subjects. Continue reading
In her debut essay collection, You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, 2 Dope Queens co-host Phoebe Robinson lays out everything that’s on her mind, from how it feels to wear a natural hairstyle, to why Michael Fassbender will be the father of her future child. It’s an eclectic collection, and not without its low points, but Robinson’s debut is a solid one, nevertheless. Continue reading