29 results for "Science"

No straight road takes you there: essays for uneven terrain

Solnit, Rebecca
New York Times Bestseller In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty. Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world. "I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take," Solnit writes in the introduction, "the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past."
Haymarket Books 2025-05-13 184 pages

The beginning comes after the end: notes on a world of change

Solnit, Rebecca
"Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability. The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized. While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world." -- Provided by publisher
Haymarket Books 2026-04-21 147 pages

The disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred

Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda
"Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of the leading physicists of her generation, at work on the origins of spacetime at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics. She is also one of the fewer than one hundred Black women to earn a PhD in physics. In The Disordered Cosmos, Prescod-Weinstein shares with readers her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter - all with a new spin and rhythm informed by pop culture, hip hop, politics, and Star Trek. Prescod-Weinstein's vision of the cosmos is vibrant, inclusive and buoyantly non-traditional. As she makes clear, what we know about the universe won't be complete until we learn to think beyond the limitations of white-dominated science. Science, like most fields, is set up for men to succeed, and is rife with racism, sexism, and shortsightedness as a result. But as Prescod-Weinstein makes brilliantly clear, we all have a right to know the night sky. By welcoming the insights of those who have been left out for too long, we expand our understanding of the universe and our place in it. The Disordered Cosmos is a vision for a world without prejudice that allows everyone to view the wonders of the universe through the same starry eyes"--
Bold Type Books 2021 318 pages

Motherland: a feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy

Ioffe, Julia
"Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy. In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow-only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up-doctors, engineers, scientists-had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin's lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate-and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak-and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women"-- Provided by publisher.
Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers 2025-10 489 pages

Education of a woman: Gloria Steinem

Heilbrun, Carolyn G.
Always a contradictory figure - the epitome of female beauty and the quintessence of female revolution - Gloria Steinem has been both hailed and vilified as the acceptable face of feminism. Not until her political engagement found active voice through New York Magazine and her own venture, the ground-breaking and influential MS, did the media coverage about the world's most beautiful byline begin to peter out. Steinem's vigorous work throughout the 1960s in support of civil rights, abortion, and the anti-Vietnam movement, and her subsequent embracing of the feminist cause, had at last put her beauty in perspective.
Virago 1997-01-01 480 pages

Woman Hating

Andrea Dworkin
Dworkin examines the place and depiction of women in fairy tales and pornography (focusing on the French erotic novels Story of O and The Image and the magazine Suck). She then looks at the historical practices of Chinese foot binding and Medieval European witch burning from a radical feminist perspective. The book's final section discusses the concept of androgyny within various cultures' creation myths and argues for "the development of a new kind of human being and a new kind of human community" free from gender and gendered roles.
E.P. Dutton 1974 217 pages

Scapegoat: the Jews, Israel and women's liberation

Dworkin, Andrea
Explores the psychology of victims and oppressors. Discusses the victimization of Jews, especially Jewish women. Ch. 2 (pp. 16-34), "Jew-Hate/Woman-Hate", discusses hatred of Jews in general, and that of women, including Jewish women specifically; Jewish self-hatred is included. Ch. 3 (pp. 35-58), "Pogrom/Rape", discusses some of the main pogroms in modern history, elucidating psychological aspects of both victim and perpetrator, and how rape was often a feature of anti-Jewish pogroms. Ch. 7 (pp. 133-170), "Hate Literature/Pornography", discusses antisemitic writings throughout history, but mainly in the 19th-20th centuries, and the dehumanization of Jews, including by the Nazis, who abused Jewish and non-Jewish women sexually, both bodily and via language and images. Argues, also, that Israeli men oppress Palestinians as a reaction to the history of oppression of Jews.
Virago 2001-01-01 434 pages

Dead end feminism

Badinter, Elisabeth
In this provocative new book, France’s leading feminist theorist launches a broadside against the way in which feminism has evolved since the 1990s. After the victories of the previous decades, during which women had made some real advances in social and political life, a new sensibility began to emerge in the 1990s which led to a reversal in the hierarchy of values. The cult of victimhood has become widespread and has affected feminism. Women are viewed as defenceless and oppressed, social violence and sexual violence are treated as the same and a finger is pointed at the guilty one: man in all his guises. But by conflating real and false victims, feminism runs the risk of misunderstanding the battles that need to be waged and of losing all credibility with the younger generation, which doesn’t see things see things this way. Preoccupied by putting men on trial, the feminism of the last few years has reactivated old stereotypes and left behind the very battles that have long been its raison d’être – this, argues Badinter, is a dead end. A huge bestseller in France, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relations between the sexes and our ways of thinking about sex and gender today.
Malden, MA 2006-03-03 126 pages