Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel

Publisher's Comments
Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, readers are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade

Ann Fessler

Publisher's Comments
In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long- overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.

Mockingbird: a Portrait of Harper Lee

Charles Shields

Publisher's Comments
After years of research, Shields has brought to life the warmhearted, high-spirited, and occasionally hardheaded woman who created two of American literature's most unforgettable characters--Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout.

My Most Secret Desire

Julie Doucet

Publisher's Comments
Considered by many to be the most influential female cartoonist ever, Julie Doucet created an iconic body of work in the ten short years she solely devoted herself to her trailblazing comic-book series Dirty Plotte. Her comics are densely inked and detailed with a pulsating neurosis from a decidedly female point of view that set the comic-book world on its head when the series debuted. Doucet returns to comics after a five-year hiatus with a reworked edition of her dream journal My Most Secret Desire, complete with never-before-published material.

My Most Secret Desire is considered to be Doucet 's most innovative work, exploring the longings, pressures, and exploits of the feminine subconscious. Nightmarish tales of pregnancy, menstruation, sex changes, and boyfriends haunt Doucet's nocturnal psyche with a feverish and surreal pitch.

Race to Incarcerate
Revised and updated edition
Marc Mauer

Publisher's Comments
In this revised edition of his seminal book on race, class, and the criminal justice system, Marc Mauer, executive director of one of the United States' leading criminal justice reform organizations, offers the most up-to-date look available at three decades of prison expansion in America.

Including newly written material on recent developments under the Bush administration and updated statistics, graphs, and charts throughout, the book tells the tragic story of runaway growth in the number of prisons and jails and the over- reliance on imprisonment to stem problems of economic and social development. Called "sober and nuanced" by Publishers Weekly, Race to Incarcerate documents the enormous financial and human toll of the "get tough" movement, and argues for more humane--and productive--alternatives.