Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future
Manning Marable

Booklist Review
Lamenting the absence of detailed histories of pivotal African American figures, or analyses that are too superficial and propagandistic, Marable offers a probing look at several historical figures and the civil-rights movement. In his critique of W. E. B. DuBois, Marable exposes much of the myth and conflict between DuBois and Booker T. Washington and exposes them both to be more complex and engaged than most works reveal. Regarding Malcolm X, Marable suggests that Alex Haley's biography and Spike Lee's film are most significant for their slants and omissions. Conflicts surrounding the estate of Malcolm X and the availability of raw material to scholars have further complicated the quest to understand the iconic black leader. Marable's final chapter explores the promise of integrated education of the Brown decision and the reality of hypersegregation that continues to estrange low-income minorities from the American mainstream. Still, Marable hopes that a new civil-rights movement will achieve the promise of Brown by transcending the limitations of popular myth and historical distortions.
Vernon Ford. Copyright American Library Association.

In A Queer Time And Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam

Publisher Comments
In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms—especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.

In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don't Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. She examines the "transgender gaze," as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. She then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.

Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place.

Rose of No Man's Land

Michelle Tea

Publishers Weekly Review
Tea follows up her Lambda Award–winning San Francisco prostitution memoir, Valencia (2000), her sporadically transcendent collected poems, The Beautiful (2003), and last year's graphic novel, Rent Girl (now in development for TV), with this inspired queer bildungsroman. In Trisha Driscoll, Tea has developed an unreliable narrator who stands on her own. Trisha is a doughy, alcoholic 10th-grade denizen of Mogsfield, Mass., a fictional white trash nowhere. Her father is long gone; her mother, owing to psychosomatic back problems, does not leave the couch; her mother's boyfriend, Donnie, enters the kitchen only to make ramen; her younger sister, Kristy, is obsessed with launching herself onto reality TV and constantly films the family dysfunctioning around her. The first half of the novel establishes Trisha's grim bedroom-to-mall despair. In the second, a new friend, Rose, a fry cook who looks 12—appears, and the two go on a crystal meth–fueled adventure with blissful highs and crashing lows. Tea is brilliant in making the stakes for Trisha abundantly clear as she discovers sex (and, concurrently, her sexuality), drugs and the emotional gains and losses attendant to each. Add in minor characters like the never-seen but oft-discussed Kim Porciatti and various dumb guys in cars, and you have a postmillennial, class-adjusted My So-Called Life.
Publishers Weekly. Copyright Reed Business Information.

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Executed
Lola Vollen and Dave Eggers, editors

Publisher's Comments
Beverly Monroe spent seven years in prison for murdering her companion of thirteen years, even though he had killed himself. Christopher Ochoa was persuaded to confess to a rape and murder he did not commit, and served twelve years of his life sentence before being freed by DNA evidence. Michael Evans and Paul Terry each served twenty-seven years in prison for a rape and murder they did not commit. They were teenagers when they entered prison and middle-aged when DNA proved their innocence.

After spending years behind bars, hundreds of men and women with incontrovertible proof of their innocence have been released from America’s prisons. They were wrongfully convicted because of problems that plague many criminal proceedings—inept defense lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful interrogation tactics, misidentifications, and more. Finally free, usually after more than a decade of incarceration, the wrongly condemned re-enter society with nothing but scars from prison life only to struggle for survival on the outside.

The thirteen men and women portrayed here, and the hundreds of others who have been exonerated, are the tip of the iceberg. By all estimates, there are thousands of innocent victims in prison today. Surviving Justice tells their unimaginable and inspiring stories.

Boy in the Middle: Erotic Fiction

Patrick Califia

Publisher's Comments
The master of S/M erotica returns, with his trademark blend of psychological insight and ingenious sexual situations.

Patrick Califia’s characters are people who can’t get a cab at night: vampires who prey on drug addicts on the Lower East Side, self-hating Mormon missionaries, baby butch dykes searching for worthy dyke daddies, hermaphrodite private investigators, transsexual streetwalkers, older butch tops — rough-mannered but compassionate — FTM community activists, femmes who need to be taught a lesson, femmes who need to be left in charge. In Boy in the Middle, the legendary Patrick Califia — sex radical, writer, and provocateur — returns with eleven erotic stories from tender initiations to raunchy role play to welt-raising, hardcore S/M scenes. There’s no safe word at this "black leather pajama party" of a book.