Mom's Cancer

Brian Fies

Author's Comments
Mom's Cancer is the true tale of my mother's battle with metastatic lung cancer. The story focuses on how a serious illness affects patient and family, both practically and emotionally, in ways that I've discovered are very common. Many readers wrote to tell me how surprised and gratified they were to learn they weren't alone.

Mom's Cancer began as a serialized Internet comic, with new installments added throughout 2004. Readership grew by word-of-mouth. People who needed the story found it and told their friends about it. In July 2005, Mom's Cancer won the comic industry's Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic, a new category that year.

Saving the World

Julia Alvarez

Publishers Weekly Review
In Alvarez's appealingly earnest fifth novel (after A Cafecito Story), two women living two centuries apart each face "a crisis of the soul" when their fates are tied to idealistic men whose commitments to medical humanitarian missions end in disillusionment. Alma Heubner's husband, Richard, goes to the Dominican Republic to help eradicate AIDS, while Alma, a bestselling Latina writer, stays at home in Vermont to work on a story about a real, ill-fated 19th-century expedition chaperoned by Doña Isabel Sendales y Gómez, the spinster director of a Spanish orphanage who agrees to vaccinate 20 of her charges with cowpox and bring them from Spain to Central America to prevent future smallpox epidemics. While the leader of the anti-smallpox expedition, Dr. Francisco Balmis, and Richard see their missions collapse in defeat, Doña Isabel and Alma surmount their personal depressions to find inner strength. Alvarez depicts her two heroines with insightful empathy and creates vivid supporting characters. But her effort to find resonating similarities between the intertwined plots sometimes feels contrived, and the details of Doña Isabel's odyssey slow the momentum. The narrative culminates in a compelling scene in which greed and ineptitude trump idealism, dramatizing the question of whether the means are ever justified by the ends.

© Reed Business Information. All rights reserved.

Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity

Hal Niedzviecki

Publishers Weekly Review
When nonconformity has become not only cool but also consumable, and everyone is told they are special, what happens to our definitions of rebellion and individualism? Are our real rebels against "conformist nonconformity" now the "neo-traditionalists" who exchange their individualism for membership in a community that offers meaning in backward-looking ideologies? These questions are pertinent but hardly original, and Niedzviecki's approach doesn't refresh the cultural debate. Niedzviecki (We Want Some Too) details lively examples from pop, consumer and counterculture—e.g., backyard wrestlers who assert their uniqueness while participating in mass culture; the "philosophy" brand of health and beauty products that sells its lotions with "moral maxims." But he molds these cases to fit his often predictable arguments: celebrity culture has been confused with individualism; the "semi-collapse" of traditional culture has led some to rebel by embracing orthodoxy; marketers have exploited ideals of individuality; and political activism is often just a way for protestors to "affirm their specialness." Falling short of a richer, more contradictory and more provocative analysis of these cultural items, Niedzviecki only grazes the surface of many of the issues Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism) and Thomas Frank (The Conquest of Cool) have already explored with depth and complexity.

© Reed Business Information. All rights reserved.

Subversive Cross Stitch

Julie Jackson

Publisher's Comments
In this wicked little book, Julie Jackson reinvents the age-old craft of cross-stitch, finally putting an end to all that saccharine sentimentalism and giving modern stitchers the chance to say what's really on their minds. Stitch up Bitch in Kitchen for a heartfelt housewarming gift. Spread cheer with the ever-festive Bite Me. Or whip up This Place Sucks for a cherished co-worker. This fully illustrated book includes 33 of Jackson's best patterns and easy-to-follow directions. Jackson outlines the simple tools and techniques needed and even offers encouragement and tips on how to create one-of-a-kind revolutionary designs from craft-store patterns with subversive sentiments all your own.

The Culture Struggle

Michael Parenti

Publishers Weekly Review
Using vivid examples and riveting arguments throughout, The Culture Struggle ranges from the everyday to the esoteric. Despite its brevity, this book offers a wealth of stimulating insights. Richly informed, penned with eloquence, irony, and economy of language, The Culture Struggle helps us understand the world we live in.

One of America's most astute and engaging political analysts, Michael Parenti shows us that culture is a changing process and the product of a dynamic interplay between a wide range of social and political interests. It is not enough to study the prevailing political realm; we also must grasp developments throughout the entire civil society. In short, to understand a society we need to understand the problem of culture as well as that of power.

Drawing from cultures around the world, Parenti demonstrates that beliefs and practices are readily subjected to political manipulation, and that cultures are instruments of social power. Many parts of modern culture are being commodified, that is, packaged and sold to those who can pay. Folk culture is giving way to a corporate market culture.

Art, science, medicine, psychiatry, and even marriage have been used as instruments of cultural control across the centuries. Powerful interests also employ racism, sexism, and class supremacy to maintain their existing politico-economic rule. Culture is both something to be contained and itself an instrument of domination.