Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion by Jean H. Baker

I knew little about Margaret Sanger when I started writing If Not the Whole Truth. I only knew that she had coined the term "birth control" and that she was connected to Planned Parenthood somehow.

I was unaware of her lifetime of truly revolutionary work, or that she ran with a bohemian, freethinking crowd in Greenwich Village that included Max Eastman, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. Artists, intellectuals, musicians. It was the hippie movement, only in 1910. Her husband quit his job as an architectural draftsman to become a painter. Maggie got a job as a nurse in the slums. There she saw self-inflicted abortions, the birth of children who could not be supported, miscarriages and deaths from pregnancies that should never have been. It was there she became outraged at the suffering of the poor because of unwanted pregnancy.

I hadn't know about her interaction with congress, nor her work to make the birth control pill a reality.

But I had noticed that Sanger, known as Maggie, to her family and friends, seemed to have fallen into recent disrepute.

That was the trigger that pushed feminist historian Jean Baker (professor of history at Goucher College and author of many books on 19th-century American history) to correct the many misconceptions about Sanger with this very approachable and comprehensive biography, detailing Sanger's battle for reproductive rights and why she is so controversial.

"It is a mark of the still controversial nature of birth control that Margaret Sanger remains a controversial subject. Now, finally, she has the biography she deserves. Jean H. Baker has restored Margaret Sanger to history and history to Margaret Sanger." ―Ellen Dubois, Professor of History, UCLA

An excerpt:
Declaring that discrimination was a universal failing to be opposed everywhere, she found its solution in the education of white men. “We must change the white attitudes … When you have Negroes working with whites you have the break down of barriers, the beginning of progress. Negro participation in planned parenthood means democratic participation in a democratic idea. Like other democratic ideas, planned parenthood places greater value on human life and the dignity of each person.

An American Marriage: a novel by Tayari Jones
This is, at its heart, a love story, but a love story warped by racial injustice. ―Kirkus Reviews
This novel goes into forbidden territories, revealing the impact society has on relationships. It makes you beg for things to be okay. The writing is like velcro, it sticks you to the story.

An excerpt: I angled toward her again, and again she didn't move. I placed my hands on her defenseless head, and she didn't stop me. I kissed her every way I could think of. I kissed her forehead like she was my daughter. I kissed quivering eyelids like she was my dead mother. I kissed her hard on her cheeks like you do before you kill someone. I kissed her collarbone the way you do when you want more. I pulled her earlobe with my teeth the way you do when you know what someone likes. I did everything, and she sat as pliable as a doll. “If you let me,” I said, “I can forgive you.” Starting my circuit of kisses again, I made my way to her neck. She shifted her head slightly so I could touch my nose where her pulse beat close to the surface. But the thrill wore off fast, like the rush of a homemade drug, the way the cheap stuff hits you hard but leaves you hungry in an instant. I moved to the other side, hoping she would tilt her head the opposite way, allowing me access to all of her. “Just ask me,” I said, my voice barely more than a rumble in my chest. “Ask me and I will forgive you.” I held her now; she was limp, but she didn't resist. “Ask me, Georgia,” I said. “Ask me so I can say yes.”

The Women
by Kristen Hannah
It's an important book to read, War from the perspective of the women who were there but overlooked and forgotten.

I could never connect with the characters, every man in the book fell in love with Army Nurse Corps Frankie, who had the resources of a privileged, rich family to repeatedly fall back upon. Several plot turn felt manufactured and unrealistic. And, Hannah made it sound like Agent Orange was called that because it turned leaves orange, rather than for the orange stripe on the barrels (it was a defoliate, it turned leaves brown). But it's a best super seller, so what do I know?

A very worthy Authors Note in the back.
Here's an excerpt:
“Are you OK?“ Ethel asked, standing beside her, holding her hand, looking at her with love and worry in her eyes.
   Frankie couldn’t stand it. Suddenly she didn’t want Ethel to love her, to care about her, to hold her hand. How could Frankie deserve such friendship? She mumbled an excuse, said she was tired, or too drunk, or just too plain sad; she couldn’t really remember her words. All she knew was that she needed to leave now before she broke down in front of her friend.

Kingdom of No Tomorrow
by Fabienne Josaphat

Preorder, releasing December 3

Outside the window was thunder, lightning, and a fierce rain, and inside Fabienne Josaphat’s novel, Kingdom of No Tomorrow, a storm raged as well. A storm that’s raged so many times, the oppressed against the oppressor. A storm that rages all around us today.

Kingdom of No Tomorrow’s storm is the storm of the Black Panthers. No, not the Marvel Studio superhero Black Panther fantasy movie, the doomed Black Panther Party of the late 1960s era. The Black Power movement forerunner to Black Lives Matter.
What image comes to mind when you think of the Black Panthers? A macho Black man dressed in a black coat with a black beret? Maybe with a big gun in his hand?

But this paramilitary figure wasn’t at the core of the Black Panthers. It was a woman hell-bent on helping those around her. Someone like Josaphat’s main character, Nettie, with her clipboard in a sickle cell clinic. For the movement was more about health, food, and education than it was about guns. The brutal, scary Black Panther was an image created by the cunning FBI and spewed out by the media. Afterall, a big Black man out to kill whitey gets more eyes than a composed Black woman testing for the “colored’s” sickle cell disease or filling hundreds of bags of free groceries.

Kingdom of No Tomorrow takes readers on a journey of revolutionary hope, sacrifice, and disappointment seen through the eyes of the empowered women who made up most of the Black Panther membership. Resolute women who had each other’s backs. Charismatic women who stood uncrushed in the crushing gears of politics, violence, and systematic sexual inequality. As Nettie thinks in the book, “This was the life she’d stepped into, and there was no glamour in it. No glory. Not even the promise of a rising sun.” Yet, she persisted.

The 2023 winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction established by Barbara Kingsolver, it’s an emotional and important story few know. The novel is well-researched, true to history, filled and insightful as to the perils and promises of revolutionary thinking, especially when love and conflicting values are involved. The characters are crisp and well-developed. Suspense builds nicely, especially in last half of the book. Set both in Oakland, California and Chicago, with links back to the disappointingly barbarous Papa Doc years of Haiti.

Very readable. Put it on the top of your book list and read it.

Coyote Weather
by Amanda Cockrell
Starting in 1967, it's a story of how the Vietnam War shaped coming of age for a set of young people in Southern California. A deft hand at dialogue and setting, infused with a light touch of mystical dreaminess. Has a young adult feel to it, and Cockrell does a great job of teaching history as an aside to a fast paced story.

Here's a nice excerpt: “To Jerry, the books began to take on a certain life as well, particularly at closing, when they settled on their shelves like chickens, roosting. He would run his fingers along their spines, lightly straightening, feeling all that information stilling itself, dozing in dim moonlight, but ready to wake if he needed it, to tell him how to sail a boat or mend a wall or make bourbon. He stayed later than Mrs. Levine knew, doors locked, lights off, stretched on his back on the rug in the children’s corner, behind his head, thinking, waiting for the books to tell him something. They had something to say he was sure of it, but the words were always filtered through the Portuguese dictionary or encoded in the Fibonacci Numbers.”