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Am I Making Myself Clear?
A Scientist's Guide to Talking to the Public
Cornelia Dean
Harvard University Press, 2012

What we don’t know can hurt us—and does so every day. Climate change, health care policy, weapons of mass destruction, an aging infrastructure, stem cell research, endangered species, space exploration—all affect our lives as citizens and human beings in practical and profound ways. But unless we understand the science behind these issues, we cannot make reasonable decisions—and worse, we are susceptible to propaganda cloaked in scientific rhetoric.

To convey the facts, this book suggests, scientists must take a more active role in making their work accessible to the media, and thus to the public. In Am I Making Myself Clear? Cornelia Dean, a distinguished science editor and reporter, urges scientists to overcome their institutional reticence and let their voices be heard beyond the forum of scholarly publication. By offering useful hints for improving their interactions with policymakers, the public, and her fellow journalists, Dean aims to change the attitude of scientists who scorn the mass media as an arena where important work is too often misrepresented or hyped. Even more important, she seeks to convince them of the value and urgency of communicating to the public.

Am I Making Myself Clear? shows scientists how to speak to the public, handle the media, and describe their work to a lay audience on paper, online, and over the airwaves. It is a book that will improve the tone and content of debate over critical issues and will serve the interests of science and society.

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Am I Still A Woman
Hysterectomy And Gender Identity
Jean Elson
Temple University Press, 2003
Recent scientific findings regarding the potential dangers associated with hormone replacement therapies bring renewed attention to the relationship between women's bodies and gender identity. In Am I Still A Woman? Jean Elson offers the testimony of women who have thought deeply about this issue as a result of gynecological surgery. For the women in this book, gynecological surgery for benign conditions proved to be a crisis that prompted questions about the meanings of sexual and reproductive organs in relation to being female and feminine. Is a woman who no longer menstruates still a woman? What about a woman who can no longer bear children? Elson looks closely at the differences in responses to understand the impact of surgery and lost fertility on sexuality and partnerships as well as the steps some women take to deal with a sense of a stigmatized identity. Whether they reconceptualized their old notions of what it means to be a woman or put a new focus on making themselves attractive, they made conscious efforts to reclaim their female identity and femininity. This book provides a wealth of insight into the choices women make regarding gynecological surgery and maintaining their sense of themselves as women.
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Am I That Name
Feminism And The Category Of Women In History
Denise Riley
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of “women” in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social. 

Feminist movements, Riley argues, have had no choice but to play out this indeterminacy of women. This is made plain in their oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference. To fully recognize the ambiguity of the category of “women” is, she contends, a necessary condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.

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Becoming Who I Am
Young Men on Being Gay
Ritch C. Savin-Williams
Harvard University Press, 2016

Proud, happy, grateful—gay youth describe their lives in terms that would have seemed surprising only a generation ago. Yet many adults, including parents, seem skeptical about this sea change in perceptions and attitudes. Even in an age of growing tolerance, coming out as gay is supposed to involve a crisis or struggle. This is the kind of thinking, say the young men at the heart of this book, that needs to change.

Becoming Who I Am is an astute exploration of identity and sexuality as told by today’s generation of gay young men. Through a series of in-depth interviews with teenagers and men in their early 20s, Ritch Savin-Williams reflects on how the life stories recorded here fulfill the promise of an affirmative, thriving gay identity outlined in his earlier book, The New Gay Teenager. He offers a contemporary perspective on gay lives viewed across key milestones: from dawning awareness of same-sex attraction to first sexual encounters; from the uncertainty and exhilaration of coming out to family and friends to the forming of adult romantic relationships; from insights into what it means to be gay today to musings on what the future may hold. The voices hail from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, but as gay men they share basic experiences in common, conveyed here with honesty, humor, and joy.

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I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
Edited, with an introduction by John E. O'Connor; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1981

    Since its release in 1932, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang had earned a reputation as one of the few Hollywood products that can be associated directly with social change. Film historians attribute the reform of the southern chain gang system to the public outrage generated by this movie, which depicts a true story.
    In addition to being an important social document, the film remains a gripping experience for filmgoers today because of its unusual dramatic conception, its hauntingly inconclusive ending, and Paul Muni's performance as the good boy forced to go wrong.

This book includes the complete screenplay.

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I Am of Ireland
Women of the North Speak Out
Elizabeth Shannon
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997
Available for the first time in paperback, this book provides an intimate look at the troubles in Northern Ireland. In a moving collection of interviews with Irish women, Elizabeth Shannon reveals them to be as diverse, charming, maddening, and contradictory as the country itself. This new edition, expanded and updated, contains follow-up interviews with many of the same Catholic and Protestant women who were featured in the original edition, as well as an analysis of the new women's political movement in Northern Ireland.
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Resentment's Virtue
Jean Amery and the Refusal to Forgive
Thomas Brudholm, Foreword by Jeffrie Murphy
Temple University Press, 2010

Most current talk of forgiveness and reconciliation in the aftermath of collective violence proceeds from an assumption that forgiveness is always superior to resentment and refusal to forgive. Victims who demonstrate a willingness to forgive are often celebrated as virtuous moral models, while those who refuse to forgive are frequently seen as suffering from a pathology. Resentment is viewed as a negative state, held by victims who are not "ready" or "capable" of forgiving and healing.

Resentment's Virtue offers a new, more nuanced view. Building on the writings of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry and the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Thomas Brudholm argues that the preservation of resentment can be the reflex of a moral protest that might be as permissible, humane or honorable as the willingness to forgive. Taking into account the experiences of victims, the findings of truth commissions, and studies of mass atrocities, Brudholm seeks to enrich the philosophical understanding of resentment.

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The Woman I Am
Southern Baptist Women's Writings, 1906–2006
Melody Maxwell
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Melody Maxwell’s The Woman I Am analyzes the traditional, progressive, and potential roles female Southern Baptist writers and editors portrayed for Southern Baptist women from 1906 to 2006, particularly in the area of missions.

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) represents the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, yet Southern Baptist women’s voices have been underreported in studies of American religion and culture. In The Woman I Am, Melody Maxwell explores how female Southern Baptist writers and editors in the twentieth century depicted changing roles for women and responded to the tensions that arose as Southern Baptist women assumed leadership positions, especially in the areas of missions and denominational support.

Given access to a century of primary sources and archival documents, Maxwell writes, as did many of her subjects, in a style that deftly combines the dispassionate eye of an observer with the multidimensional grasp of a participant. She examines magazines published by Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), an auxiliary to the SBC: Our Mission Fields (1906–1914), Royal Service (1914–1995), Contempo (1970–1995), and Missions Mosaic (1995–2006). In them, she traces how WMU writers and editors perceived, constructed, and expanded the lives of southern women.

Showing ingenuity and resiliency, these writers and editors continually, though not always consciously, reshaped their ideal of Christian womanhood to better fit the new paths open to women in American culture and Southern Baptist life. Maxwell’s work demonstrates that Southern Baptists have transformed their views on biblically sanctioned roles for women over a relatively short historical period.

How Southern Baptist women perceive women’s roles in their churches, homes, and the wider world is of central importance to readers interested in religion, society, and gender in the United States. The Woman I Am is a tour de force that makes a lasting contribution to the world’s understanding of Southern Baptists and to their understanding of themselves.
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Www.Here I Am
Russell Stannard
Templeton Press, 2002
Sam didn't think much of religion. What with science being able to explain almost everything about us and about the world we live in, there didn't seem much point to believing in God any more. But then came the day Sam was exploring the Internet, and stumbled across God's website! At least, that was what it claimed to be.
Sam decides to investigate, and becomes engrossed in conversations with the mysterious person on the other end. Together they explore the great questions arising out of evolution, astronomy, cosmology, the laws of nature, and the possibility of miracles. Not that Sam knew much science. Fortunately the stranger was able to explain the science from scratch in a way that Sam could understand. They also tackled the problems of evil, suffering, and death; that really set Sam thinking.
Readers will be challenged to form their own personal responses to the issues raised based on a listing of forty questions at the back of the book. Sample questions include:
•What do you hope to achieve in your lifetime?
•Does belief in God play a part in that?
•Do you believe in evolution—that you came from animals?
•Do you think there is life on other planets?
•If so, does that make human beings less important?
•Do the world religions contradict each other, or are they simply talking about the same God in somewhat different ways?
•How should belief in an afterlife affect the way you live this life?
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