It is 1979 and a teenage girl is charmed by a man she meets in a disco. Before long, like Alice through the looking glass, she tumbles into a world of strange and frightening characters. Desperate to escape, she takes us into the darkness and out again, delivering her tale with wit, warmth and furious zest. Memoirs of a Suburban Girl is the cautionary tale of an everyday girl who makes a wrong turn.

It is 1979 and a teenage girl is charmed by a man she meets in a disco. Before long, like Alice through the looking glass, she tumbles into a world of strange and frightening characters. Desperate to escape, she takes us into the darkness and out again, delivering her tale with wit, warmth and furious zest.

It is 1979 and a teenage girl is charmed by a man she meets in a disco. Before long she tumbles into a world of strange and frightening characters. Desperate to escape, she takes us into the darkness and out again, delivering her tale with wit, warmth and furious zest. This is a cautionary tale of an everyday girl who makes a wrong turn.

In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz helped found the Women’s Liberation Movement, part of what has been called the second wave of feminism in the United States. Along with a small group of dedicated women in Boston, she produced the first women’s liberation journal, No More Fun and Games. Dunbar-Ortiz was also an antiwar and anti-racist activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and early 1970s and a fiery, tireless public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and formed associations with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical politics, including the Civil Rights Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary Union, the African National Congress, and the American Indian Movement. Unlike most of those involved in the New Left, Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part–Native American in rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women’s movement. Dunbar-Ortiz’s odyssey from Oklahoma poverty to the urban New Left gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement that forever changed American society. In a new afterword, the author reflects on her fast-paced life fifty years ago, in particular as a movement activist and in relationships with men.

A powerful, beautifully written memoir about coming of age as a black girl in an exclusive white suburb in "integrated," post-Civil Rights California in the 1970s and 1980s. At six years of age, after winning a foot race against a white classmate, Jennifer Baszile was humiliated to hear her classmate explain that black people "have something in their feet to make them run faster than white people." When she asked her teacher about it, it was confirmed as true. The next morning, Jennifer's father accompanied her to school, careful to "assert himself as an informed and concerned parent and not simply a big, black, dangerous man in a first-grade classroom." This was the first of many skirmishes in Jennifer's childhood-long struggle to define herself as "the black girl next door" while living out her parents' dreams. Success for her was being the smartest and achieving the most, with the consequence that much of her girlhood did not seem like her own but more like the "family project." But integration took a toll on everyone in the family when strain in her parents' marriage emerged in her teenage years, and the struggle to be the perfect black family became an unbearable burden. A deeply personal view of a significant period of American social history, The Black Girl Next Door deftly balances childhood experiences with adult observations, creating an illuminating and poignant look at a unique time in our country's history.

A laugh-out-loud memoir about a city slicker who discovers that Manolos and manure just don?t mix. At her husband?s prompting, suburban mom and New York career woman Susan McCorkindale agreed to give up her stressful six-figure job. Together, they headed down south to a 500-acre beef farm, and never looked back. Well, he didn?t look back. She did. A lot. From playing ?spot the religious billboard? on the drive to rural Virginia, to adapting to a world without Starbucks, to planning bright-orange hunter-resistant wardrobes for the kids (?We moved here to get away from the madness of Manhattan only to risk getting popped on our own property?), this is her hilarious account of how a city girl came to love?or at least tolerate?country life.