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  Skid Dogs

  Emelia Symington-Fedy

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  A raw and riveting coming-of-age story about the wild love of teenage friendships and the casual oppression of nineties rape culture. 
   
   
   
  Emelia Symington-Fedy grew up with her girl gang on the railroad tracks of a small town in British Columbia. Unsupervised and wild, the girls explored the power and shortcomings of "best" friendships and their growing sexuality. 
   
   
   
  Two decades later an eighteen-year-old girl is murdered on Halloween on the same tracks, and Symington-Fedy returns to her hometown to stay with her mother, who is fearful of a murderer at large. 
   
   
   
  While the media narrows its focus on how the girl dared be alone on the tracks, Symington-Fedy slowly comes to terms with the mistreatment of her own teenage body. Giving a bold and often darkly humorous first-hand account of nineties rape culture and the sexual coercion that still permeates girlhood, Symington-Fedy holds her hometown close and accountable and exposes the subtle ways that misogyny shows up daily.

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  Searching for Alpha Centauri - A...

  Gary Spetz

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  Three complaisant kids, two stormy parents, one anxious French poodle, too many U-haul trailers, and the potholed road of the early 1960s. Searching for Alpha Centauri is American Public Television artist Gary Spetz's boyhood memoir of living a nomadic life with an impetuous mother, a discontent casino-security-guard step-father, an anxious French poodle, and two complaisant siblings -- during the early 1960s. The artist/author paints his moving landscape with words. He adeptly colors these words with both humor and tenderness. Mixed into this tale is the author's deference of history. He effectively interweaves his backdrop of an impending nuclear war, an exciting new space race, an escalating conflict in Vietnam, a rising civil rights movement, the invasion of Beatlemania, and the shocking assassination of a President. Searching for Alpha Centauri is a story of innocence, edification, intrigue, adventure, and endurance. As its boy-protagonist explains, it was "a time of flying bears, where everyone, it seemed, danced into the mystic."

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  The Struggle of Struggles

  Vera Pigee

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  From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924–2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County's NAACP. Known as the "Lady of Hats," coined by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, Pigee was a businesswoman, mother, and leader. Her book, The Struggle of Struggles, offers a detailed view of the daily grind of organizing for years to open the state's closed society. Fearless, forthright, and fashionable, Pigee also suffered for her efforts at the hands of white supremacists and those unwilling to accept strong women in leadership. She wrote herself into the histories, confronted misinformation, and self-published one of the first autobiographies from the era. Women like her worked, often without accolade or recognition, in their communities all over the country, but did not document their efforts in this way. 
   
   
   
  The Struggle of Struggles, originally published in 1975, spotlights the gendered and generational tensions within the civil rights movement. It outlines the complexity, frustrations, and snubs, as well as the joy and triumphs that Pigee experienced and witnessed in the quest for a fairer and more equitable nation.

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  Role-modeling Socialist Behavior...

  Karla Doris Rab

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  Isaac Rab (1893 - 1986) was a well-known agitator for Socialism in the Boston area, as a soap-box orator, a lecturer and a teacher, for most of the Twentieth Century. He was among the founding members of the World Socialist Party and organized a Boston Local in 1932, in which he was a central figure for many years. Today the WSP(US) remains a companion party of the World Socialist Movement.

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  First In Last Out - An American...

  John D Howard

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  A Vietnam veteran recounts his experience through two tours of duty—early in the conflict and then in its final stages. Fresh out of West Point, John Howard arrived for his first tour in Vietnam in 1965, the first full year of escalation when U.S. troop levels increased dramatically, from 23,000 to 184,000. When Howard returned for a second tour in 1972, troop strength stood at 24,000 and would dwindle to a mere fifty the following year. He thus participated in the very early and very late stages of American military involvement in the Vietnam War.   Howard’s two tours—the first as a platoon commander and member of an elite counterguerrilla force, and the second as a senior advisor to the South Vietnamese—provide a fascinating lens through which to view not only one soldier’s experience in Vietnam, but also the country’s.

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  Anselm - A Very Short Introduction

  Thomas Williams

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  Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was the outstanding philosopher-theologian of the Latin West between Augustine and the thirteenth century. As a public figure, especially as Archbishop of Canterbury, he corresponded with kings and nobles, popes and bishops, in letters that reveal a fascinating personality and flesh out the practical dimensions of his theoretical philosophy. He wrote at a time when a renewed interest in logic encouraged careful and rigorous argumentation, but before the recovery of Aristotle filled the philosophical discourse with difficult technical jargon, making for writing that is unrivalled for its lucidity and accessibility. He offers the first clear account of what we now call a libertarian view of free will, according to which free choices cannot be determined by the agent's internal states or by external influences. His famous "ontological argument" for the existence of God continues to generate discussion, debate, and puzzlement. His understanding of God is rightly regarded as one of the definitive expressions of classical theism or perfect-being theology, which remains influential in philosophy of religion and analytic theology. His account of the Atonement is one that every theologian to this day still grapples with.

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