Social Science

Eyeliner: A Cultural History

25,000.00

From the distant past to the present, with fingers and felt-tipped pens, metallic powders and gel pots, humans have been drawn to lining their eyes. The aesthetic trademark of figures ranging from Nefertiti to Amy Winehouse, eyeliner is one of our most enduring cosmetic tools; ancient royals and Gen Z beauty influencers alike would attest to its uniquely transformative power. It is undeniably fun—yet it is also far from frivolous.

Seen through Zahra Hankir’s (kohl-lined) eyes, this ubiquitous but seldom-examined product becomes a portal to history, proof both of the stunning variety among cultures across time and space and of our shared humanity. Through intimate reporting and conversations—with nomads in Chad, geishas in Japan, dancers in India, drag queens in New York, and more—Eyeliner embraces the rich history and significance of its namesake, especially among communities of color. What emerges is an unexpectedly moving portrait of a tool that, in various corners of the globe, can signal religious devotion, attract potential partners, ward off evil forces, shield eyes from the sun, transform faces into fantasies, and communicate volumes without saying a word.

Delightful, surprising, and utterly absorbing, Eyeliner is a fascinating tour through streets, stages, and bedrooms around the world, and a thought-provoking reclamation of a key piece of our collective history.

The K&W Guide to Colleges for Students with Learning Differences

35,000.00

FIND THE RIGHT SCHOOL FOR YOUR SPECIFIC NEEDS. This indispensable resource will help students with ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, or learning differences find and apply to their personal best-fit college.

Hundreds of thousands of students with learning differences head to college every year. This comprehensive guide makes it easy for those students and their families and guidance counselors to tackle the daunting process of finding the school that fits their needs best.

This invaluable book for students, parents, and professionals includes:
• 350+ school profiles with targeted information on admission requirements, updated test policies, and the support services and programs offered by the colleges
• Index of colleges by level of support
• Policies and procedures regarding course waivers and substitutions
• Resources to help students find the best match for their needs
• Advice from learning specialists on making an effective transition to college

Fierce Love

17,000.00

Often in our romantic relationships, we long for deep connection, but we don’t know how to communicate well and sometimes withhold what we’re really thinking and feeling. This can lead to fighting, resentment, or, worse, complacency–where you are just going through the motions, more like roommates than two people in love. As Susan writes, “It’s as if we’ve pulled off our own wings.” As couples, we don’t stop to think how important our conversations are. And we certainly don’t understand that what we talk about and how we talk about it determine whether our relationships will thrive, flatline, or fail.

In Fierce Love, New York Times bestselling author Susan Scott guides couples through eight must-have conversations that lead to deep connection and lasting commitment. Through the use of true stories and hands-on exercises, Susan helps us

-understand that the conversation is the relationship;
-identify and dispel five relationship myths that mislead and derail us;
-learn eight conversations that are critical to enriching relationships; and
-stop fighting or ignoring issues and start connecting in a deep and meaningful way.

After a season where many relationships were tested and tried, where some relationships thrived and others have exposed cracks couples didn’t even realize were there, or realized but didn’t acknowledge, now is the best time to learn to communicate well. By having honest, compelling conversations with our partners, we can foster true connection and a fierce love that will withstand the test of time and grow stronger over the years.

The Creative Act

30,000.00

Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn’t, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone’s life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.

The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments—and lifetimes—of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.

What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Girls

14,000.00

Everything preteen and teen girls need to know about their changing bodies and feelings Written by an experienced educator and her daughter in a reassuring and down-to-earth style, The “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Girls gives sensitive straight talk on: the body’s changing size and shape; the growth spurt; breast development; the reproductive organs; the menstrual cycle; body hair; diet and exercise; romantic and sexual feelings; and puberty in the opposite sex. It also includes information on anorexia and bulimia, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, and birth control.

Featuring detailed illustrations and real-life stories throughout, plus an introduction for parents and a helpful resource section, this bestselling growing-up guide is an essential puberty education and health book for all girls ages 10 and up.

God Is A Black Woman

16,000.00

For years, Christena Cleveland spoke about racial reconciliation to congregations, justice organizations, and colleges. But she increasingly felt she could no longer trust in the God she’d been implicitly taught to worship—a white male God who preferentially empowered white men despite his claim to love all people. A God who clearly did not relate to, advocate for, or affirm a Black woman like Christena.

Her crisis of faith sent her on an intellectual and spiritual journey through history and across France, on a 400-mile walking pilgrimage to the ancient shrines of Black Madonnas to find healing in the Sacred Black Feminine. God Is a Black Woman is the chronicle of her liberating transformation and a critique of a society shaped by white patriarchal Christianity and culture. Christena reveals how America’s collective idea of God as a white man has perpetuated hurt, hopelessness, and racial and gender oppression. Integrating her powerful personal story, womanist ideology, as well as theological, historical, and social science research, she invites us to take seriously the truth that God is not white nor male and gives us a new and hopeful path for connecting with the divine and honoring the sacredness of all Black people.

Unmasking AI

25,000.00

To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.

After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,” she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.

Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.

Entertain Your Brain

14,000.00

If there’s a kind of puzzle not included in this incredibly varied collection, we can’t imagine what it is. There are math problems, lateral-thinking conundrums, brain teasers, whodunits, IQ tests, trivia quizzes…as well as an assortment of baffling optical illusions and amazing stunts using paper, scissors, and other items found around the house. It’s nonstop fun, but every one of these challenges will enhance real-life problem-solving skills.

Rising Troublemaker

14,000.00

In this young readers edition of her New York Times bestseller Professional Troublemaker, Luvvie Ajayi Jones uses her honesty and humor to inspire teens to be their bravest, boldest, truest selves, in order to create a world they would be proud to live in.

The world can feel like a dumpster fire, with endless things to be afraid of. It can make you feel powerless to ask for what you need, use your voice, and show up truly as your whole self. Add the fact that often, people might make you feel like your way of showing up is TOO MUCH.

BE TOO MUCH, and use it for good. That is what it means to be a troublemaker. In this book, Luvvie Ajayi Jones–bestseller of books, sorceress of side-eyes and critic of culture–gives you the permission you might need to be the troublemaker you are, or wish to be. This is the book she needed when she was the kid who got in trouble for her mouth when she spoke up about what she felt was not fair. This is the book she needed when kids made fun of her Nigerian accent. This is the book that she needed when it was time to call herself a writer, but she was too scared.

As a Rising Troublemaker, you need to know that the beautiful, audacious life you want is on the other side of doing the things that will scare you. This book will help you face and fight your fear and start living that life ASAP.

Dress Codes

20,000.00

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants dressing like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility, and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance-era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States, and in the 1940s, the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip-flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world, and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a suit.

In Dress Codes, law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford presents a “deeply informative and entertaining” (The New York Times Book Review) history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the present day, a walk down history’s red carpet to uncover and examine the canons, mores, and customs of clothing—rules that we often take for granted. After reading Dress Codes, you’ll never think of fashion as superficial again—and getting dressed will never be the same.

Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

20,000.00

Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past.

Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change.

With his usual elan, Morgan Housel presents a master class on optimizing risk, seizing opportunity, and living your best life. Through a sequence of engaging stories and pithy examples, he shows how we can use our newfound grasp of the unchanging to see around corners, not by squinting harder through the uncertain landscape of the future, but by looking backwards, being more broad-sighted, and focusing instead on what is permanently true.

By doing so, we may better anticipate the big stuff, and achieve the greatest success, not merely financial comforts, but most importantly, a life well lived.

Flawless

18,000.00

K-beauty has captured imaginations worldwide by promising a kind of mesmerizing perfection. Its skincare and makeup products—creams packaged to look like milkshakes or pandas, and snail mucus face masks, to name a few—work together to fascinate us, champion consumerism, and invite us to indulge. In the four years Elise spent in Seoul as NPR’s bureau chief, the global K-beauty industry quadrupled. Today it’s worth $10 billion and is only getting bigger as it rides the Hallyu wave around the globe.

And fun as self-care consumerism may be, Elise turns her veteran eye to the darker questions lurking beneath the surface of this story. When technology makes it easy to quantify and optimize ourselves—from banishing blemishes, to whittling our waistlines, even to shaving down our jaws—where do we draw the line? What are the dangers for a society where a flawless face and body are promoted and possible? What are the real financial, physical, and emotional costs of beauty work in a culture that valorizes endless self-improvement and codes it as empowerment?

With rich historical context and deep reporting, including hours of interviews with South Korean women, this is a complex, provocative look at the ways hustle culture has reached into the sinews of our bodies. It raises complicated questions about gender disparity, consumerism, the beauty imperative of an appearance obsessed society, and the undeniable political, economic, and social capital of good looks worldwide. And it points the way toward an alternative vision, one that’s more affirming and inclusive than a beauty culture led by industry.

The Right To Sex

13,000.00

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do, a supposedly private act laden with public meaning, a personal preference shaped by outside forces, a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo, many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity―its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race, and power―we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex―but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope for a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships―between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

Raising Critical Thinkers

18,000.00

A guide for parents to help children of all ages process the onslaught of unfiltered information in the digital age.

Education is not solely about acquiring information and skills across subject areas, but also about understanding how and why we believe what we do. At a time when online media has created a virtual firehose of information and opinions, parents and teachers worry how students will interpret what they read and see. Amid the noise, it has become increasingly important to examine different perspectives with both curiosity and discernment. But how do parents teach these skills to their children?

Drawing on more than twenty years’ experience homeschooling and developing curricula, Julie Bogart offers practical tools to help children at every stage of development to grow in their ability to explore the world around them, examine how their loyalties and biases affect their beliefs, and generate fresh insight rather than simply recycling what they’ve been taught. Full of accessible stories and activities for children of all ages, Raising Critical Thinkers helps parents to nurture passionate learners with thoughtful minds and empathetic hearts.

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