Women's Herstory Month Book List
SFMTA Women’s Herstory Month 2024 Reading List
A short list of books that the cultural heritage working group put together for this month to engage you in your ongoing learning of the contributions and advancements of women, both at home here in San Francisco and all over the world. Please feel free to submit your own recommendation for the list by emailing equity@sfmta.com, subject: Reading List.
Title: All About Love
Author: bell hooks
Genre: Philosophy, Gender Studies
Synopsis: The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.
Recommender: lawrence festin, 1842, OREB
Ways to Access: (99+) All about love, bell hooks | Karla C Galicia - Academia.edu
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Title: The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Author: Toni Morrison
Genre: Essays
Synopsis: These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others.
An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.
Recommender: Maya Price, 5288, Streets, Planning
Ways to Access: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566846/the-source-of-self-regard-by-toni-morrison/
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Title: climate resilience: How We Keep Each Other Safe, Care for our Communities, and Fight Back Against Climate Change: in conversation with 39 women, nonbinary, and gender-expansive climate leaders
Author: Kylie Flanagan
Genre: Essays
Synopsis: Climate justice and resilience strategist Kylie Flanagan invites us to see and act beyond status-quo solutions, Big Tech promises, and everything we’re usually told about how to save the planet. Centering the voices of Native Rights activists, queer liberation ecologists, youth climate-justice organizers, Latinx wilderness activists, and others on the front lines, Climate Resilience urges us toward a vision of climate care that invests in place-based, community-led projects focused
Each section offers practical blueprints for engaging with different aspects of climate-change action through mutual aid, seed-saving, community-owned energy, community safety plans, and more, and it includes a range of ideas for readers to apply these strategies in their own communities.
Recommender: Maya Price, 5288, Streets, Planning
Ways to Access: Libraries, https://resistbooksellers.com/product/climate-resilience-how-we-keep-each-other-safe-care-for-our-communities-and-fight-back-against-climate-change/
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Title: Practicing Pinayist Pedagogy
Author: Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales & Jocyl Sacramento
Genre: Education, Pinayism (Pinay/Filipina American Feminism)
Synopsis: Pinayist praxis is a process, place, and production that aims to connect the global and local to the personal issues and stories of Pinay struggle, survival, service, sisterhood, and strength. It is an individual and communal process of decolonization, humanization, self-determination, and relationship building, ultimately moving towards liberation. Through this process, Pinays create places where the epistemologies are at the center of the discourse/dialogue/conversation and organizing. Pinays also represent Pinayism through critical cultural production of art, performance, and engaged scholarship that expresses their perspectives and counternarratives.
Recommender: lawrence festin, OREB
Ways to Access: https://www.academia.edu/1873604/Practicing_Pinayist_Pedagogy
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Title: Parable of the Sower
Author: Octavia Butler
Genre: magical realism, speculative fiction, afrofuturism
Synopsis: It is the year 2024, the night before Lauren Olamina’s 15th birthday (and Lauren’s father’s 55th). Lauren has a dream in which she is teaching herself to fly, but ends up flying into a wall of fire. Later, she and her stepmother, Cory, discuss the fact that now there is no light pollution, and people can see the stars again. Although Lauren has stopped believing in her father’s religion, she is about to let herself be baptized. Lauren and the other kids being baptized are making a special trip beyond their neighbor wall to a real church for the occasion. They live in Robledo, a city 20 miles outside Los Angeles. The people living outside their neighborhood wall are homeless, mutilated, and wounded, which makes it difficult for Lauren to be around them. She suffers from hyperempathy as a result of her mother’s drug abuse during pregnancy, a condition that means she feels other people’s pleasure and pain.
Recommender: lawrence festin, OREB
Ways to Access: Parable of the Sower (oasisacademysouthbank.org)
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Title: With the Fire on High
Author: Elizabeth Acevedo
Genre: fiction
Synopsis: Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making tough decisions—doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela.
The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.
Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet, despite the rules she thinks she must play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.
Recommender: lawrence festin
Ways to Access: With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo Pages 1-50 - Flip PDF Download | FlipHTML5
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Title: They Called Me a Lioness
Author: Ahed Tamimi & Dena Takruri
Genre: Memoir
Synopsis: A Palestinian activist jailed at sixteen after a confrontation with Israeli soldiers illuminates the daily struggles of life under occupation in this moving, deeply personal memoir.
Recommender:
Ways to Access: Goodreads Review
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Title: Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities
Author: Veronica Davis
Genre: Non-fiction
Synopsis: The book calls for transportation practitioners to shift how they think about transportation planning. Specifically, to be inclusive of community concerns and input and in acknowledgement that you can’t address historic disinvestment and inequities without this.
Recommender: Jenny Delumo, Streets - Planning Division
Ways to Access: https://www.abebooks.com/9781642832099/Inclusive-Transportation-Manifesto-Repairing-Divided-164283209X/plp
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Title: I am Malala: How one girl stood up for education and changed the world.
Author: Malala Yousafzai
Genre: Nonfiction, Biography,
Synopsis: About a young girl’s life before the Taliban and after the takeover of the Taliban. Her father was a schoolteacher, eager to teach the community, when his own daughter was shot on her way to school. It was a targeted shooting. Even after recovering from the incident, Malala refused to stop learning and in turn educating the world of education for young girls.
Recommender: Katherine Tapia – Dispatcher at Woods Division
Ways to Access: Goodreads Review
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Title: The House on Mango Street
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Genre: Fiction, Young Adult, Classic
Synopsis: Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero.
Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
Recommender: Benjamin Ibarra, 5408, OREB
Ways to Access: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros | Goodreads, multiple sellers
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