Library Loot ~ October 16-22

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture ~ by Peggy Orenstein, 2011, society

The rise of the girlie-girl, warns Peggy Orenstein, is no innocent phenomenon. Following her acclaimed books Flux, Schoolgirls, and the provocative New York Times bestseller Waiting for Daisy, Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter offers a radical, timely wake-up call for parents, revealing the dark side of a pretty and pink culture confronting girls at every turn as they grow into adults.

My great-granddaughter likes everything pink:  her hat, her clothes, her lawn chair, her hair bows, her valentines, her art work.  Why must everything be pink?  It didn't used to be this way, when my girls wore greens and yellows, reds and blue, plaids, stripes, and polka dots (maybe not those).  Here's the table of contents:

1.  Why I Hoped for a Boy
2.  What's Wrong with Cinderella?
3.  Pinked!
4.  What Makes Girls Girls?
5.  Sparkle, Sweetie!
6.  Guns and (Briar) Roses
7. Wholesome to Whoresome:  The Other Disney Princesses
8.  It's All About the Cape
9.  Just Between You, Me, and My 622 BFFs
10.  Girl Power — No, Really

The New Mind of the South ~ by Tracy Thompson, 2013, culture

There are those who say the South has disappeared.  But in her groundbreaking, thought-provoking exploration of the region, Tracy Thompson, a Georgia native and Pulitzer Prize finalist, asserts that it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition:  an ability to adapt and transform itself.  Thompson spent years traveling through the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child.  African Americans who left en masse for much of the twentieth century are returning in huge numbers, drawn back by a mix of ambition, family ties, and cultural memory.  Though Southerners remain more churchgoing than other Americans, the evangelical Protestantism that defined Southern culture up through the 1960s has been torn by bitter ideological schisms.  The new South is ahead of others in absorbing waves of Latino immigrants, in rediscovering its agrarian traditions, in seeking racial reconciliation, and in reinventing what it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.  Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives, Thompson upends stereotypes and fallacies to reveal the true heart of the South today — a region still misunderstood by outsiders and even by its own people.

Here's the table of contents:

1.  It's Complicated
2.  Salsa with Your Grits
3.  The Big Lie
4.  Shadow History
5.  Jesusland
6.  The Sorting Out
7.  Atlanta
8.  Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

Yep, I'm sure there's some interesting stuff in this book.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader.  They encourage us to share titles of books we’ve checked out of the library.  Add your link any time during the week, and see what others got this week.

This is the sign in front of my branch of the library.