Here are 100 books that The Dance of the Dissident Daughter fans have personally recommended if you like
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.
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I am passionate about this topic because patriarchy has generally told us that raising babies and kids is a mundane, even vilified, topic that’s hardly worthy of artistic attention, which is ridiculous. It is the richest of topics, underlines the mysteries of being alive, and so many wonderful books that explore it are either overlooked, unwritten, or admired for how they address something else. I have a hard time saying “Best” of anything, but these are great books that contribute to the respect and reverence that the experience deserves.
This book is about the legacy of the massive violence and trauma of slavery, but at its heart, this is entirely about motherhood. I have read no other novel that so searingly, brilliantly, and tenderly depicts the haunting extremes— physically, emotionally, and spiritually—to which motherhood will bring a woman.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
I love to read. I always have. I also love to write mysteries that, hopefully, keep my reader guessing until the end of the book. I look for books that not only provide me with a mystery to solve but also inform me of situations and/or places I would otherwise never learn about. I have found all the books on my list to fill that need. They are just an example of the many I have found and read.
A murder mystery and so much more. Set in the marshlands of North Carolina in the United States, it’s an unusual read with the emotional content tugging at my heartstrings. It describes life in the marsh and a child’s heartbreaking struggle to survive.
Nevertheless, I found the author’s description of the natural world in the marshlands brilliant and the haunting tale stayed with me long after I finished reading the book.
OVER 12 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be…
I’m a historical novelist originally from Ohio. In Civil War lessons at school, we learned about battles and generals and read The Red Badge of Courage and other books centering on men’s experiences. With the exception of Florence Nightingale, women were largely absent from the discussions. I want to know about the women. As an adult, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, where I learned of the mill workers, mostly women and children, who, in 1864, were arrested and sent north by Federal forces for making Confederate cloth. Their fates largely remain a mystery, and I wrote my book in order to imagine what we may never know.
Part of the pleasure of reading historical fiction is the opportunity to learn something new, and this novel offered insight into medical practices of the Civil War period. Oliveira spares no details, no matter how gruesome. Yet the novel never feels like a lecture; the details are expertly woven into the story.
I loved following Mary Sutter’s journey from a well-respected Albany midwife to an aspiring Washington surgeon. I was inspired by her determination to learn all she could about the human body and how to treat it despite the many obstacles in her path.
A moving, New York Times bestselling novel about a young Civil War midwife who dreams of becoming a surgeon
Chosen by Good Housekeeping as a Top 10 Good Read
Mary Sutter's story continues in Winter Sisters, coming February 2018 from Viking
Fans of Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, and Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker by Jennifer Chiaverini will love this New York Times bestselling Civil War tale.
Mary Sutter is a brilliant young midwife who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Eager to run away from recent heartbreak, Mary travels to Washington, D.C., to help tend the legions…
I grew up watching my mother suffer under a strict patriarchal religion. She never felt she had a choice in her life, and yet she always remained a dreamer, collecting newspaper articles about events in history that interested her. They piled up in a box and I’ve no idea what she thought to do with them. She would thumb through them between bouts of standing over a ringer washer or hanging wet clothing outside in freezing weather. There were 15 of us, you can imagine the laundry. I never saw her cry…despite working like a mule. I admire her and women like her for getting through.
The title says a lot about why this book moved me. Susan La Flesche was a warrior for her people, and what greater reason do any of us have for our existence? La Flesche overcame impossible odds and gave up a great deal to become a doctor. Time and again she risked her life to travel to homes in the dead of night or through snowstorms to reach someone who needed her. That dedication and drive inspire me. Reading the book makes me roll my eyes at my own short list of accomplishments. Also, I was raised close to the famous Indian School in Genoa, Nebraska. I grew up fascinated by the buildings and the haunted feelings in the classrooms. Starita’s lyrical descriptions of the land also transported me back.
"An important and riveting story of a 19th-century feminist and change agent. Starita successfully balances the many facts with vivid narrative passages that put the reader inside the very thoughts and emotions of La Flesche." —Chicago Tribune
On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche Picotte received her medical degree—becoming the first Native American doctor in U.S. history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country.
By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Native woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered…
I have been to hell and back over the years. After experiencing childhood abuse, I lived through a succession of traumas with my family including fraud, painful experiences in church ministry, a death threat, and a catastrophic house fire accidentally started by my mother-in-law. While I was helped by counseling, prayer, and caring friends and mentors, something was still missing. I needed to process all that pain and loss but didn’t know how. I had to learn how to grieve. Over years of rebuilding, I’ve lived the lessons of lament and know the healing that is possible when pain is metabolized.
I discovered Cole Arthur Riley through her breath prayers and curated wisdom around liberation through her Black Liturgies account on Instagram. Her words in this book are poetry and good medicine for my soul.
Her story of learning to love her physical body as she lives with chronic pain is wise and freeing. I didn’t know how much I needed her wise reimagining of the story of the garden, the fall, and what it means to find home.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her stunning debut, the creator of Black Liturgies weaves stories from three generations of her family alongside contemplative reflections to discover the “necessary rituals” that connect us with our belonging, dignity, and liberation.
“This is the kind of book that makes you different when you’re done.”—Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter
“Reaches deep beneath the surface of words unspoken, wounds unhealed, and secrets untempered to break them open in order for fresh light to break through.”—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and…
I have been interested in purpose and meaning since I snuck into a high school philosophy class when I was 10 years old. Since then, I have not only worked on my own quest for meaning in my life but also helped dozens of others through these types of questions as an executive coach and business leader. I believe that having an answer to the question “why am I here?” is the crucial ingredient to living a happy and fulfilled life, and I’ve been working for years to distill all that I have learned on the subject into a useable and accessible collection of insights.
What amazes me about A Confession is that here is Tolstoy, one of the giants of world literature, at the top of his game, lamenting that there is no meaning to his life. This made me realize that there is no one immune from this feeling of purposelessness and that there are no prizes, accolades, awards, or other external things that will prevent you from feeling existential angst.
The book also shows how Tolstoy worked through his crisis, and although I do not agree with his conclusions, the path that he takes in the book was very useful for me in my own journey to meaning.
Despite having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, at the age of 51, looked back on his life and considered it a meaningless, regrettable failure. A Confession provides insight into the great Russian writer's movement from the pursuit of aesthetic ideals toward matters of religious and philosophical consequence. Authentic and genuinely moving, this memoir of midlife spiritual crisis was first distributed in 1872 and marked a turning point in the author's career as a writer: in subsequent years, Tolstoy would write almost exclusively about religious life, especially devotion among the peasantry. Generations of readers have been inspired…
I am the teaching pastor of Woodland Christian Church, and in 2016, I published a best-selling marriage book, Your Marriage God's Way, with an accompanying workbook. Soon after that, I began receiving invitations to put on marriage conferences across the nation. My experience teaching on marriage, performing marriage counseling, and meeting so many married couples has given me a strong biblical understanding of marriage.
The subtitle of the book helps you understand Gary Thomas’s purpose: he wants to help his readers see that marriage is not primarily for our happiness.
Although it is a gift and frequently fills us with joy, marriage is also very sanctifying, which is to say it makes us holy. Few things in life help us grow spiritually as much as marriage. When we get married we learn to be patient, gentle, and we frequently have to find ourselves being forgiving. And these are all wonderful graces.
What if God designed marriage to make you holy instead of happy? What if your relationship isn't as much about you and your spouse as it is about you and God?
In Sacred Marriage, bestselling author Gary Thomas uncovers the ways that your marriage can become a doorway to a closer walk with God and with each other. Join over one million others who have already uncovered Thomas's tips for fostering a sacred marriage.
Within the pages of Sacred Marriage, Thomas invites you to see how God can use your relationship with your spouse as a discipline and a motivation…
Our history is spoken through the voice of the conqueror – notably white male. My work seeks to balance our narratives through insight from women’s perspectives. I support my creative writing with extensive research in history, archeology, and myths, and include in situ interpretations of the relevant landscape. There are many truths to be told, not simply one ordained story and I wish to shine the light on stories that have been hidden and/or silenced. The themed series title, Women Unveiled, pertains to this.
Mary Magdalene is a central character in my novel. Aside from researching the folklore in the south of France and reading Mary’s Gospel discovered at Nag Hammadi, I needed to delve into contemporary writings of this historical and maligned woman.
I read many academic articles, essays, and books on Mary Magdalene, notably Karen King’s bookThe Gospel of Mary of Magdala, which could have just as easily been my third pick. I selected Cynthia Boudreault’s book as I appreciated the application of her reasoning and intuition. Her writing was accessible without being laden with religious overtones.
The author of The Wisdom Jesus takes readers on a journey to discover the real Mary Magdalene—and finds a powerful, ancient model for 21st-century spirituality
Mary Magdalene is one of the most influential symbols in the history of Christianity—yet, if you look in the Bible, you’ll find only a handful of verses that speak of her. How did she become such a compelling saint in the face of such paltry evidence?
In her effort to answer that question, Cynthia Bourgeault examines the Bible, church tradition, art, legend, and newly discovered texts to see what’s there. She then applies her own…
I have always been interested in cultural history. In my early 30s, I realized that Greek mythology was a late, patriarchal revision of the earlier Goddess-centric myths. After much research, I reconstructed several pre-Olympian myths in my book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. This was one of the first books of the Women’s Spirituality movement, which began in the 1970s and is still going strong. A few years later, I edited an anthology of 50 voices, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality. Thus I am a foremother of that movement, which is a bountiful exploration of authentic spiritual experience in women’s lives.
If you try to learn about the cultural history of the sacred female cross-culturally, you are likely to encounter the attitude in our patriarchal society that Goddesses couldn’t really have been widespread or ever been very important. A handy refutation can be found in this book, which contains information on over 11,000 Goddesses, nymphs, spirits, and deified women around the world. Grouped according to geographic regions, each entry gives you not only the translation of the Goddess’s name but also her story. That is, it’s a biographical dictionary because it gives the characteristics and the mythology associated with each Goddess. If you read through the entries for any one region, you will become immersed in a deeply poetic sense of the resonant cultural history underlying later developments.
This biographical dictionary contains 11,500 entries for goddesses from around the world and throughout time. Each entry contains area location, associated attributes, and a brief description. Many entries also contain brief retellings of the main myth pertaining to that goddess. This book is intended for religion students and scholars; those interested in New Age.
My passion for studying religion started decades ago, now culminating in a master's degree from Harvard in religion. My main interest is religious literacy, and my master's thesis is on religious literacy among healthcare providers, which is not surprising since I myself work in healthcare. I am particularly interested in interfaith approaches that unite people of diverse religious and nonreligious backgrounds in a common goal of doing some good in the world.
I particularly like the way this book embraces pluralism. Although the term "pluralism" is sometimes maligned by friends who lean right politically, a few facts are clear, including that our society is becoming more and more multicultural and pluralistic, and that diverse people will generally live more harmoniously together the more they understand and respect each other. This is a profoundly important truth for kids to learn in this book. The less we and our kids "other" (exclude or see as a threatening other) people outside of our own ingroup, and the more we live by the Golden Rule, applied to all other humans, not just to people in our ingroup(s), the better off we will all be in our increasingly diverse religious landscape. Religious literacy is more important now than ever.
For the five billion people who inhabit the earth, religion is an important part of culture and identity. From the Buddhists of China to the Muslims of the Middle East, people of different origins, languages, and customs have also embraced varied ways of worship. Through detailed illustrations and descriptions, Betsy and Giulio Maestro take a historical look at religious--and show that faiths around the world are as diverse as the people who practice them.
