Others: Positive A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book.
Genres: nonfiction
Lists: …
Kevyn Aucoin
1997 · 159 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveThe classic -- and gorgeous -- bestseller from one of the most influential makeup artist in history. Kevin Aucoin shares his secrets, explaining not only the basics of makeup application and technique but also how to use the fundamentals to create a wide range of different looks.
What made the match, strongest first
Laura Bates
2025 · 320 pages · 7 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveGoodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favorite Nonfiction (2025) Misogyny is being hardwired into our future. Can we stop it? We like to believe we’re moving closer to equality, riding the wave of technological progress into a brighter, fairer future. But beneath the glossy surface of innovation lies a chilling truth: new technologies are not just failing to solve age-old inequalities—they’re deepening them. In The New Age of Sexism, acclaimed author and activist Laura Bates exposes how misogyny is being coded into the very fabric of our future. From the biases embedded in artificial intelligence to the alarming rise of sex robots and the toxic dynamics of the metaverse, Bates takes readers on a shocking journey into a world where technology is weaponized against women. This isn’t a dystopian warning about what might happen. It’s a harrowing account of what’s happening now and the dangers we face if we don’t act. With clarity and urgency, Bates reveals how these advancements are dragging society backward, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, and jeopardizing decades of progress in the fight for gender equality. Eye-opening and empowering, The New Age of Sexism is a rallying cry for awareness and action in a world where the battle for equality has entered a dangerous new frontier.
What made the match, strongest first
bell hooks
2000 · 239 pages · 8 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveAll About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all. Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame. For readers who have found ongoing delight and wisdom in bell hooks's life and work, and for those who are just now discovering her, All About Love is essential reading and a brilliant book that will change how we think about love, our culture-and one another.
What made the match, strongest first
Emily Nagoski
2015 · 448 pages · 2 reviews
Others: PositiveAn essential exploration of why and how women’s sexuality works—based on groundbreaking research and brain science—that will radically transform your sex life into one filled with confidence and joy. Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill” for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all. The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal. Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm. Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible. And Emily Nagoski can prove it.
What made the match, strongest first
Rosan Smits
2026 · 192 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveAn international bestseller, this “excellent” (Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny), urgent book outlines how fascism has returned to the mainstream―and how we can stop it Fascism is back. This time no swastikas or concentration camps, but MAGA hats and masked immigration officers. In his second term, Donald Trump is putting together a fascist regime. Not only Trump’s political adversaries say so; his own former advisers do, too. Internationally renowned scholars―experts in the field of fascism―say the evidence is overwhelming: Fascism is on the rise, not just in the US but around the world. Political scientist Rosan Smits topples the strongly held conviction in the West that our established democracies are immune. They are not. Fascism wasn’t just born in the West; it’s where new variants are being incubated. And these modern variants pose a threat not only to our national democracies but the international rules-based order built on law and human rights. The illusion that “it can’t happen here” makes us vulnerable and apathetic, precisely at a moment when action is still possible. Standing up against emerging fascism requires collective action. Nothing is inevitable in politics, and fascism doesn’t stand a chance if enough people understand that an attack on one person’s freedom is an attack on everyone’s freedom. If, in short, enough people understand: This is fascism.
What made the match, strongest first
Amanda Montell
2021 · 320 pages · 3 reviews
Others: PositiveThe New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how “cultish” groups, from Jonestown and Scientologists to SoulCycle and social media gurus, use language as the ultimate form of power. What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.
What made the match, strongest first
Loved itRebecca sonit is another one of those authors that writes essays that are very educational but still extremely readable and easy to get through and this one is kind of a collection of stories of things that went right in history
