Advice for Readers

In observance of Women’s History Month we bring you a short list of books on women who made important contributions to the fight for suffrage, in civil and human rights, and in science and mathematics. Read on.

Women achieved the right to vote in the United States in 1920 after a struggle almost as old as the nation itself. For a good overview of that movement, read With courage and cloth : winning the fight for a woman's right to vote by Ann Bausum. To learn more about the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, birthplace of the American Woman Suffrage movement, read Seneca falls and the origins of the women's rights movement by Sally G. McMillen.

During the past month, many U.S. immigrants have faced new challenges as a result of executive orders issued from the White House. As a nation of immigrants, we know that the immigrant experience is varied and unique. Listed below are books released in the last year that capture some of the unique experiences of what it means to be a U.S. citizen and/or an immigrant living in the U.S.

Nonfiction

Call me Ishmael. 

You just read one of the most recognizable first lines in all literature opening one of the most immersive and rewarding reads there is. But what’s the big deal? Why read it? Here’s why. Moby Dick sprawls across the pages, from New Bedford to the South Seas and from a hopeful beginning to a disastrous end. Its language is monumental, springing from the biblical and Shakespearean texts that were Herman Melville’s cultural foundation. Its characters, Ahab, Ishmael, Starbuck, Queequeg, Tashtego, Pip, are fully alive and compelling and, to use an anachronistic word, diverse. The discursive chapters on whales and whaling draw you into
world and way of life that’s lost. The whale itself is a force of nature, both aggressor and aggressed against.

First published in 1851, Herman Melville created Moby Dick out of his own experiences as a sailor in the whale fishery, and on