Good Reads

Our Bodies, Ourselves by The Boston Women's Health Book Collective
This is the "everything you ever wanted to know about having a female body" book. A must read!


Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman by Kaneko Fumiko translated by Jean Inglis
If you are interested in Kaneko after reading "Resistance to Difference," this is the book to read. Originally titled "What made me do it," this book was Fumiko's letter to the judge explaining her life, and her reasoning for declaring war on the Emperor and society. A nihilist, anarchist, individualist and poet, Fumiko's writing style makes this telling of her life's story powerful as well as enjoyable to read.

Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies by Helene Bowen Raddeker
While this book is virtually impossible to obtain for one's self, it is available at many libraries. In this book Raddeker focuses on the lives, struggles, and deaths of Kanno Suga and Kaneko Fumiko, including many of there poems and writings, which are rare in English.


Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity by Lucy Parsons and Gale Ahrens
An insurrectionary anarchist, before it was in style, Lucy Parsons had a way of writing and of speaking that could excite the most docile of abused workers. She advocated for the use of explosives as a means of waging war on the bosses, she was involved in the creation of several unions, most notably the IWW, and was considered by the Chicago police to be "more dangerous than a thousand rioters."
This book is the most complete compilation of her writings and speeches, as well as a biography by Ahrens.

Shoot The Women First by Eileen MacDonald
This book is comprised mainly of interviews with women involved in militant or violent groups, both state sanctioned and anti-state alike. The zine "Among the Women of the ETA" was taken from Shoot the Women First. MacDonald also explores the world of women in the Palestinian movement - women from the PLO and the infamous plane hijacker, Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; women of the Baader-Meinhohf Gang and the Red Army Faction; Kim Hyon Hui who bombed a plane for the North Korean Government; and Susanna Ronconi of the Red Brigades.

This book provides great insight into these organizations and individuals, but MacDonald is by no means sympathetic to the causes of those she is interviewing and writing about. Her interest in these groups extends only to the role of these women and their relationship to violence: whether or not women are more brutal, more committed, and more dangerous than their male counterparts. She explores the idea that women have a greater capacity for violence because of their biology: they give life, and are therefore more able to take it; and that patriarchal relations makes women tougher because they feel that they have more to prove, that they can be equally, if not more, violent and brutal than men. But in the end, the feelings, opinions and thoughts of the interviewees seems to win out over her own agenda, and this book is really a good one.