100 Books Like Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Most people know Harry Belafonte as an iconic singer and actor – someone whose career as an entertainer spanned more than half a century. But this autobiography proves he was much more, and, indeed, he considers himself more an activist than an entertainer.

He writes about his struggles growing up in a poor and underprivileged family, and he describes how his roots helped chart his pivotal role in this country’s civil rights movement. Unlike many “entertainer-activists,” Belafonte was in it for the long haul–he spent most of his adult life advocating for the rights of underprivileged people and racial minorities and sometimes paid a price for his actions.

I had always admired Harry Belafonte–not just for his talent but also for his steadfast support of civil rights, even though he knew that support could create controversy, alienate people, and hurt his career. In plain language, he describes here why his… show more.

This is the story of someone who was willing to take an unorthodox and brave stand even though she knew she would be widely ridiculed and demeaned. Rachel Carson can be considered one of the first environmentalists in this country. She was one of the first to take on an entire industry when she pointed out the widespread dangers of pesticides and other commonly used chemicals considered at the time to be safe. Carson was a woman of great determination and vision and someone who has been lost to history to some degree.

I felt that in addition to taking on a major corporation and questioning prevailing ways of thinking, Rachel Carson attempted to transform the way we view the natural world and human beings’ effect on it. She was vilified for her efforts and for the very fact that she was a woman scientist–her gender intensified negative feelings against… show more.

This book portrays Harvey Milk as a deeply inspirational figure who rose at a time when many LGBTQ individuals remained in the closet because they were shunned by society. Milk became the nation’s first openly gay elected city official when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and as such, he had a platform to become a key figurehead and leader in the gay rights movement in this country. Milk was a fearless and charismatic leader and role model to millions of people, fueling one of the most influential political and sociological movements of the late 20th century. Milk’s influence remains today.

I found Milk to be incredibly brave. He knew his fight for gay and lesbian rights put him in physical danger, and his fears, tragically, were realized when he was assassinated by a fellow city supervisor. Author Randy Shilts details Milk’s triumphs and struggles in… show more.

As I read this book, I realized the more things change, the more they stay the same, particularly when it comes to the battle for reproductive rights. The two women chronicled here were “rivals,” and they were direct opposites when it came to upbringing, personality, and strategic views. But they both were dedicated to making birth control legal in this country – it’s hard to believe that providing it was once a crime – and both fought hard and sacrificed much to achieve that goal. The author shows clearly how history repeats itself: the battles these two women fought mirror current ones over reproductive rights and show that women’s rights are far from guaranteed in any era. 

This book showed me that rivalry and competition can actually fuel a cause and help both participants achieve their goals. In this case, two strong-willed women from widely varied backgrounds had differing opinions… show more.

If you want to understand men and what makes them tick, read this book. 

There are many good books now published on men and masculinities, but this work by David Morgan transcends them all. It was written for a sociological audience, though it remains accessible to any reader. Partly, this is due to the reflective element David deploys throughout.

I love this book because there is much of him in it while remaining one of the classic sociological texts on being and becoming a man. I knew David as a friend and academic colleague and learned much from him. You, too, will learn much about men and masculinities by reading this passionately profeminist work by one of the UK’s top sociologists. 

Unrecognised female labor is also the subject of this captivating non-fiction book by Hochschild, a sociologist drawing upon decades of research with fifty heterosexual couples in the Bay area. Hochschild is well-known for identifying ‘the second shift’ of childcare and domestic chores that working women often perform at home, on top of their professional commitment. This results in a rampant inequality of leisure time, and compounded with unequal pay in the workplace, exacerbates gender injustice in contemporary American society. But Hochschild also provides powerful examples of couples who counter-act this norm, while showing how individual attitudes towards gender and domestic responsibilities are influenced by class, ethnicity, and upbringing. Fascinating and illuminating. 

You’d think the subtitle says it all, but nope. Chocano loved reading bedtime stories to her daughter, but when even Alice and Wonderland proved problematic, she peered through the looking glass to see why. She explores the challenges of raising a female in a world of Disney Princesses, Playboy bunnies, and popular TV shows and movies. She even takes aim at the female manifesto, Eat Pray Love, bless her heart. I met Chocano at a reading of this book when I was nervously submitting A Boob’s Life to publishers. I was thrilled to find overlap with such a kindred spirit. You’ll find Chocana’s byline in major magazines featuring celebrity interviews, but without the snark. Personally, I love the snark - it makes the facts more fun.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what life after #girlboss looks like, and Benjamin’s book plants the seed of an answer. Benjamin opens the book with a meditation on the system that celebrates “exceptional” youth of color and how this system functions more to prop up the myth of colorblindness than to create a world in which all of us can thrive. The key to getting from that world to this one is to radically redistribute the power to imagine—so that we live in a world where it is not only the visions of tech billionaires that are shaping our future.

This might sound abstract, and it is, but the book is full of lovely exercises in liberating our power to envision the world otherwise. For example, Parker Brothers paid feminist Elisabeth Magie $500 in 1903 for a game intended to portray unrestricted capitalism as a dystopian nightmare… show more.

Where the Girls Are is about a particular generation of women growing up in post War America, and the impact popular media had on their lives, both for good and for bad. It weaves wonderfully smart, often funny, always engagingly written discussions of pop music, movies, and television shows with Douglas’s own experiences at the time. It’s unabashedly feminist—but it isn’t a speech or a political manifesto. It’s an exploration of the push-pull of growing up female at a transitional time, a time in which attitudes toward women were changing, unevenly, and how pop culture reflected the tensions of the times. This book is history, memoir, sociology, media studies, all at once – immensely informative and very entertaining.

The Sri Lankan feminist Kumari Jayawardena produced this groundbreaking history in 1986 and it has never been out of print. It told me so many things I didn’t know, for example how Chairman Mao’s early radicalism was centred on women’s issues: a social system which so subjected women must be brought down; Marxism was a later add-on (but don’t tell the Chinese Communist Party, they don’t like to acknowledge this fact).