sold

After finishing Half the Sky yesterday, I picked up this book written by Patricia McCormick because it tells the story of one girl's nightmare as she is sold into sex slavery.  It complements what I learned in Half the Sky because it is a fictional, personal account based on the author's interviews of girls in brothels in Nepal and India. 

This book is beautifully written in almost vignette-like verse, deeply contrasting the horrifying turmoil of the young narrator's life.  It does a wonderful job of forcing the reader to acknowledge a world we try to pretend does not exist in today's world.  But it does.  And it's important to open our eyes to the atrocities that are so real to so many young women and girls.  Although Sold is a young adult book, it needs to make its way into adult literary circles as well.

half the sky

"Women hold up half the sky." - Chinese Proverb

Half the Sky, written by Pulitzer prize-winning spouses Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, will change your persective on life.  This is not just a book about women's rights, rather a book about human rights.  If you have a humanitarian bone in your body, Half the Sky will shock you, sadden you, and empower you.

Half the Sky is a "passionate call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world."  It discusses sex trafficking, honor killings, female genital cutting, maternal health, and other horrifying realties.  Realities we have escaped through our privileged Western upbringing.

If you have a mother, a sister, a daughter, a female you love, this book is a must.  If you don't have time to read it, visit Half the Sky to see what you can do to make a difference in the lives of women and girls across the globe.  I know I will no longer be able to turn a blind eye.

six months in sudan

The story of a 33-year-old doctor on assignment in Sudan through Doctors without Borders, this memoir is both shocking and touching.  I could not put the book down.  Loved, loved, loved it.

James Maskalyk originally told his story through his blog and later in this book.  The memories he retells leave a searing mark on your heart, espcially the ones of the Sudanese infants and children.  

I recommend this to anyone in search of an inspring and thought-provoking humanitarian story.  James is a beautiful writer, capturing an almost vignette style in his blog entries, which are woven throughout the book.  Truly a wonderful memoir.

Thank you to my freshman student Nicole who recommended this book to me after it changed her own outlook on life.

catching fire

Okay, so I fell off the wagon and stopped reading for a month.  I don't know what happened.  I guess life happened.  This weekend, though, we went out of town for a wedding without the boys so I actually read a book.  I finally picked up the next book in the Hunger Games trilogy.  This book is almost as engaging as the first, and I have already pre-ordered the third one to be released in August, just in time for school to start, the ultimate delay to my reading!