Category Archives: Featured Books

A Sparkling New Podcast on “Tell It Slant” – The Biography of Chuck Fager

Announcing A Brand-New, free podcast, now online at the link below:

Tell It Slant-Podcast with Emma, Chuck & Mark

Continue reading A Sparkling New Podcast on “Tell It Slant” – The Biography of Chuck Fager

From “Tell It Slant,” Excerpt #2: Encouraging Rejections

(Excerpt #1 is here.)

In the spring of 1956 — Chuck was in eighth grade — orders came for the family to  leave an Air Force base in California. His father, now a major, was aircraft commander of one of the largest bombers ever, the B-36.

Click was assigned to join a squadron of these bombers at Ramey Air Force Base, in the northwest corner of Puerto Rico. These planes flew long missions — often reportedly carrying nuclear bombs — likely around the periphery of the Soviet Union and “Red” China, though their course was secret too.

Some of the Puerto Rico experiences were pivotal for Chuck, in several ways.

For one thing, since there was no local English-language TV service, Chuck was perforce obliged to wean himself from TV, and thereby transferred almost all his
free time to reading. Here he had help from the Caribbean climate and the Air Force: Puerto Rico was continually hot and humid, with frequent rainstorms (and a major hurricane, Betsy, in late 1956); air conditioning was still a rare luxury. Continue reading From “Tell It Slant,” Excerpt #2: Encouraging Rejections

A New Book: A Quaker’s Life in Our “Interesting,” Tumultuous Times

Emma Lapsansky-Werner and Chuck Fager at the Quaker History Roundtable, summer of 2017

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Announcing: A Very Special Quaker Publishing Award

For years, I’ve been loudly protesting the sky-high, exclusionary prices on “academic” or “scholarly” books and monographs.  The particular focus of my ire has been publications by or about Quakers and Quakerism, though the price-gouging has infected many other fields of study.

Today I want to recognize and celebrate a successful challenge to this uber-inflationary practice. Continue reading Announcing: A Very Special Quaker Publishing Award

A History of NOW and its Women who Made History

The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

Katherine Turk has produced a must-read on the group which did so much for American women in the 1960s and 70s

Clara Bingham

Pauli Murray – an under-appreciated feminist-civil-rights-labor activist and thinker, also a founder of NOW. From a wall mural on a Durham NC street

What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.

Continue reading A History of NOW and its Women who Made History