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book reviews about African Americans’ genera- tional wealth—or lack thereof— with a heavy nod toward the injustice of property laws that could ignore a woman’s stewardship of the land, her decades-long struggle to pay taxes. “Nobody helped her cut the wheat or grind the flour or bake the bread,” Rayne says of Selma, who carried the burden of the fami- ly’s inheritance alone, or nearly so, for more than half a century. De- spite the book's evocative title—in- spired by the Bible promise, “In Christ you are not slaves, but sons, and if sons, then heirs”—Cary shows that more often than not, the riches of the earth are inherited by the few. LORI L. THARPS is an assistant profes- sor of journalism at Temple University and author of the novel Substitute Me. HARD QUESTIONS ANSWERED Pamela D. Bridgewater Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law and the Civil Rights Revolution By Serena Mayeri Harvard University Press YOU’VE BEEN IN THAT ROOM. WE all have. The room that had the air sucked out of it because someone among the feminists present noted that their differences were not being addressed sufficiently, if at all. No conversation screeches to a halt as quickly as when someone raises the issue of difference, whether it’s gen- der identity, class, ethnicity or religion —but especially when it’s racial. For generations, feminists have struggled with these “Ain’t I a woman?” moments, bracing themselves for reactions that can range from hostili- ty, guilt and defensiveness to respon- sibility and alliance building. Many believe that feminism has benefited over the years from such uncomfortable but productive mo- ments—the hard questions, the un- responsiveness, the denials, the meaningful engagements. Others say the charge that feminism reflects only the aspirations of privileged, straight white women is unfair and has caused irreparable harm to the feminist political movement. Still others wonder what the fuss is about, saying debates over difference are a natural by-product of a diverse movement. Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race is designed to facilitate these discus- sions by showing how the pursuit of racial justice affected the legal bookmarks I GREAT READS FOR SPRING 2011 Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade By Virginia Lynn Moylan University Press of Florida Moylan fills in the “lost years” of the much- loved Harlem Renaissance novelist, offering insight into Hurston’s political views and telling of her work in anthropology and as a public intellectual. In Zanesville By Jo Ann Beard Little, Brown and Company This debut novel explores the tragicomic struggles of a teenage girl in 1970s subur- bia. Beard’s narrator traverses first crushes, the siren song of popularity and the push/ pull of friendship. State of Wonder By Ann Patchett Harper The author of the breakthrough Bel Canto returns with a novel even more adventur- 58 | SPRING 2011 ous. A pharmacologist, sent to the Amazon to track down her reclusive mentor, faces real and imagined demons and makes thorny decisions in the name of science, work and love. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s By Stephanie Coontz Basic Books Coontz shows how Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique threw a lifeline to U.S. middle- and upper-class white women constrained by conformity. The Wild Girls By Ursula K. Le Guin PM Press Nominated for a 2003 Hugo Award and fi- nally in book form, this novella proves that sci-fi doyenne Le Guin grows sharper with the decades. The three-caste society she imagines, and the two girls situated at its bottom, show that while cultural structures of race, class and gender may be fluid, power hierarchies and their grim human toll remain constant. Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag By Sigrid Nunez Atlas & Co. Memoirs about Sontag, who died in 2004, have become a cottage industry, but this re- membrance is especially worthwhile. Nunez, who worked for Sontag, dated her son and moved in with the two, limns the novelist/ essayist in all her glory, snobbery and poignancy. The Civilized World: A Novel in Stories By Susi Wyss Holt Paperbacks Wyss, who spent years in Africa working in health programs, creates a cast of five African and American-expat women whose lives inter- www.feminist.org