The most recommended books about misogyny

It came as no surprise to me, having spent so much time in the country, that Korea has long been and still is a sexist society, and this book illustrates that sexism brutally. When I lived there, my good friend, a woman, was a professor of biochemistry, and she struggled in her career the way men didn’t have to. Also, while people thought nothing of my going out to a pub with my male friends, it was somewhat scandalous when I did the same with this woman. In this novel, set in more recent times, a young woman has similar troubles trying to find her way. For many readers, it has served as a wake-up call for Korean society.

As a Harvard undergrad, Cooper hears a story about an anthropology professor who murdered a female graduate student with whom he was having an affair, burning her body with cigarette butts and surrounding her in red ochre.

This “macabre legend” illustrates a common critique of true crime—a victim provided no name and no identity beyond the way she was brutalized. A former New Yorker editorial staff member, Cooper performed meticulous research on the 1969 murder, debunking the affair rumor and instead exploring a more interesting story about memory, institutional power, and misogyny in academia.

She also excavates the story of the crime’s victim, 23-year-old Jane Britton. Full of twists and turns, this real-life whodunit provides an exacting portrait of who Jane was and what her loved ones lost.

I’m a sucker for a distinctive (preferably gothic) setting, and this book makes incredible use of the northern Scottish coast. The wet chill of the air practically seeps through its pages, mirroring the slow, seeping chill of the plot.

As the story moves through three separate timelines, braiding together the lives of three different women who’ve lived in that remote, rocky spot, misogyny and violence against women rise to the surface again and again, like the dead things that wash ashore.

The piece-by-piece buildup is so subtle, the writing is so beautiful, and the unfolding events are so enraging, I couldn’t put this book down until I reached the end. And it has haunted me ever since.

Jennifer Carlson, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, does the rare thing of actually asking gun owners (she interviewed sixty of them) why they have guns, and what guns mean to them. As a sociologist, Carlson immersed herself in the “gun carry culture”—Americans who carry guns with them in everyday life, which is a new wrinkle in American gun culture. I was surprised by many of her findings and insights, and in some cases I was struck by their elegance; for example, Americans carry guns because they feel the US is “in decline” because of social chaos, and “guns are perceived as solving the problem” of that chaos.

What’s new and surprising here, and that I especially appreciated, is that Carlson in her own words “does something different” in this book, rejecting both the “gun politics” narrative that the “gun culture is an affirmation… show more.

After her most famous work of speculative fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale, was adapted for a popular television series in 2017, Atwood wrote a sequel of sorts and a book that, to me, is more interesting and engaging than the remarkable story it builds on.

It takes the form of a truth-and-reconciliation investigation of the theocratic coup that turned the U.S. into the Republic of Gilead. It turns the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale—often criticized as a Wizard of Oz-like cop-out at the end of an otherwise unflinching novel—into the launching point for a text that digs in much deeper, with profound wisdom and a clear-eyed species of hope.

In this book, Shlain reveals his unusual take on the power of images throughout history. His discussion using contemporary ideas about our creative right-brain side brings interesting connections between the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Shlain's earlier book, Art & Physics was very popular expressing his breakthrough theory, ad revealing an astonishing parallel with these two seemingly different topics. I find that books like this, not dedicated to learning specific painting techniques, end up being more helpful towards how I think as an artist. A good writer, it is easy to read and very inspiring.

This book is a collection of essays, letters, and lectures about the intrinsic value, importance, and beauty of science by one of its most talented and passionate communicators. Dawkins’s clear and often witty treatment of complex scientific issues is a breath of fresh air in this time of misinformation and ‘fake news.’ He writes primarily about biology, his own specialty, but ranges widely from ecology to evolution to genetics and even life beyond planet earth. Throughout, his incisive prose conveys the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery.

Jack Holland was an incredible writer. When he told men he was writing a book about misogyny, one group expressed surprise that a man would write such a book. His reply was, “Why? We invented it.” How can you not thoroughly love a man who could answer that? More, he’s done his homework, and done it exceedingly well.

He takes us through the history of this dreadful manifestation of patriarchy sympathetically and carefully. The links he creates historically are breath-taking, and cage-rattling they’re so sensible. Every woman in the world should read this book, and so should every human who knows a woman.

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox is a complex, enthralling pastiche of a novel. Interweaving adaptations of Bluebeard, Fitcher’s Bird, Mr. Fox, and the ballad of Reynardine, Mr. Fox invites readers into a vertiginous wonderland where Oyeyemi’s adaptations interrogate the workings of gender and race, romance and desire, imperialism and geopolitics. Moving slipstream-style across the twentieth century, Mr. Fox offers a transnational circuit of stories and characters that connect gendered and raced cultural conventions with the misogyny and violence of the Bluebeard tradition, ultimately challenging readers to consider (and reconsider) European literary and artistic traditions as well as their underlying ideological structures.

Anne Gardiner Perkins’ Yale Needs Women combines rigorous historical research and riveting storytelling to produce a book that is both insightful and inspirational. She explains how Yale University’s first female students in 1969 faced extensive discrimination and had to fight rampant misogyny, outdated traditions, and backwards views on a daily basis to get an education.