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WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER WAVE: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists

edited by Melody Berger (Seal)

In this ensemble reader, which features familiar feminist names such as Bitch magazine cofounder Lisa Jervis, poet Alix Olson, and Doris zinester Cindy Crabb, editor Melody Berger has collected 30 essays that artfully articulate visions of what it means to be a feminist-from tracing the formation of individual convictions to setting goals for the movement's future. Intentionally dispensing with divisive semantics, We Don't Need Another Wave is rousing and zippy. Many of the selections pack sass and spunk in place of in-depth academic analysis, but the feisty style is anchored in sincerity, and the intensely personal essays make this collection stand out in a crowded field. -Julie Hanus

SEEKING THE SACRED RAVEN: Politics and Extinction on a Hawaiian Island

by Mark Jerome Walters (Island)

The 'alal was just a crow cousin, some might say, a minor branch on the big avian family tree. But to anyone who saw it before it recently vanished from the wild, it was a memorable bird-loud, spirited, and social-and to many native Hawaiians, it was an ancestral spirit guardian, or 'aumakua. Author Mark Jerome Walters traces the last-ditch efforts to save the wild 'alala?, revealing the turf wars, bungled science, and, crucially, habitat loss that hastened its decline. By 'circling the raven' and attempting to write about it 'from every possible perspective,' he contrasts the scientific world with the spirit world of the Hawaiians and posits that the bird might still be cavorting in the koa trees if everyone saw it as a sacred being. It's a lesson that may be learned too late for the 'alala?, but perhaps not for other species on the brink of extinction. -Keith Goetzman

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