You must write a 1,000 word paper about a book of your choice. The topic of the book must relate to victims. It may be one of the books on the list below, or you can choose your own book, but I must approve the book before you read it and write about it. A high-scoring paper will spend a short time summarizing the book (a paragraph or two), and spend the majority of the paper relating it to what we have learned in class. That is, did sections of it remind you of our readings, discussions, or my lectures? How did it relate? A high-scoring paper will be thoughtful and analytical – I’d really like to see that you thought carefully about the topic.
This is a small list of possible books – there are many, many more out there that you might choose:
Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women by Victoria Law
Can’t Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs and the Limits of Personal Responsibility, by Susan Starr Sered, Maureen Norton-Hawk
Lost Girls, by Melissa Gira Grant
Random Family
Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
Compelled to Crime: The gender entrapment of battered black women by Beth Richie
Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence by Nikki Jones
Whatever Mother Says…: A True Story of a Mother, Madness and Murder by Wesley Clarkson.
Becoming Anna by Anna Michener
They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch
The Lost Boy by David Pelzer (sequel to A Child Called “It”)
Such Good Boys by Tina Dirmann
Proclivity by Bonnie Kern
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood by Julie Gregory
The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam (If you use this book, you must do some internet searching on Somaly Mam’s story since it came out).
Silent No More: Victim 1’s Fight for Justice Against Jerry Sandusky by Aaron Fisher and Michael Gillum with Dawn Daniels
The Burning Bed by Faith McNulty
Empty Promises by Ann Rule
Shattered Dreams: The Story of Charlotte Fedders by Charlotte Fedders and Laura Elliott
I Am Not Your Victim by Beth Sipe and Evelyn J. Hall
Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas by Joyce King
A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder and a Small Town’s Struggle for Redemption by Dianna Temple-Raston
Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder by Beth Loffred
Eight Bullets: One Woman’s Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence by Claudia Brenner with Hannah Ashley
Lucky by Alice Sebold
After Silence; Rape and My Journey Back by Nancy Venable Raine
The Only Girl in the Car by Kathy Dobie
Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz
Where the River Bends by Barry Raine
Shattered: Reclaiming a Life Torn Apart by Violence by Debra Puglisi Sharp & Marjorie Preston
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
