A Schneider Family Book Award Honor Book for Teens "Raw and unflinching . . . A must-read!" --Marieke Nijkamp, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of This Is Where It Ends "[It] cuts to the heart of our bogus ideas of beauty." –Scott Westerfeld, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Uglies I am ugly. There's a mathematical equation to prove it. At only eight months old, identical twin sisters Ariel and Zan were diagnosed with Crouzon syndrome -- a rare condition where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. They were the first twins known to survive it. Growing up, Ariel and her sister endured numerous appearance-altering procedures. Surgeons would break the bones in their heads and faces to make room for their growing organs. While the physical aspect of their condition was painful, it was nothing compared to the emotional toll of navigating life with a facial disfigurement. Ariel explores beauty and identity in her young-adult memoir about resilience, sisterhood, and the strength it takes to put your life, and yourself, back together time and time again.

What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

Happiness is big business. Books, consultants, psychologists, organizations, and even governments tout happiness secrets that are backed by scientific findings. The problem is that all of this science is done by and for cis white men. And some of the most vocal of these happiness experts were announcing that women could become happier by espousing "traditional" values and eschewing feminism. Skeptical of this hypothesis, Ariel Gore took a deep dive into the optimism industrial complex, reading the history, combing the research, attending the conferences, interviewing the thought leaders, and exploring her own and her friends' personal experiences and desires. Fuck Happiness is a nuanced, thoughtful examination of what happiness means and to whom, how it's played a role in defining modern gender roles and power structures, and how we can all have a more empowered relationship with the pursuit of joy in our lives.

BLACK ENTERPRISE is the ultimate source for wealth creation for African American professionals, entrepreneurs and corporate executives. Every month, BLACK ENTERPRISE delivers timely, useful information on careers, small business and personal finance.

Girls ages 3-7 will have fun under the sea with their favorite Disney Princess, Ariel! Featuring 96 pages and a foil and embossed cover, this coloring and activity book will be available in time for the Diamond Edition DVD and Blu-ray release of Disney's The Little Mermaid in October 2013!

BLACK ENTERPRISE is the ultimate source for wealth creation for African American professionals, entrepreneurs and corporate executives. Every month, BLACK ENTERPRISE delivers timely, useful information on careers, small business and personal finance.