Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29 Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a woman (or, for that matter, a man) to choose to wear them? Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Slavery is back. America, 1962. Having lost a war, America finds itself under Nazi Germany and Japan occupation. A few Jews still live under assumed names. The 'I Ching' is prevalent in San Francisco. Science fiction meets serious ideas in this take on a possible alternate history.

A new collection of Bill Ehrhart's essays--25 of them, written between 2002 and 2012 on subjects ranging from the Vietnam War failures of American policy-makers to life in 21st century Vietnam; the trenches of the Western Front, the mountains of Korea, the sands of Iraq; from the value of one's name to the cowardice of Congress; mountain gorillas in Rwanda, the journalist Gloria Emerson, teaching poetry to teenagers; on the famous (Wilfred Owen) and the obscure (Robert James Elliott).... These essays explore the fallacies of history, the madness of war, the craft of poetry, the profession of teaching, and the art of living.

Third book in a series about a spiritual healer mystic as he travels around the coastlines of Ireland, seeking to lift the veil between the worlds for the openminded people of this fair world, themselves seeking the understand the world of magic, The Sidh (Fairies) Ancient belief systems, God, Christian and otherwise. A power greater than mankind, yet nothing without us.

From her birth at the palace at Versailles to her death on a South Carolina plantation, Natalie Delage Sumter (1782-1841) lived a life riveted by escape, adventure, grandeur, and hardship - a saga that spanned several turnultuous decades of French history and included her residence on three continents. The godchild of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and a member of the French nobility, Nathalie de Lage de Volude fled to New York at age eleven at the height of the French Revolution. She lived for eight years in the household of politician Aaron Burr and became a confidante of his daughter, Theodosia. On her return voyage to France, Delage fell in love with Thomas Sumter Jr., a diplomat to France and the son of South Carolina's Revolutionary War Gamecock. The couple enjoyed a celebrated shipboard romance, and with their subsequent marriage, Natalie Sumter entered the world of the southern planter aristocracy. A Lady of the High Hills follows the epic events that took Sumter to Brazil, back to France, and ultimately to plantation life in Stateburg, South Carolina. Thomas Tisdale describes Sumter's adjustment to life in the South Carolina backcountry, her role as the matriarch of the

Dancing Backwards In High Heels

The world is a fraught place for the contemporary female. Working mothers are still expected to make their children's costumes for the school play, despite the fact that home economics was abolished in the Seventies; we're told it's not looks but brains that count, and yet if we dare to leave the house looking vaguely our age we're made to feel like failures; women's magazines run earnest articles about the evils of size 00 culture, only to feature models with hips like 10-year-old boys a few pages later; we pay the same level of taxation as men, and yet on average we earn 25% less. So, this book - a book for women who never got around to perfecting the art of domestic divinity but would quite like to be able to cook supper for six without having a nervous breakdown; who never quite mastered Cosmo's 101 ways to please your man, but don't want the embarrassment, not to say inconvenience, of him running off with a 19-year-old Russian supermodel.