BiblioVault - Books about Tell

Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the Twentieth Century
Julia A. Ericksen
Harvard University Press, 2001
Library of Congress HQ18.U5E75 1999 | Dewey Decimal 306.709730904

Learning the details of others' sex lives is the most enticing of guilty pleasures. We measure our own practices against the "normalcy" that sex surveys seek to capture. Special interest groups use or attack survey findings (such as the claim that 10% of Americans are gay) for their own ends. Indeed, we all have some stake in these surveys, be it self-justification, recrimination, or curiosity--and this testifies to their significance in our culture.

Kiss and Tell chronicles the history of sex surveys in the United States over a century of changing social and sexual mores. Julia Ericksen and Sally Steffen reveal that the survey questions asked, more than the answers elicited, expose and shape the popular image of appropriate sexuality. We can learn as much about the history and practice of sexuality by looking at surveyors' changing concerns as we can by reading the results of their surveys. The authors show how surveys have reflected societal anxieties about adolescent development, teen sex and promiscuity, and AIDS, and have been employed in efforts to preserve marriage and to control women's sexuality.

Kiss and Tell is an important examination of the role of social science in shaping American sexual patterns. Revealing how surveys of sexual behavior help create the issues they purport merely to describe, it reminds us how malleable and imperfect our knowledge of sexual behavior is.

Expand Description

The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian
Mike Burns; Edited by Gregory McNamee
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Library of Congress E99.Y5B874 2012 | Dewey Decimal 305.8975724

Mike Burns—born Hoomothya—was around eight years old in 1872 when the US military murdered his family and as many as seventy-six other Yavapai men, women, and children in the Skeleton Cave Massacre in Arizona. One of only a few young survivors, he was adopted by an army captain and ended up serving as a scout in the US army and adventuring in the West. Before his death in 1934, Burns wrote about the massacre, his time fighting in the Indian Wars during the 1880s, and life among the Kwevkepaya and Tolkepaya Yavapai. His precarious position between the white and Native worlds gives his account a distinctive narrative voice.

Because Burns was unable to find a publisher during his lifetime, these firsthand accounts of history from a Native perspective remained unseen through much of the twentieth century, archived at the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott. Now Gregory McNamee has brought Burns's text to life, making this extraordinary tale an accessible and compelling read. Generations after his death, Mike Burns finally gets a chance to tell his story.

This autobiography offers a missing piece of Arizona history—as one of the only Native American accounts of the Skeleton Cave Massacre—and contributes to a growing body of history from a Native perspective. It will be an indispensable tool for scholars and general readers interested in the West—specifically Arizona history, the Apache wars, and Yavapai and Apache history and lifeways.

Expand Description

Qanemcit Amllertut/Many Stories to Tell: Tales of Humans and Animals from Southwest Alaska
Edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Library of Congress E99.E7Q24 2017 | Dewey Decimal 398.209798

This bilingual collection shares new translations of old stories recorded over the last four decades though interviews with Yup’ik elders from throughout southwest Alaska. Some are true qulirat (traditional tales), while others are recent. Some are well known, like the adventures of the wily Raven, while others are rarely told. All are part of a great narrative tradition, shared and treasured by Yup’ik people into the present day.
This is the first region-wide collection of traditional Yup’ik tales and stories from Southwest Alaska. The elders and translators who contributed to this collection embrace the great irony of oral traditions: that the best way to keep these stories is to give them away. By retelling these stories, they hope to create a future in which the Yup’ik view of the world will be both recognized and valued.

Expand Description

Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems
Jim Daniels
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
Library of Congress PS3554.A5635S56 2003 | Dewey Decimal 811.54

"Jim Daniels is a poet of unique commitment and ability. He makes poetry an act of deep caring and recognition."—Robert Creeley

Expand Description

Tell: Love, Defiance, and the Military Trial at the Tipping Point for Gay Rights
Major Margaret Witt
University Press of New England, 2017
Library of Congress KF229.W58W58 2017 | Dewey Decimal 343.73014

In 1993 Margie Witt, a young Air Force nurse, was chosen as the face of the Air Force’s “Cross into the Blue” recruitment campaign. This was also the year that President Clinton’s plan for gays to serve openly in the military was quashed by an obdurate Congress, resulting in the blandly cynical political compromise known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Contrary to its intent, DADT had the perverse effect of making it harder for gay servicemen and -women to fight expulsion. Over the next seventeen years more than 13,000 gay soldiers, sailors, marines, coast guard, and airmen and -women were removed from military service. That is, until Margie Witt’s landmark case put a stop to it. Tell is the riveting story of Major Margaret Witt’s dedicated and decorated military career as a frontline flight nurse, and of her love and devotion to her partner—now wife—Laurie Johnson. Tell captures the tension and drama of the politically charged legal battle that led to the congressional repeal of the controversial law and helped pave the way for a suite of landmark political and legal victories for gay rights. Tell is a testament to the power of love to transform hearts and minds, as well as a celebration of the indomitable spirit of Major Witt, her wife Laurie, her dedicated legal team, and the brave men and women who came forward to testify on her behalf in a historic federal trial. “The name Margaret Witt may join the canon of US civil rights pioneers.” —Guardian “Major Witt’s trial provided an unparalleled opportunity to attack the central premise of [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] . . . and set an important precedent.”— New York Times “A landmark ruling.”—Politico

Expand Description

Tell the Driver: A Biography of Elinor F.E. Black, MD
Julie Vandervoort
University of Manitoba Press, 1992
Library of Congress RG76.B57V36 1992 | Dewey Decimal 618.092

Tell the World You're a Wildflower: Stories
Jennifer Horne
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Library of Congress PS3608.O76275A6 2014 | Dewey Decimal 813.6

Tell the World You’re a Wildflower is a collection of loosely interwoven stories in the voices of southern women and girls of different ages and backgrounds. Beginning with the youngest characters and ending with the oldest, the stories encompass plastic surgery and white supremacists, family secrets and family trees, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a young writer who describes her work in progress as “the bastard love-child of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.”
In Tell the World You’re a Wildflower, each character must decide what to tell, whether to tell it, and to whom to tell it. Each struggles with questions of identity and truth, trying to understand who she is and what holds true for her. Some tell their stories plainly, directly, others more obliquely, nesting one within another. Anchored in the tradition of southern storytelling, these women contend with loss, change, and growth while going to church, school, and prison, navigating love and sex, and worrying too much about what people might think.

Yet these women generally refuse to behave, and they wander in and out of each other’s stories just like people do in small towns across the South. Small town lives are always interconnected: your third-grade teacher is your new neighbor’s aunt and the boy you dated your senior year falls from political grace after being caught in a hot tub with your second cousin. Though they may have had little say in where they were planted, Horne’s protagonists nevertheless do their best to bloom.

Rich, multifaceted, and unforgettable, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower is the work of a veteran explorer of the twentieth and twenty-first century South. Horne’s quest to understand her culture through decades of reading and observing has now yielded these narratives that imaginatively and insightfully enter the hearts and minds of southern women.

Expand Description

This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature
Authored by Isabelle T. Pelaud
Temple University Press, 2010
Library of Congress PS153.V54P45 2010 | Dewey Decimal 810.9895922073

In the first book-length study of Vietnamese American literature, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud probes the complexities of Vietnamese American identity and politics. She provides an analytical introduction to the literature, showing how generational differences play out in genre and text. In addition, she asks, can the term Vietnamese American be disassociated from representations of the war without erasing its legacy?

Pelaud delineates the historical, social, and cultural terrains of the writing as well as the critical receptions and responses to them. She moves beyond the common focus on the Vietnam war to develop an interpretive framework that integrates post-colonialism with the multi-generational refugee, immigrant, and transnational experiences at the center of Vietnamese American narratives.

Her readings of key works, such as Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge show how trauma, racism, class and gender play a role in shaping the identities of Vietnamese American characters and narrators.

Expand Description

To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865
William L. Andrews
University of Illinois Press, 1986
Library of Congress E185.96.A57 1986 | Dewey Decimal 973.0496022

To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of Black autobiography from the colonial era through Emancipation. Beginning with the 1760 narrative by Briton Hammond, William L. Andrews explores first-person public writings by Black Americans. Andrews includes but also goes beyond slave narratives to analyze spiritual biographies, criminal confessions, captivity stories, travel accounts, interviews, and memoirs. As he shows, Black writers continuously faced the fact that northern whites often refused to accept their stories and memories as sincere, and especially distrusted portraits of southern whites as inhuman. Black writers had to silence parts of their stories or rely on subversive methods to make facts tellable while contending with the sensibilities of the white editors, publishers, and readers they relied upon and hoped to reach.

Expand Description