Elinor Burkett

"In the wake of the disaster at Columbine, one question haunted America: What's going on in our suburban high schools? Award-winning journalist Elinor Burkett went back to school in suburban Minneapolis to find out.". "For nine months - from the opening pep rally through graduation - she attended classes, hung out with students, sat in on teacher gripe sessions, and interviewed both parents and adminstrators. With a novelist's eye, she takes readers behind closed doors, revealing a world of mixed messages, manufactured myths, and poltical hype." "Another Planet offers an insider's view of the lives of suburban teenagers, the plight of the nation's teachers, and the state of American education."--BOOK JACKET.

American women have begun cropping up in unlikely places - in the conservative reaches of politics and at the helm of the National Rifle Association, in extremist militia groups and on the talk shows of the most virulent antiliberal, and antifeminist, radio hosts in the nation. Despite feminist predictions that women's liberation would forge a national sisterhood dancing to a liberal beat, women in growing numbers are declaring themselves to be strong, invincible and enemies of the very movement that empowered them. Elinor Burkett, a pioneer in women's studies, spent two years on the road meeting the vanguard of this counter-women's movement in order to write The Right Women. She interviewed the shooting stars of national politics, identifiable leaders such as Elizabeth Dole, Bay Buchanan and Helen Chenoweth - and the stars-to-be, twentysomethings who are bold, brash and brazenly right wing. She walked the halls of academia with politically incorrect college students and faculty, visited the homes of gun-toting militiawomen in Montana and listened to the lonely Abolitionists - African-American conservative women intent on doing away with every program liberals ever designed to help them. You will meet these women, and dozens more, whose voices have been curiously absent from the national discussion, on the pages of this book. The Right Women is neither an attack on feminism nor a defense of antifeminism, but a travelogue through the lives of women who are rewriting women's history with the choices they make about careers, marriage, childbearing, fashion, television and voting. Burkett argues that while they are forging new relationships with institutions that liberal feminism has written off as hopelessly patriarchal, these women are not turning their backs on the ideals of the women's movement. Instead, they are living up to those ideals by refusing to march in lockstep with anyone - even their so-called sisters. Their refusal to live the lives their feminist forebears prescribed for them is the fruit of the very movement they are rejecting.

Not since And the Band Played On has any journalist taken readers behind the scenes in the war against AIDS to reveal how avarice, ignorance, and egotism are subverting the nation's struggle against the epidemic. But Elinor Burkett goes well beyond Randy Shilts. She not only reports on the decade of plague he did not cover, but addresses the wider questions about what AIDS reveals about America on the brink of the new millennium. Readers meet the major players - from activist/playwright Larry Kramer to scientist Robert Gallo and MTV star Pedro Zamora - and watch them in action at home, in their laboratories, and at demonstrations. We see Jonas Salk manipulating his company's stock prices by carefully parceling out research information, Henry Heimlich peddling malaria as the magic bullet that will kill HIV, and federally funded scientists making "advertorials" for the drug companies whose products they test. We are taken into the streets at political funerals and behind the scenes of the negotiations at which leaders of the AIDS service industry divide up government funding for the dying. We read detailed accounts of the tensions that AIDS has caused in the African American community and of the fight staged by women to end the nation's decades-long policy of approving drugs tested only on men.

The first female head of state in the Western world and one of the most influential women in modern history, Golda Meir was one of the founders of the State of Israel, the architect of its socialist infrastructure, and its most tenacious international defender. Historian-journalist Burkett looks beyond Meir's well-known accomplishments to the complex motivations and ideals, personal victories and disappointments, of her charismatic public persona. Beginning with Meir's childhood in virulently anti-Semitic Russia and her family's subsequent relocation to the United States, Burkett places Meir within the framework of the American immigrant experience, the Holocaust, and the singlemindedness of a generation that carved a nation out of its own nightmares and dreams.--From publisher description.