Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from My Daughter's School

"Provocative and personally searching"&nbsp;-San Francisco Chronicle One mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school, and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for long walks, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began. &nbsp; Learning in Public is the story, not just Courtney's journey, but a whole country's. Many of us are newly awakened to the continuing racial injustice all around us, but unsure of how to go beyond hashtags and yard signs to be a part of transforming the country. Courtney discovers that her public school, the foundation of our fragile democracy, is a powerful place to dig deeper. &nbsp; &nbsp; Courtney E. Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other moms and dads as they navigate school choice. A vivid portrait of integration's virtues and complexities, and yes, the palpable joy of trying to live differently in a country re-making itself. Learning in Public might also set your family's life on a different course forever.&nbsp;

Biographies & Memoirs

Martin, Courtney E.

Community & Culture

Little. Brown and Company

This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for long walks, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began.\nLearning in Public is the story, not just Courtney’s journey, but a whole country’s. Many of us are newly awakened to the continuing racial injustice all around us, but unsure of how to go beyond hashtags and yard signs to be a part of transforming the country. Courtney discovers that her public school, the foundation of our fragile democracy, is a powerful place to dig deeper.\nCourtney E. Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other moms and dads as they navigate school choice. A vivid portrait of integration’s virtues and complexities, and yes, the palpable joy of trying to live differently in a country re-making itself. Learning in Public might also set your family’s life on a different course forever.

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

This eye-opening look at twenty-first century culture and its impact on women reveals how food and weight obsession, driven in no small part by images of celebrities openly wasting away, threatens a new generation of girls as the feminist exhortation that ?you can do anything? is twisted into ?you must do everything.? It also inspires readers to consider what wonderful things might happen if the madness stopped once and for all.

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Women's Health

Penguin Publishing Group

Written in conjunction with the documentary Rebirth, a full decade in the making, an uplifting look at the lives of nine individuals whose lives were forever changed by the largest tragedy our nation has ever faced. The images of the burning towers, the heartbroken friends building memorials, the minute-by-minute accounts of the horrors of that day-all are indelibly etched on our collective consciousness. But what of those left behind after 9/11? What have they, and we, learned from the gift of time?
In Project Rebirth, a psychologist and a journalist examine the lives of nine people who were directly affected by the events of September 11, 2001. Written concurrently with the filming of a forthcoming documentary, it is uniquely positioned to tackle the questions raised about how people react in the face of crippling grief, how you maintain hope for a future when your life as you knew it is destroyed, and the amazing ability of humans to focus on the positive aspects of day-to-day living in the face of tragedy.
The project follows people dedicated to rebuilding, both physically and emotionally. Spirituality, resilience, and hope are at the center of their stories. Brian, who lost his firefighter brother, spent two years working at Ground Zero and then helped to rebuild the PATH train station. Tanya, who lost her fiancée on 9/11, finds new love, new life, and joy as a mother in the years following, all doors she thought closed to her forever.
Not a book that recounts the events of that day, and not a book about grief, Project Rebirth is a book about resilience and finding inner peace.

Project Rebirth: Survival and the Strength of the Human Spirit from 9/11 Survivors

Self-Help

Stern, Dr. Robin

Death & Grief

Dutton

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body

Free Press

"Why does every one of my friends have an eating disorder, or, at the very least, a screwed-up approach to food and fitness?" writes journalist Courtney E. Martin. The new world culture of eating disorders and food and body issues affects virtually all -- not just a rare few -- of today's young women. They are your sisters, friends, and colleagues -- a generation told that they could "be anything," who instead heard that they had to "be everything." Driven by a relentless quest for perfection, they are on the verge of a breakdown, exhausted from overexercising, binging, purging, and depriving themselves to attain an unhealthy ideal.An emerging new talent, Courtney E. Martin is the voice of a young generation so obsessed with being thin that their consciousness is always focused inward, to the detriment of their careers and relationships. Health and wellness, joy and love have come to seem ancillary compared to the desire for a perfect body. Even though eating disorders first became generally known about twenty-five years ago, they have burgeoned, worsened, become more difficult to treat and more fatal (50 percent of anorexics who do not respond to treatment die within ten years). Consider these statistics:     Ten million Americans suffer from eating disorders.     Seventy million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders.     More than half of American women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would pre fer to be run over by a truck or die young than be fat.     More than two-thirds would rather be mean or stupid.     Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychological disease.In Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Martin offers original research from the front lines of the eating disorders battlefield. Drawn from more than a hundred interviews with sufferers, psychologists, nutritionists, sociocultural experts, and others, her exposé reveals a new generation of "perfect girls" who are obsessive-compulsive, overachieving, and self-sacrificing in multiple -- and often dangerous -- new ways. Young women are "told over and over again," Martin notes, "that we can be anything. But in those affirmations, assurances, and assertions was a concealed pressure, an unintended message: You are special. You are worth something. But you need to be perfect to live up to that specialness."With its vivid and often heartbreaking personal stories, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters has the power both to shock and to educate. It is a true call to action and cannot be missed.

Psychology & Counseling

If you care about social change but hate feel-good platitudes, Do It Anyway is the book for you. Courtney Martin’s rich profiles of the new generation of activists dig deep, to ask the questions that really matter: How do you create a meaningful life? Can one person even begin to make a difference in our hugely complex, globalized world?

Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists

History

Beacon Press

Are we living the good lifeand what defines 'good,' anyway? Americans today are constructing a completely different framework for success than their parents' generation, using new metrics that TED speaker and On Being columnist Courtney Martin has termed collectively the "New Better Off." The New Better Off puts a name to the American phenomenon of rejecting the traditional dream of a 9-to-5 job, home ownership, and a nuclear family structureilluminating the alternate ways Americans are seeking happiness and success. Including commentary on recent changes in how we view work, customs and community, marriage, rituals, money, living arrangements, and spirituality, The New Better Off uses personal stories and social analysis to explore the trends shaping our country today. Martin covers growing topics such as freelancing, collaborative consumption, communal living, and the breaking down of gender roles. The New Better Off is about the creative choices individuals are making in their vocational and personal lives, but it’s also about the movements, formal and informal, that are coalescing around the New Better Off ideapeople who are reinventing the social safety net and figuring out how to truly better their own communities.

The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream

Business & Money

Business Culture

Seal Press

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Books by Martin, Courtney E.