American Girl Research Articles

Look Wider Still: The Subversive Nature of Girl Scouting in the 1950s

Look Wider StillThe Subversive Nature of Girl Scouting in the 1950s Susan H. Swetnam (bio) For Elizabeth and Lara As those who follow women’s issues in the media will be aware, over the past few years Girl Scouts of the USA—an organization the name of which has been a byword for wholesomeness, even squareness—has become a flashpoint in the twenty-first century culture wars over reproductive rights, diversity, and the alleged erosion of “American family values.” Girl Scouting, critics charge, has become outrageously liberal, even morally suspect. Indiana state representative Bob Morris made national headlines when he voted against a resolution congratulating American Girl Scouting on its 2012 centennial, asserting that all but three of the fifty role models presented on the Girl Scouts of the USA’s (gsusa) website were “feminists, lesbians, and/or Communists.”1 Critics have charged gsusa with promoting an lgbt agenda, citing acceptance of a transgender girl into a Denver troop.2 Commentators have lamented that the term “God” is now optional in the Girl Scout Promise and have complained that activities in the Girl Scout curriculum encourage girls “to explore mazes and stone or dirt labyrinths—symbols rooted in pagan mythology.”3 They have warned the public of national staff members’ affiliation with organizations that support sex education, abortion, and/or gay marriage.4 gsusa has even been accused of encouraging promiscuity.5 Based on such allegations, the right-wing Catholic Eternal World Television Network recently produced an exposé documentary series called “Girl Scouts: Mission Aborted” with episodes titled “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Indoctrinating Our Daughters, the Girl Scout Cirriculum” [sic].6 Disaffected Girl Scouts and their parents have contributed to the public outcry. Two “brave former Girl Scouts” (as one web page calls them) have begun a pro-life, anti-Scout blog called “Speak Now Girl Scouts,” on which they write, “We refuse to remain silent while this organization’s unscrupulous principles mislead over 2 million girls.”7 Another ex-Scout made a media splash in the wake of the Denver transgender controversy when she posted a call on [End Page 90] YouTube (which has since gone private) urging a boycott of Girl Scout cookie sales. “gsusa cares more about promoting the desires of a small handful of people than it does for my safety and the safety of my friends and sister Girl Scouts,” she said.8 One mother who pulled her daughters from Scouting told the conservative wnd news network, “I feel misled, betrayed, offended, and hurt,” recommending as an alternative the American Heritage Girls, a group said to be “building women of integrity through service to God, family, community, and country.”9 Such criticism gives the impression—as words like “betrayed” and phrases like “Mission Aborted” suggest—that in recent years Girl Scouting has deviated radically from its roots, becoming an organization espousing a far different ethos than it did historically. Once upon a time, the implication goes, the movement offered desirable training in healthy principles for girls, but now, in a sad sign of the times, it is attempting to substitute fashionable liberal values for solid “mainstream” ones.10 Despite such nostalgia for an alleged golden age of Scouting, however, considerable evidence suggests that encouraging its charges to think outside the conservative box is nothing new for Girl Scouting. Girl Scout historian Tammy Proctor, indeed, charts a series of controversies stretching from the movement’s very beginning, including allegations that scouting would turn girls into masculine tomboys (considered in more detail later in this essay), and disapproval of racially integrated and mixed-religion troops.11 Even in the supposed golden age of “wholesome” American Girl Scouting, the 1950s, a national incident made the organization a target for conservative fire in a way reminiscent of the early twenty-first century.12 This 1953–56 controversy has faded into obscurity over the past fifty years, not discussed in histories of Girl Scouting or mentioned by recent critics of the organization. But it made a great deal of noise at the time, as six fat folders of records at gsusa headquarters in New York City attest. I discovered this collection by chance in the National Historic Preservation Center, Girl...

The Historian behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians ed. by Megan L. Bever, Scott A. Suarez

The Historian behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians. Edited by Megan L. Bever and Scott A. Suarez. Introduction by George C. Rable. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 202. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1851-2.) The suggestion that might lurk somewhere behind the history they write seems a little jarring in an era when members of the younger set advertise their presence within it, littering conference papers with my and argue. Odd title aside, this valuable volume draws together ten interviews that appeared between 2005 and 2014 in Southern Historian, a journal written and edited by graduate students. The subjects--William W. Freehling, Laura F. Edwards, James M. McPherson, Gary W. Gallagher, Richard J. M. Blackett, J. Mills Thornton III, Dan T. Carter, Theodore Rosengarten, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Pete Daniel--are southern historians in the sense of being scholars of the American South. But they are evenly divided between those born or brought up in the South and those elsewhere. Nativity seems not really to matter in most respects though. Every one of them has changed our minds about the South's struggles and the struggles of southerners. None appears inclined by their origins either to be more gentle or more fierce in approaching their subjects. But, not surprisingly, the native southerners seem to have had a more visceral introduction to their subjects. For example, Thornton grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott, learning early that local events participated in a broader history, one he became determined to track. It was very clear to me that the world was being changed by folks I passed on the sidewalk every day, he said (p. 121). Gilmore, who said she was raised as a white supremacist, saw the sit-in movement erupt in her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, and thought, Everything that I thought was true and forever was under siege (p. 166). Carter had his epiphany at age twelve, seeing a young African American girl bawled out by a white bus driver for sitting up front. The nonsoutherners, by contrast, seem to have arrived at their lives' work by more roundabout routes. The interviewers ask questions about subject matter and craft that any of us might pose. How did Freehling light upon the subject of nullification? How did Rosengarten get along with the family of Ned Cobb, the protagonist of his epic book All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1974)? …

Coinheritance of Alpha-3.7 Deletion and Hb Questembert [131alpha-2 Tct > CCT](Ser131>Pro)] in an African American Patient Results in an Alpha Thalassemia Phenotype

Patients with Hemoglobin Questembert carry a Ser131Pro mutation in one of their alpha globin chains encoded by a TCT-CCT mutation of one of their alpha 2 globin gene. This mutation usually results in an unstable hemoglobin variant with mild anemia that is rarely symptomatic. Rarely these patients may show increased extravascular hemolysis during stress, due to oxidative membrane damage. Our patient is a 7 year old African American girl that came to medical attention due to severe anemia, reticulocytosis, absent haptoglobin levels, persistent jaundice and hyperbilirubinemia. Over a period of several years the patient progressed to develop marked splenomegaly with progressive anemia. Isoelectric focusing in this patient revealed Hb A, A2 and a variant "S" band which was less than 1% and thus not detectable by HPLC. We speculate that in the presence of limited alpha globin synthesis, due to a deletion of one α-2 gene and in the presence of a highly unstable alpha-2 variant, synthesis of wild-type alpha globin from the remaining alpa-1 gene is not sufficient to allow for normal alpha-globin/ beta-globin assembly. Furthermore the assembly of the alpha-globin Questembert into the hemoglobin tetramer is favored resulting in an extravascular hemolytic disorder. DisclosuresNo relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Contested spaces in graphic narrative: Exploring homeland through Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army

Abstract ‘Contested spaces in graphic narrative’ argues that spatiality in graphic narratives is conducive to restructuring fraught landscapes. Through an exploration of the contested homelands of the Israeli Palestinian conflict in Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008), this article argues that graphic narratives have a unique ability to depict geographical spaces through lines, panels and various artistic devices. Like maps, such lines and boxes on a page physically create borders and represent corresponding location as bounded; they may represent existing political divisions, or they may subvert and push state-drawn boundaries. These devices within the graphic form open up a recognition of the ways that boundaries obfuscate the multifaceted representations of identity that include multiple nationalisms, ideological discontinuities, as well as human-centred spatial connections. Graphic form, then, becomes a landscape that allows for a complex visual understanding of affective attachment to the state through possibilities of graphic, bordered texts that cut across traditional understandings of territoriality and occupation. Libicki’s status as an outsider and as a woman in the Israel Defense Forces emphasizes her position of precarity in traditional conceptions of the Biblical Jewish homeland as well as in Israel, the modern Jewish state.

Facing the Arab ‘Other’?: Jerusalem in Jewish women’s comics

Abstract Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, comic artists have turned their attention to the Middle East, including the ‘Holy City’. Scholars, however, have yet to study how comics engage with life in Jerusalem, in particular the relationships between Arabs and Jews. In this article, I will take on this critical oversight and explore how Mira Friedman’s ‘Independence Day’ (2008), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008) engage with the complicated social situation. The philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, has argued that face-to-face encounters are the basis for recognizing the Other as human and for feeling responsibility towards him or her.1 In this article I show that we rarely see the Other’s face in the corpus of the Jewish comic artists I discuss here. Instead, the Arab presence is brought into the texts by way of urban elements such as the Dome of the Rock, media remediations or indistinct, distant figures. This highlights that comics are closely tied into the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians, where fear and separation rule to a level where the Arab Other – whether Christian or Muslim – of the Jews of Jerusalem is almost invisible.

Assessment and Treatment of a Person at Risk for Psychosis in a Culturally Complex Case

A14-year-old Asian American girl presented to the emergency room with suicide ideation and a plan to overdose on medication. She reported the following symptoms of depression: chronic feelings of sadness, negative future outlook, anhedonia, agitation, indecision, and sleep disturbance. The symptoms had been present for 1 year. She went from being an honor roll student to struggling to pass several of her classes. Upon further investigation, she disclosed experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations. She was admitted for inpatient evaluation and treatment. She denied any prior or current substance use, and did not have any previous mental health treat-

Teaching With Tupac: Building a Solid Grounding in Theory Across the Social Work Education Continuum

This article describes a collaborative and emergent approach utilizing Tupac Shakur’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby” to leverage theory education. This song/video uses a fictionalized account of a pregnant 12-year-old African American girl to chronicle the ecological realities of life in the inner city (e.g., teen pregnancy, drug addiction and trafficking, incest, poverty, dysfunctional families, lack of opportunity, ineffective educational and welfare systems, runaway youth, commercial sexual exploitation, violence, and a racially insensitive law enforcement response). Because of the complexity and convergence of multiple issues and social problems in Brenda’s life, and their impact across the micro–macro spectrum, this song/video is an effective anchor for a semester-long emphasis on a critically conscious approach to theory. This article (a) reviews hip-hop as a vehicle for pedagogy; (b) explores Tupac’s early history and approach to information dissemination; and (c) discusses underlying assumptions and application in BSW-, MSW-, and PhD-level theory courses.

Implication of Auto-Anti-U Antibody in a Pediatric Patient

The anti-U antibody is a rare antibody belonging to the MNS blood group system and has been implicated in cases of hemolytic transfusion reaction and hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn (HDFN). We report a case of auto-anti-U antibody in a pediatric patient. A 14-year-old African American girl, G0, with a 4-week history of bloody diarrhea, was admitted to Le Bonheur Children’s …

Atypical Expanded-Spectrum Hemifacial Microsomia: A Case Report

Objective : To present the case report of a patient with expanded hemifacial microsomia (HFM) that illustrates the complex interactions of these embryogenic factors and to review current theories and mechanism regarding the etiopathogenesis of HFM. Design and Method : We present the case of an African American girl who was born at full term by cesarean section and transferred to our institution for systemic malformations. Her craniofacial findings include holoprosencephaly, cleft lip and palate, low set and posteriorly rotated ears, flat midfacial features, micrognathia, left HFM with grade 1 microtia, hypoplastic mandible, and a small preauricular pharyngeal arch remnant. Systemic anomalies included ectopic kidney, atrial-septal defect, bilateral hip dysplasia, bilateral humeroradial fusion, bilateral club feet, and bilateral low-set thumbs with the right side also being triphalangeal. Genetic evaluation did not identify a molecular diagnosis or other known syndrome. Conclusions : Although vasculogenic disruption of the stapedial artery during early fetal gestation has been implicated in the etiology of HFM, the grouping and bilateral findings seen in our patient argue against this relatively simple and localized phenomenon. Instead, such diverse and widespread anomalies in the setting of expanded spectrum HFM seem to support the theory of a disorder in blastogenesis as the cause of HFM.

Phd to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life by Elaine B. Richardson (review)

Reviewed by: Phd to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life by Elaine B. Richardson Cynthia Delaney Phd to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life Elaine B. Richardson Philadelphia: Parlor P, 2013. 264pp. In PHD (Po Ho on Dope) to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life, Elaine Richardson successfully establishes a deeply personal narrative that has the potential to reach and inspire a variety of audiences both inside and outside of the academy and serves as a model of the public scholarship in the spirit of other widely influential literacy narratives, such as those by Mike Rose and Victor Villanueva. Through discussion of her own journey, Richardson’s memoir is an unflinching presentation of her early life on the streets, and an unabashed celebration of literacy and education as her redemption. While literacy researchers may be hesitant of Richardson’s treatment of education as a panacea (or what Harvey Graff might call the “literacy myth”), Richardson stresses the importance of “end[ing] the lie that Black people have no intellectually worthy language and literacy traditions, that English and literacy are the same across different people and cultures, and that upper class biased Whites in power and their followers (not all White people) get to define language and literacy for everyone else” (235). Richardson’s argument has important implications for readers in and out of the academy by encouraging the development of a stronger examination of “teachings and mindsets that are not to our advantage” (235) and the realization, particularly for members of disadvantaged communities, that it is possible to make contributions to “culture and to the world of ideas” through challenging the paradigms and finding power in language (236). In short, the book details Richardson’s journey as a young African American female who transcends “cultural performance” and socially enforced expectations that she perform the identity of a “regla” African American girl: that is, someone who was supposed to be sexually available and readily accepting of physical abuse. Enacting this prescribed identity in her youth, Richardson’s experiences with prostitution and drug addiction capture the destructive feelings of guilt and shame tied up in this identity. [End Page 96] As a testament to the fluidity of identity, however, Richardson also illustrates that, by means of education and the support systems (such as her mother’s strength and support) on reserve for her, Richardson rewrote her sense of self within the academy, conducting research that would not only assist in her finding her voice but love for herself and self-confidence. Beginning with her family history, Richardson establishes her roots as a good student in search of self-acceptance in the wrong places. As a preteen and teenager, she has periods of consistency in school but she lives a “double life” (periodically lending more importance to one life over the other) by simultaneously attending college and working as a prostitute, up until she is academically dismissed from Cleveland State and becomes completely immersed in “the life of street people” (110). Richardson spends a fair portion of the book discussing her history as a prostitute and details the characteristics of the men who serve as her pimps and abusers in the years before she goes back to college. Although Richardson’s life falls into despair and she loses her sense of self, she realizes, after some years, having two children, and narrowly missing death several times, that she “needed to love and feel good about [herself] again” (190). When she is accepted again into Cleveland State University to finish her undergraduate degree, she “put[s her] all into school” (194) and nothing deters her from her mission to succeed as a student. In describing her years as a student and then graduate student, she places emphasis on finding her niche as a scholar and how finding her educational passion and support system drives her to continue on and receive her Ph.D. In addition to its candor about Richardson’s conflicted history, the book is notable for the lengths to which Richardson goes “to be true to the languages of her communities” (vii–viii). Richardson carefully represents the diverse voices of the people (be they pimps, boyfriends, often a combination...

In the Shadow of Parsenn

In the Shadow of Parsenn Lorraine Hanlon Comanor (bio) The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out whole. —The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann My final year of skating I lived in a Swiss village at the base of Parsenn, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. The town became the hub of my existence, not only a geographical center from which I traveled to shows and competitions, but a place of self-reckoning. The day I was forced to leave, I took with me a Bavarian doll, a book of pressed wildflowers, a collection of German texts, and two black-and-white photographs: one of old folks streaming up the hill to the thirteenth-century Frauenkirche, the other of the Höhenweg, a path I used to take to Parsenn. Today the German texts sit in my bookcase behind the doll, waiting to be reread. The photos hang in my bedroom, the first thing I see in the morning and the last at night. A last practice session in the London suburb of Richmond with my new Swiss trainer, Arnold Gerschwiler. Then a flight to Zürich, a cab to the Bahnhof, a train to Landquart, and a change to the narrow-gauge Rhätische Bahn to climb the fifteen hundred meters to Davos. A four-hour train ride in 1962. I brought along a German grammar. Our first stop on arrival was the outdoor regulation rink surrounded by Alps in their full summer glory, cows grazing in the high pastures. The town had wanted an elite figure skater, and after the 1962 World Championships, the mayor had invited me to be its guest. At sixteen I had trouble believing that I was going to train in this alpine paradise. With the exception of two months’ outdoor work in Cortina, a town in the Dolomites, I’d mostly practiced in buildings that resembled airplane hangars. Mother watched from the sidelines as I completed a set of brackets, making sure I was taking full advantage of my recent lessons, incorporating all the changes Arnold had made to my school figures. This new trainer, she hoped, would help me make the leap from the second American girl to the US figure skating champion. Unlike in Cortina, there was no retractable curtain here to shade the ice from the alpine sun. I struggled to make out my tracing in the glare. After I’d completed a set of brackets, she beckoned me over to the boards. If I would carry my weight just a tad further back, my skate would run better. [End Page 78] What did she know about how to stand on a blade? She was a painter. In a few days, she’d return to our Boston home, and I’d be completely on my own. I’d had the lecture on chastity and distractions, the former something to keep, the latter—presumably romantic involvement—something to avoid. I’d listened dutifully. I was used to her continual presence in the bleachers, her reiteration of my mistakes at dinner while she admonished me to sit up straight. After three hours of continuous pulling up, forcing my shoulders back, I liked nothing better than to slouch at the table. But aside from my delight at the prospect of being on my own in a picture-book town, part of me was in a shadow, recovering from the previous year’s disaster. The crash of Sabena Flight 548 in Brussels had killed all seventy-two on board and decimated the US Figure Skating Team. Of the thirty-four skaters, parents, coaches, and officials on the flight, nine were from Boston. But for a last minute ultimatum from Winsor, my elite private school, I would have been on board too. My name had not even been removed from the passenger list. From the patchwork quilt of days that followed, beginning with the 5 a.m. reporter’s call to my father asking for an interview and at the same time informing him of his wife’s and daughter’s deaths, what I mostly...

Review of <em>The Great Immensity</em>

The Great Immensity had me at “climate change musical.” After reading that brief descriptor of the play, I envisioned campy yet incisive songanddance numbers about unprecedented heat waves, sealevel rise, melting polar ice caps. I imagined the kitschy, queer appeal of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but with more scientists and activists and fewer charming lumberjacks turned sortof kidnappers. But with a few exceptions, such as a sardonic number about the pathetic state of international climate change policy (“oceans must be better protected / science must be respected . . . these agreements are not legal / these agreements are not binding”), The Great Immensity is not that kind of climate change musical. For better or worse. In my view, it’s both better and worse. Developed by the Brooklynbased Civilians theater group, The Great Immensity focuses on American cameraman Karl (Chris Sullivan), a multipleEmmy winner for his work on the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Estranged from his wife Phyllis (Rebecca Hart) while posted at a scientific research center in Panama, Karl’s despair over environmental degradation and the ineffectiveness of the mainstream media leads him to team up with the Earth Ambassadors, an international youth group led by a precocious American girl named Julie (Erin Wilhelmi). They set a goal of hatching a major media stunt that will get the world to watch, and to act. Their deadline for pulling it off is the eve of an international climate change summit in Paris. At a time at which emotions around climate change find little outlet in public media— instead, we are bombarded with facts and figures and

The American Girl Company and the Uses of Nostalgia in Children’s Consumer Culture

Since the mid-1980s, thousands of girls have encountered history through the American Girl books, dolls, and merchandise. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson and Arjun Appadurai, both of whom comment on the ways in which historical narratives are always imbued with nostalgia, this paper argues that by creating purchasable “artifacts” for dolls, American Girl has drawn on nostalgic consumer impulses to create longing for an imagined and sanitized history. As American Girl has changed its focus from historical dolls to contemporary dolls, its message has become more focused on individuality, fashion, and personal improvement.

The American Girl Company and the Uses of Nostalgia in Children’s Consumer Culture

Since the mid-1980s, thousands of girls have encountered history through the American Girl books, dolls, and merchandise. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson and Arjun Appadurai, both of whom comment on the ways in which historical narratives are always imbued with nostalgia, this paper argues that by creating purchasable “artifacts” for dolls, American Girl has drawn on nostalgic consumer impulses to create longing for an imagined and sanitized history. As American Girl has changed its focus from historical dolls to contemporary dolls, its message has become more focused on individuality, fashion, and personal improvement.

Fat blame: how the war on obesity victimizes women and children

A four year old Mexican American girl is taken away from her parents because she is obese and experiencing health problems related to her weight. Such a measure, once seen as extreme, quickly comes to be seen as a logical means of addressing a problem viewed as nothing short of child abuse. And yet, for all the purported concern for these children s welfare, little if any mention is ever made of the psychological ramifications of removing children from their families. They are simply the latest victims of the war on obesity a war declared on a disease but conducted, April Herndon contends in this book, along cultural lines. Fat Blame is a book about how the war on obesity is, in many ways, shaping up to be a battle against women and children, especially women and children who are marginalized via class and race. While conceding that fatness can be linked to certain conditions, or that some populations might be heavier than others, Herndon is more interested in the ways women and children are blamed for obesity and the ways interventions aimed at preventing obesity are problematic in and of themselves. From bariatric surgeries being performed on children to women being positioned as responsible for carrying to term a generation of thin children, her book looks closely at the stories of real people whose lives are drastically altered by interventions that are supposedly for their own good. As with so many practices surrounding bodies and health, like dieting, people are often simultaneously blamed and empowered through policies and interventions, especially those that seem to offer them choices. What Herndon reveals is how such choices only offer the illusion of being empowering. Rather, she shows how woman and children are pushed, pulled, and sometimes victimized by interventions such as bariatric surgeries, limits on reproductive technologies, and having their families broken up by the courts. Only by identifying members of this group as victims of discrimination, she argues, can we hope to return them to a fuller and richer kind of agency. In declaring a war on obesity, the United States has said that fat is one of the most serious enemies it faces. Fat Blame asks us to confront the real enemy the moral, political, and ideological significance of our every move in this war.

Where She Comes From: Locating Queer Transracial Adoption

Abstract This article attempts to answer the oft-asked question of where my daughter—an African American girl with two white, middle-class gay dads—“comes from,” by tracing power constellations that make our family possible. Through critical autoethnography, it interweaves narrative about the evolving relationship we share with her birth family with analysis of intersecting, conflicting histories of U.S. transracial adoption, same-sex family recognition, shrinking public support systems for and growing criminalization of low-income women and families of color, gendered dynamics in parenting, and the shift toward foster-adoption permanency. Utilizing queer, feminist, and critical race theories of kinship, I advocate for “queer transracial family” as a form of differential becoming that is attentive to complex power relations. Queer transracial family as a critical practice seeks to enact a blended, open vision for belonging that contests colorblindness, homonormativity, and the consumerist, privatized family.

Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo (review)

Reviewed by: Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo Belinda Acosta (bio) Joy Harjo. Crazy Brave: A Memoir. W. W. Norton. Reading one of this nation’s most critically acclaimed and award-winning poets, we should not be surprised at how much is accomplished in Joy Harjo’s slender volume Crazy Brave: A Memoir (164 pages). A Native American of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation, Harjo has written in her newest work more than a conventional memoir. It’s a multifaceted creation story. At one moment, it’s a dry-eyed autobiography of a young Native American girl coping with her harsh reality; in the next, it’s a spiritual journey; in another, a slice of political history; and finally, it’s a testament to the saving grace of the arts. In between, Harjo contemplates what she’s lived with: introspection, empathy, and when necessary, mercy. Divided into four sections, each opens with a tribute to one of the four directions (as is common in Native American traditions). In this context, the practice also orients readers to the period of her life that she will be covering: East is the direction of beginnings. It is sunrise. When beloved Sun rises, it is an entrance, a door to fresh knowledge. Breathe the light in. Call upon the assistance you need for the day. Give thanks. . . . East is also the direction of Oklahoma, where I was born, the direction of the Creek Nation. In this enchanting first section, Harjo captures the reality of childhood with unsentimental clarity, yet this inviting opening may also be the most challenging. Commingling the language of myth, history, and memory, Harjo takes readers back and forth through time, from her prebirth when she “heard the soul that was to be my mother call out in a heartbreak ballad” and on to her birth and childhood. Working her narrative like a bellows, she expands on the particulars of her life with moments from her familial and native people’s history to create a text that is both personal yet anchored in the larger world—the physical and the spiritual. Everything is connected, Harjo reminds her readers. Each life touches another, no matter the span of time separating them. “North is the direction where the difficult teachers live” is how Harjo begins the next section. Guided by the mothers in her life—her mother, grandmother, and other matrilineal elders—Harjo directly benefited as well as suffered from their past deeds. Poor choices in men, grinding poverty, and self-doubt are recounted [End Page 160] at the same time that she celebrates her mothers’ unique gifts, gifts that Harjo as a young girl is unconsciously but purposefully cultivating in herself. Drawn to Earth by her mother’s singing, music did and still plays a huge role in her life (her readings often include her playing sax). Painting, dance, theater, and finally poetry would later make their mark as she struggled to understand her world and her place in it. In each section of the book, we come to appreciate just why Harjo is admired for her use of mythic language influenced by her Native American worldview and the orality of her culture. (“Written text is, for me, fixed orality,” she said in Soul Talk, Song Language, Conversations with Joy Harjo, 2011.) At turns magical and sublime, Harjo nonetheless maintains a writer’s allegiance to unadorned truth telling. Make no mistake, Harjo’s early life was difficult. She did have an alcoholic father. She did have a menacing stepfather. She did get pregnant as a teenager. She did leave home too soon. She did give birth without the benefit of a personal, caring friend or relative in a facility where, in addition to being treated as if she were sure to be an incompetent mother, sterilization was matter-of-factly suggested as birth control. The beauty of Harjo’s prose—thoughtful, lofty, yet hard and lovely as polished stones—sweetens these bitter moments. In the end, Harjo’s memoir offers a study of how the arts not only influenced her life, they saved it. “It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the...

Carcinoma-associated retinopathy in a young teenager with immature teratoma of the ovary

A 14-year-old African American girl presented with diminished vision in both eyes 1 week after undergoing an oophorectomy for a right ovarian mass. Systemic metastatic work-up was negative. Visual acuity was 20/40 in the right eye and 20/50 in the left eye. Slit-lamp biomicroscopy was unremarkable in both eyes. Fundus examination showed diffuse patchy areas of retinal pigment epithelial atrophy in the macula and peripheral retina bilaterally. Color vision had decreased in each eye. Electroretinography revealed nondetectable rod and cone responses. Both pattern and flash visual evoked potential (VEP) testing showed delayed latency in both eyes. She was treated with pulse intravenous methylprednisolone for 3 days along with intravenous immunoglobulins and rituximab, followed by systemic prednisolone and biweekly intravenous immunoglobulins and rituximab for 3 months. Antiretinal autoantibodies against 48-kDa (arrestin) and 64-kDa and 94-kDa proteins were positive, suggestive of carcinoma-associated retinopathy. After 3 months, visual acuity was 20/40 in each eye with improvement in color vision and VEP findings.

Promoting Resilience in Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence Through a Developmentally Informed Intervention

A significant proportion of children exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) are preschool-aged, yet few interventions exist for this population. Those interventions that do exist focus primarily on reducing psychopathology, without addressing the range of potential outcomes, including resilient functioning. This case study considers the treatment of Alexis, a 6-year-old, African American girl who was referred for services following exposure to IPV. At her initial intake, she not only showed evidence of posttraumatic stress but also exhibited characteristics of resilient functioning. Over the course of a 10-session group intervention, Alexis’s resilient functioning improved, according to both therapist and maternal report. At follow-up, her posttraumatic stress symptoms were below the clinical range, indicating improvement in psychopathology paralleling her increases in resilient functioning. This case lends support for the use of group interventions with young children exposed to violence and also emphasizes the importance of assessing multiple domains of functioning, including resilient behaviors.

How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson (review)

Reviewed by: How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson Deborah Stevenson Nelson, Marilyn. How I Discovered Poetry; illus. by Hadley Hooper. Dial, 2014. [112p]. ISBN 978-0-8037-3304-6 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 7-12. This slender verse memoir draws on both previously published and new work to paint “a portrait of the artist as a young American Negro girl,” following young Marilyn from 1950 to 1959, age four to thirteen. The nearly fifty poems (each subtitled with location and date) offer snapshots of her life with her family as they followed a peripatetic Army existence, moving from place to place as her father, a high-ranking officer, changed postings and her mother found new teaching jobs. Her family were often the “First Negroes” for townies and classmates, but they nonetheless generally rooted into each new place, Marilyn finding solid friends and excelling academically. Notes of the era are effectively played as young Marilyn imagines fighting the Red Menace and absorbs adult commentary about “that lady in Montgomery” and “a boy named Emmett.” The tightly written yet musing poems (many of them unrhymed sonnets) effectively capture single moments as slices of a larger, longer trajectory of growth, travel, and inquiry. Young Marilyn’s capable, confident family (“Daddy corrects white men who call him boy./ Even when they’re in police uniforms”) provides a solid foundation for both her and the narrative trajectory, and her need to find herself over and over again in each new location provides an unusual opportunity for self-awareness and reflection that understandably translates into becoming a poet. Attractive and subtle design adds appeal, with poem titles in slate blue and simple decorative spot art, usually dichromatic, neatly supplying both a retro visual quotation and contemporary currency; [End Page 370] occasional family photographs provide additional immediacy. Use this to bring a vivid personal touch to an exploration of the era, or as a gloriously personal entry in a poetry unit that will prompt eager imitation. Final illustrations not seen. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois