Inside the WNBL

This is a comprehensive look at just how the league was formed, and how its female players have taken it to the top. From the boardroom, to the men's professional game, to the movers and shakers who made the league possible, this is not just the history of the league but also of the key players that made it happen.

Sex Variant Woman: A Life of Jeannette Howard Foster
by Joanne Passet

Passet, a professor of history captures both the personal and professional obstacles faced by Jeanette Howard Foster, the foremother of lesbian literature. Passet begins with Foster’s childhood and adolescence, a cold and confusing time with parents enthralled by their own business failures, living distantly from each other and their daughter. Tumultuous undergrad years take her through multiple colleges and her first few broken hearts. As a series of often-intellectual women traipse in and out of her life, a very driven Foster succeeds in obtaining her PhD and eventually works for famed sexual scientist Alfred Kinsey as the institute’s first librarian—all before finally completing her own highly controversial book, Sex Variant Women in Literature. Somewhat ironically, Foster’s personal life (especially her love life) take precedence over her accomplishments in nearly every chapter; still, Passet does justice to Foster’s important place in both literary and lesbian culture.

Price: $39.95

Wisdom of Whores
By Elizabeth Pisani

Despite billions of dollars in funding, international HIV-prevention efforts sometimes achieve only modest results, a reality the author sums up as the triumph of politics and ideology over sound science. Combining a background in journalism with experience as an epidemiologist (who has worked with, among other organizations, UNAIDS, the World Bank, and the health ministries of several Asian governments), Pisani here presents a blunt, cynical, and even funny insider’s view of global HIV-prevention efforts. When she isn’t telling colorful stories, she’s skewering everyone who allows ideology to overrule science, e.g., conservatives who oppose needle exchanges and the distribution of condoms despite evidence that they reduce the spread of HIV significantly; well-meaning international development professionals who argue that HIV is spread by poverty and gender inequality rather than by sex and IV drug use; and, especially, politicians who allow the epidemic to grow rather than make unpopular—but evidence-based—decisions. Though she writes in a lively journalistic style, Pisani crafts cogent arguments and supports them with detailed footnotes and an extensive bibliography. with only a core group of friends to turn to for reassurance.

Price: $35