Annotated Reading List

Kiedis, Anthony, and Larry Sloman. Scar Tissue. New York: Hyperion, 2004. Print.

Scar Tissue is the deliciously deranged and drug-infested memoir of Red Hot Chili Peppers front man, Anthony Kiedis. He tells his readers about what life was like growing up in Los Angeles with his drug-dealing father, how the Red Hot Chili Peppers (RHCP) formed, what happened during RHCP, tours how drug addiction haunted him throughout his life, and the people he met along the way. Kiedis mentioned how his English teachers through out grade school and college fancied his writing style and I can see why! His casual, yet descriptive, story-telling tone makes it seem almost as if he were telling me the story before my eyes. Though I have never been addicted to drugs myself, he very distinctively describes the feelings drug addiction brings to where I understand. (465 pages)

Lamb, Sharon, and Lyn Mikel Brown. Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes. New York: St. Martin's, 2006. Print.

In Packaging Girlhood, authors Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown inform mothers about the media selling an imaginary picture of women being girly, motherly, sexy, and powerless to their daughters. Images such as these are subliminally pounded into girls' skulls at young ages in disney movies clothing, then gradually segue into an image of a sex appeal. Lamb and Brown offer advice to their audience to help them keep their daughters from submitting to the sexist image the media portrays of women. Since I have seen a majority of what the authors mention in the book, I know what they are talking about. The problem with that is that I know more about the tv show, movie, etc. than the authors do and I can tell when the authors over-fabricate, which they clearly do an abundance of times. For example, when they discuss That's So Raven, they say Raven's mother is dead. Any girl from ages 10-20 can tell you that Raven's mother is living (actually in the later episodes, her mother goes to law school, which should be more empowering than not). (294 pages)