Books
Pornography: A Groundwork Guide (Groundwood Press). The first and only book about pornography for young adults of high school and undergrad college age. Porn is everywhere today, everyone is looking, and the media responds with little more than gloom-and-doom talk about evils like Internet sex addiction, or rah-rah promotion of Brazilian waxing and Jenna Jameson’s fame and fortune. Meanwhile, few know the real history of this explosive media, or the truth about its business practices, working conditions, politics and actual effects on people. Pornography: A Groundwork Guide summarizes the latest scholarly research about porn and makes it easy to understand. Booklist recommends it as “a provocative starting point for further research in media studies, censorship, and human sexuality,” and says it “presents the pros and cons of adult enterainment in surprisingly fair measure.” Pornography is must reading for people of any age who want to cut through the hype and learn the facts.
Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border (Cinco Puntos Press). Debbie lived in the bordertown El Paso, Texas for many years in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In this collection of essays, she looks at women immigrants and, more profoundly, at the idea of borders and borderline acts when it comes to women. Debbie’s early reporting for The Village Voice about teachers accused in “satanic daycare” cases also appears in Women and Other Aliens. So does work about immigration published in The Chicago Reader and The Texas Observer. The collection also includes essays written especially for the book. Out of print, but lots of used copies are available. Click here for sellers.
Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. (With co-author Michael Snedeker. First edition Basic Books. Second edition IUniverse.)
Click here to buy the current edition.
Definitive, widely acclaimed history of the ritual abuse panic of the 1980s in the US. Read about notorious scandals such as the McMartin Preschool case in Los Angeles — the longest and costliest criminal case in the nation’s history. Read also why and how the Department of Justice, police, social workers, psychologists, doctors and women’s rights advocates were so quick to embrace the junk science and irrationality that backed up this panic. An important book for those who care about child protection, sexual politics, moral crusades, and social panics in times of national anxiety.
Translations:
The Moon Will Forever Be a Distant Love, by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite (Cinco Puntos Press), with co-translator Willivaldo Delgadillo.
Crosthwaite is a major Mexican fiction writer from the northern border. This is the English rendering of his novel La luna siempre será un amor difícil. It’s about a 16th-century Spanish conquistador who takes a bus from Mexico City to Tijuana, where he crosses illegally into California to get a job as a dishwasher and flirt with an Okie waitress. (The conquistador’s indigenous wife, meanwhile, gets work at a twin plant and eats too much pizza.) Don Quixote meets Guillermo Gómez-Peña, as channeled through Crosthwaite’s psychic WordPerfect program. And the result is word perfect. Even in English: Willivaldo and Debbie are proud that their work won a Texas Institute of Letters award for translation.
Yiddish South of the Border (eds. Alan Astro and Ilan Stavans, U New Mexico Press).
Debbie translated several pieces in this excellent anthology of short stories and essays. They were written from the 1920s to 1940s in Latin America — not in Spanish but in Yiddish.
Look for Debbie’s essays in these books:
Before & After: Stories from New York (ed. Thomas Beller, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Books)
Debbie has contributed for several years to www.mrbellersneighborhood.com. It’s a serendipitous, democratic site that posts vignettes about life in New York City, written by very prominent, not-so-prominent and completely unknown writers. This little book collects pieces written both before 9/11 and immediately after. Debbie’s contribution, “Kicked Off E-Bay,” is in the “after” section.
The New York Times has this to say about mrbellersneighborhood.com:
“It’s as if the Greek drama of the city has been temporarily halted to let members of the chorus step forward and sing about themselves. They produce tales and screeds and comic effusions and rueful reminiscences galore.”
The Late Great Mexican Border: Essays from a Disappearing Line (Eds. Bobby Byrd and Susannah Byrd, Cinco Puntos Press).
Charles Bowden, Luis Alberto-Urrea, Ruben Martinez, Debbie Nathan, and more: every serious border-rat writer has something in this book. These people were living and working on the international line before Bill O’Reilly ever heard of it. If you want deep background on today’s “illegal immigrant” brouhaha, you’ll want Late Great.
America’s Mayor, America’s President? The Strange Career of Rudolph Giuliani (ed. Rob Polner with introduction by Jimmy Breslin).
Rudy Giuliani did a run for president, trying to convince people across the country that he was rock steady as mayor of NYC during 9/11. But National Disaster Rudy was a far cry from Everyday Mayor Rudy. Most of the time, his mean-spiritedness, hypocrisy, and overweening political ambition made a hash of civil liberties, free speech, and race relations. New Yorkers knew all about this; most heartlanders still don’t. Rudy’s prez campaign is history now, but you can still read this book to learn about his nasty tenure in the Big Apple.
Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots & Graffiti from La Frontera (eds. Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, John Byrd and Bobby Byrd).
Another great Cinco Puntos book with all the best essays, pix and riff raff about the southern border. Debbie’s piece reports on a young, Mexican bookkeeper who wanted nothing more than to keep her accounts straight at the maquiladora she worked for, and to one day visit Disneyland. Instead, she was brutally murdered because the maquila was too cheap to protect her from thugs. Her parents were the kind of poor, humble Mexicans who usually look at their feet when the system mistreats them. But not this mother and father. They sued the St. Louis-based maquila in a Texas court. Debbie’s account of the trial reads like “Law and Order” at the US-Mexico line: It’s a page turner. As is every contribution to this anthology.
The Texas Observer’s 50th Anniversary Reader (ed. Char Miller, intro by the late Molly Ivins)
Debbie is a fifth-gen Texan. Her first memories include hearing her parents calling Dwight Eisenhower and Texas governor Alan Shivers dirty names in Tex-twanged Yiddish as they leafed through big, runny-newsprint tabloid pages of the Observer. Three decades later it had turned into a little, cleaner-ink magazine, and Debbie started sending submissions. Currently she’s a contributing writer. The Observer is the flagship cultural institution of Texas progressivism. In this anthology you find its fourth-estate beacons, beginning during the creepy Cold-War years (when, for example, a Texas statehouse pol moved to impose the death penalty on Communist Party members), and continuing to the icky Dubya era.
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