Unbecoming : : a Memoir of Disobedience

Locations
Call Number: 921 Bhagwati, Anuradha
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Bhagwati, Anuradha	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Home fires -- Are you a girl with a star-spangled heart? -- Becoming a Marine -- Womanizing the Corps -- Heart of darkness -- A few good men -- Joining the grunts -- One last oorah -- Invitation to a beheading -- Unraveling -- Rising up -- The civilian invasion -- Shock and awe -- Bleeding hearts -- Handling the truth -- Our last best hope -- Red, (white) and blue.
"A raw, unflinching, and inspirational memoir by a former United States Marine Captain describing her journey from dutiful daughter of immigrants to wide-eyed recruit to radical activist dedicated to effecting historic policy reform in the military. After a lifetime of buckling to the demands of her strict Indian parents, Anuradha Bhagwati abandons her grad school career at Harvard University to join the Marines. It's the fiercest, most violent, most masculine branch of the military: the perfect place for her to prove that she's the ultimate Cool Girl, someone who can brawl with the boys in every sense of the word. Or at least that's what she thinks. From the moment training begins, Anuradha's G.I. Jane fantasy is punctured. As a bisexual woman of color in the military, she faces adversity and underestimation at every stage, confronting misogyny, racism, abuse, and astonishing injustice perpetrated by those in power. Pushing herself beyond her limits to prove her ability, she is forced to wrestle with what exactly drove her to pursue such punishment and violence in the first place. Once her service concludes in 2004, instead of retreating and putting it all behind her, she decides to do the exact opposite: take to task the leaders and outmoded conventions that she found so objectionable and even dangerous. Full of strength, courage, and heroic resilience, Unbecoming is about one woman who learned to believe in herself in spite of everything; it is the kind of story that will light a fire beneath you, and that will inspire our next generation of fierce female heroes to always persist"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Exceptional submitted by rats on February 3, 2021, 10:48pm This is the first nonfiction book I've ever read that I've wanted to read all over again once I finished it. I wish I could make it required reading for everyone in military schools and the military, especially the officers. If I was Tzar of the nation, I would lock up the highest marine corps leadership and make them read it and discuss it together with the author. Yet because I am just a peon, I am just going to email the heads of military schools and the new Secretary of Defense, etc., and recommend they read this. My sister escaped Ann Arbor after she was raped at the old YWCA to go into the Navy, only to be raped there in the first year of service. It is a disgrace that service personnel are still having to put up with this behavior from people who are supposed to have their backs. Shame.