Unfollow

Author: Megan Phelps-Roper
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715815
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
The activist and TED speaker Megan Phelps-Roper reveals her life growing up in the most hated family in America At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy. As Phelps-Roper grew up, she saw that church members were close companions and accomplished debaters, applying the logic of predestination and the language of the King James Bible to everyday life with aplomb—which, as the church’s Twitter spokeswoman, she learned to do with great skill. Soon, however, dialogue on Twitter caused her to begin doubting the church’s leaders and message: If humans were sinful and fallible, how could the church itself be so confident about its beliefs? As she digitally jousted with critics, she started to wonder if sometimes they had a point—and then she began exchanging messages with a man who would help change her life. A gripping memoir of escaping extremism and falling in love, Unfollow relates Phelps-Roper’s moral awakening, her departure from the church, and how she exchanged the absolutes she grew up with for new forms of warmth and community. Rich with suspense and thoughtful reflection, Phelps-Roper’s life story exposes the dangers of black-and-white thinking and the need for true humility in a time of angry polarization.

Unfollowing You

Author: Komal Kapoor
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1524852082
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
After prolific growth on social media, Komal Kapoor is utilizing her perceptive understanding of romance in the digital age to present her first collection of poems. Unfollowing You tells a chronological tale of a modern love through a series of poems, prose, texts, screen grabs, and unsent letters. Exploring digital phenomena like swipe culture and technological realities, Kapoor’s words affirm experiences and sentiment echoed across many media platforms. Unfollowing You is separated into two parts: “Following You” details how the two protagonists fall in love and “Unfollowing You” shares their heartbreak. The realism of this collection will encourage readers to normalize growth and indulge in their feelings, even finding strength in them.

Unfollow Me

Author: Charlotte Duckworth
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
ISBN: 1643853937
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
This domestic thriller is a “timely, page-turner of a novel” that examines the terrifying depths of our social media obsessions (Araminta Hall, author of Our Kind of Cruelty) You can't stop watching her. Violet Young is a hugely popular journalist-turned-mummy-influencer, with three children, a successful husband and a million subscribers on YouTube who tune in daily to watch her everyday life unfold. Until the day she's no longer there. But one day she disappears from the online world—her entire social media presence deleted overnight, with no explanation. Has she simply decided that baring her life to all online is no longer a good idea, or has something more sinister happened to Violet? But do you really know who Violet is? Her fans are obsessed with finding out the truth, but their search quickly reveals a web of lies, betrayal, and shocking consequences . . .

Unfollow Me

Author: Jill Louise Busby
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635577128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, aka Jillisblack. Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area. In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. As her pithy persona Jillisblack became an "it-voice" weighing in on all things race-based, Jill began to notice parallels between her performance of "diversity" in the white corporate world and her performance of "wokeness" for her followers. Both, she realized, were scripted. Unfollow Me is a memoir-in-essays about these scripts; it's about tokenism, micro-fame, and inhabiting spaces-real and virtual, black and white-where complicity is the price of entry. Busby's social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of white fragility (and other words for racism), respectability politics (and other words for shame), and all the places where fear masquerades as progress.

The Unfollowing

Author: Lyn Hejinian
Publisher: Omnidawn
ISBN: 9781632430151
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Elegies of public and personal loss from the renowned avant-garde poet

Girl on a Wire

Author: Libby Phelps
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510703276
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
It wasn’t until Libby Phelps was an adult, a twenty-five year old, that she escaped the Westboro Baptist Church. She is the granddaughter of its founder, Fred Phelps, and when she left, the church and its values were all she’d known. She didn’t tell her family she was leaving. It happened in just a few minutes; she ran into her house, grabbed a bag, and fled. No goodbyes. Based in Topeka, Kansas, the Westboro Baptist Church community is one the country’s most notorious evangelical groups. Its members are known for their boisterous picketing—their zealous members with anti-military, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay signs—“Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “God Hates Jews,” or “Thank God for 9/11”—and their notorious catchphrase “God hates fags.” Search for them online and you’re directed to their website, www.godhatesfags.com. The church makes headlines in news across the country. You’ve driven past its picketers or seen them on TV. It has seventy members and ninety percent of them are part of Libby’s family. They picket concerts, football games, other churches, and, most notoriously, the funerals of servicemen and victims of hate crimes. For its members, to question its rules is to risk going to hell—where worms eat at your body and fire shoots out of your eyeballs. In Girl on a Wire, Libby is candid about her experience and what’s happened since her escape. On Anderson Cooper Live, she was confronted by the mother of a soldier whose funeral had been picketed, and had to respond. Despite it all, she cares for her family. Her grandfather’s sermons were fear mongering, but she loves him. This unusual memoir presents a rare, inside look into a notorious cult, and is an astonishing story of strength, bravery, and determination.

Unfollow Me

Author: Charlotte Duckworth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781787478091
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'An intriguing slow burner that reveals the dark side of social media' Heat 'A timely, page-turner of a novel' Araminta Hall 'Gripping, scarily realistic and unpredictable - brilliant!' Karen Hamilton 'A twisty tale' i news ********** You can't stop watching her. Violet Young is a hugely popular journalist-turned-mummy-influencer, with three children, a successful husband and a million subscribers on YouTube who tune in daily to watch her everyday life unfold. Until the day she's no longer there. But one day she disappears from the online world - her entire social media presence deleted overnight, with no explanation. Has she simply decided that baring her life to all online is no longer a good idea, or has something more sinister happened to Violet? But do you really know who Violet is? Her fans are obsessed with finding out the truth, but their search quickly reveals a web of lies, betrayal, and shocking consequences... ********** 'A total page-turner' 5* reader review 'I was completely captivated' 5* reader review 'Brilliantly addictive' 5* reader review 'Warning: once you start, you can't put it down' 5* reader review

Unfollow

Author: Linda Papadopoulos
Publisher: Piatkus
ISBN: 0349414130
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Life is full of opportunity for young women, but it's also far more pressured than ever before. Whether it's the proliferation or the homogeneity of images of beauty and success that wallpaper our world, we know what a beautiful woman looks like - and we know what a perfect life looks like too. We live in a world that floods us with expectations about everything - from what we should weigh to what we should wear to how often we should be having sex and how much money we should be making. As a consequence, we begin to feel that we need to tick all these boxes in order to have 'the Perfect Life'. When we inevitably fall short, we feel anxious - we feel that we are failing and have the sense we are losing control. As a result, increasing numbers of young women are battling with issues such as anxiety, low self-esteem, bullying, perfectionism, toxic friendships and relationships, pressure to succeed or conform, and poor body image. At an age when life should be exciting, fun and relatively care-free, more and more young women are adrift and struggling. Dr Linda Papadopoulos understands the issues and has the experience to guide and support young women to help get their lives back on track so they can feel happier, more confident, more in control. Unfollow: Living life on your own terms offers valuable insight and practical self-help to empower women to throw off the burden of expectation and start leading the lives they want to lead.

White American Youth

Author: Christian Picciolini
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316522910
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
As featured on Fresh Air and the TED stage, a stunning look inside the world of violent hate groups by a onetime white supremacist leader who, shaken by a personal tragedy, abandoned his destructive life to become an anti-hate activist. Raw, inspiring, and heartbreakingly candid, White American Youth explores why so many young people lose themselves in a culture of hatred and violence and how the criminal networks they forge terrorize and divide our nation. The story begins when Picciolini found himself stumbling through high school, struggling to find a community among other fans of punk rock music. There, he was recruited by a notorious white power skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to "protect the white race from extinction." Soon, he had become an expert in racist philosophies, a terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. When his mentor was sent to prison, sixteen-year-old Picciolini took over the man's role as the leader of an infamous neo-Nazi skinhead group. Seduced by the power he accrued through intimidation, and swept up in the rhetoric he had adopted, Picciolini worked to grow an army of extremists. He used music as a recruitment tool, launching his own propaganda band that performed at white power rallies around the world. But slowly, as he started a family of his own and a job that for the first time brought him face to face with people from all walks of life, he began to recognize the cracks in his hateful ideology. Then a shocking loss at the hands of racial violence changed his life forever, and Picciolini realized too late the full extent of the harm he'd caused. "Simultaneously horrifying and redemptive" (AlterNet), White American Youth examines how radicalism and racism can conquer a person's way of life and how we can work together to stop those ideologies from tearing our world apart. *An earlier edition of this book was published as Romantic Violence

Banished

Author: Lauren Drain
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455512435
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
Banished is an eye-opening, deeply personal account of life inside the cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church, as well as a fascinating story of adaptation and perseverance. You've likely heard of the Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps you've seen their pickets on the news, the members holding signs with messages that are too offensive to copy here, protesting at events such as the funerals of soldiers, the 9-year old victim of the recent Tucson shooting, and Elizabeth Edwards, all in front of their grieving families. The WBC is fervently anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and anti- practically everything and everyone. And they aren't going anywhere: in March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the WBC's right to picket funerals. Since no organized religion will claim affiliation with the WBC, it's perhaps more accurate to think of them as a cult. Lauren Drain was thrust into that cult at the age of 15, and then spat back out again seven years later. Lauren spent her early years enjoying a normal life with her family in Florida. But when her formerly liberal and secular father set out to produce a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually evolved into fascination, and he moved the entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme beliefs, and became a member of the church and an active and vocal picketer. But as she matured and began to challenge some of the church's tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church and permanently cut off from her family and from everyone else she knew and loved. Banished is the story of Lauren's fight to find herself amidst dramatic changes in a world of extremists and a life in exile.