Rebecca Traister's previous book, All the Single Ladies, revealed how women who've bypassed our culture's expectations have reshaped America's socioeconomic landscape. Her cathartic Good and Mad (Simon & Schuster) is something of a spiritual successor. It casts our recent revolts—#MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the March for Our Lives, and the Women's March among them—against the larger, protest-rich backdrop of our country's history; behind every great movement, Traister contends, has been a woman whose ire served to ignite monumental change. Traister draws a line from Emmett Till's mother, Mamie, who invited the media to her son's open-casket funeral and is credited with sparking the modern civil rights movement, to Bree Newsome, who in 2015 scaled a flagpole at the South Carolina State House to take down the Confederate banner. Traister interweaves the tribulations of today's firebrands with those of the past. The result? A celebration of a catalytic force that burns ever brighter today.
— Michelle Hart
