Human Biography

Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, The New Queer Conscience, Voices4 Founder and LGBTQIA+ activist Adam Eli offers a candid and compassionate introduction to queer responsibility. Eli calls on his Jewish faith to underline how kindness and support within the queer community can lead to a stronger global consciousness. More importantly, he reassures us that we're not alone. In fact, we never were. Because if you mess with one queer, you mess with us all.

Recycled Human is a continuation of my first book, Damaged Goods, but Recycled Human is aimed more at the re-entry into the general public. A big part of that shift involves various "transitional services" which are in fact not helping people. In fact, the services meant to help a person like me develop can be yet another oppressive system. When a person wants to change and truly is ready to face change, it can be challenging to find genuine resources. So here it is...this is my testimony of what I saw in myself and the system that needed changing.

The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family's search for safety shows how the United States-in concert with other Western nations-has gutted asylum protections for the world's most vulnerable.

If you have ever felt like a misfit in school or been paralyzed by your family’s imposing expectations, if you have ever obsessed about your appearance or panicked about choosing a career path, if you have ever wondered if every single thing to which your body is exposed, from egg yolks to X-rays, might harm you, then you may be surprised to find a kindred spirit in The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt.

In February of 1973, Nancy Weber put an ad in the Village Voice offering to trade places with another woman, a stranger, for a month. In hopes of better understanding what was fixed and final in each person - and what was invented, and therefore might be reinvented - they would use each other's names, live in each other's homes, love each other's loves, and do each other's work.

The 19th daughter of a local village leader in rural Afghanistan, Fawzia Koofi was left to die in the sun after birth by her mother. But she survived, and perseverance in the face of extreme hardship has defined her life ever since. Despite the abuse of her family, the exploitative Russian and Taliban regimes, the murders of her father, brother, and husband, and numerous attempts on her life, she rose to become the first Afghani woman Parliament speaker.

On an East African hunting expedition in 1909, Delia Akeley, a 40-year-old American woman, casually captured a baby female monkey, never dreaming this act would overturn both their lives. Delia’s life was isolated and often lonely in an overpoweringly masculine world. She decided to name the monkey JT Jr and study her interactions with humans; a long-frustrated desire to adopt a child led her to also lose her heart to this lovable animal.

"الكتاب ده هو بداية لمغامرة جديدة فى مستشفى جديدة بعد ما خلصت مغامراتي فى الوحدة الصحية الى كنت فيها فى إحدى قرى محافظة الغربية، مغامراتي الى دونتها في كتابي الأول "بالطو وفانلة وتاب ".. لو قريته أكيد هتبقى عارف المرمطة الي أنا اتمرمطتها كويس، ولو مقرتهوش فخلي حد قراه يحكيلك عن المرمطة الي أنا اتمرمطتها أو ما يحكيش هو مش فارق عمتاً، لأن دي رحلة جديدة كليا ملهاش أي علاقة بالكتاب الأول.

Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.

How do we thrive? In Gods in a Box on My Dresser: An Inquiry Into the Human Capacity to Thrive, Dr. Luciana Passeri takes listeners on her journey to the Peruvian Amazon Jungle as she struggles with God and religion while traversing childhood abandonment, abuse, and an eating disorder that almost took her life.

In telling her erotic story, Agapedis seamlessly weaves in other wonderful and challenging facets of her life - as a belly dancer, yogini, Wicca priestess, massage therapist, teacher, wife, and mom to an autistic child. Her story is one of a real woman who is having the most thrilling, mind-blowing year of her life - a time when she was turning 50 years old, going through the beginnings of menopause, and more sexually turned on than ever before. During this year, she was able to realize her burning sacred desire: to make love to a man as man.

Born in Brooklyn in 1963, Patrick Dougher grew up in some of the most turbulent and culturally impactful periods of NYC's history. Often neglected as a child by his parents—a father who struggled with alcohol addiction and an overworked mother who struggled to make ends meet—he learned to fend for himself. Now a renowned visual artist, musician, actor and writer, Dougher brings to the page his memories, struggles, personal revelations, and a life intimately tied to the realities of growing up Black and disenfranchised on the streets of one of the most remarkable cities in the world.

In the aftermath of Jo Cox's tragic death in 2016, her husband, Brendan Cox, urged us to remember Jo's life and what she stood for and not the manner of her death. In this moving and impassioned portrait of Jo - as daughter, mother, wife, sister, MP and activist - we see how much she gave and how much more she had to give, and her legacy of values and beliefs which will live on.

Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic. Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in student demonstrations, she was arrested (literally snatched off the street by secret police) and charged with "inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran". While imprisoned in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison she faced brutal interrogation: her head was shaved, and she was beaten.

يقول الكاتب في مقدمة هذا الكتاب "وقد شرفت بمعرفة عالمنا الكبير عام 2005 ، ثم عملت معه بدءاً من عام 2012 حتى وفاته مستشاراً إعلامياً و متحدثاً باسم مدينة زويل للعلوم والتكنولوجيا، فتعمقت علاقتنا وصداقتنا حتى أصبح اليوم الذي لا أتلقى منه مكاملة هاتفية تأتيني من نصف الكرة الآخر حيث مدينة لوس أنجلوس، لا أعده من أيامي، إضافة إلى حرصه على أن أكون برفقته دوماً خلال زياراته إلى أرض الوطن.

Jimmy Carter has lived the most admired and productive post-presidency in the nation's history. Through The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982, President Carter has fought neglected diseases, waged peace in war zones, and built hope among some of the most forgotten and needy people in the world.

Barrister Michael Mansfield, KC, has spent his career fighting injustice, persecution and corruption. And be it the Birmingham Six, Bloody Sunday, Stephen Lawrence, the Marchioness, Hillsborough or Grenfell, he has come to learn one thing - that people power is unstoppable. Michael draws upon his 50 years of fighting for justice and revisits his most important cases and clients, proving without doubt that when people get together they can make lasting and positive change.

Basadas en la vida real y con mágicas dosis de fantasía, estas historias irreverentes y divertidas—de una chica como tú: en busca del amor libre, la celebración de la vida y la felicidad—están escritas con humor e inigualable pasión romántica.

Un manifiesto necesario para una democracia global. Una impactante historia al estilo David y Goliat sobre un joven activista de Hong Kong, quien con tan solo veintidós años está sacudiendo e inspirando al mundo entero. A los catorce años Joshua Wong ya hizo historia. Mientras los adultos guardaban silencio, Joshua escenificó la primera protesta de estudiantes en Hong Kong en contra del sistema de educación nacional, y ganó.

Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother’s stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother’s health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. "Tell them about Papa Renty," she would say. It was her mother’s last wish. Thus begins one woman’s remarkable commitment to document that story.