The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability, K. Hogan. Duke University Press (2016). (272 pages ISBN: 9780822361299)

By the mid-1990s, in the United States and Canada there were over one hundred feminist bookstores, all connected in a transnational network. Still, glancing through its chapters, readers soon realize that Kristen Hogan's The Feminist Bookstore Movement. Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (2016) is far from a nostalgic throwback to that time. Rather, Hogan aims to restore to feminist memory bookwomen's radical practice of accountability, as they built ‘coalitions across profound cultural, racial, class, sex, gender, and power differences’ (p. XVI) and ‘showed how knowledge creation happens in relationship’ (p. XX). At bookstores such as A Woman's Place in Oakland, Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and the Toronto Women's Bookstore, bookwomen developed feminist alliances that can inform today's feminism. The Feminist Bookstore Movement challenges the description of the 1970s feminist movement as wholly white, by recognising the relevant and active role of women of color within the bookstores, and narrating the stories of white bookwomen unlearning their privilege. This process also informed Hogan's own experience working at BookWoman in Austin and at the Toronto Women's Bookstore. Her methodology thus combines personal experience with archival research as well as interviews with the protagonists of the bookstore movement, enacting an affectionate and intimate ‘writing style that uses story as theory’ (p. XX).