Sometimes I think that carrying - other people, the continuity of history, generational identity, the emotional load of the everyday - is the main thing that women do. In Marina Benjamin's new set of interlinked essays, she turns her astute eye to the tasks once termed 'women's work'. From cooking and cleaning to caring for an ageing relative, A Little Give depicts domestic life anew: as a site of paradox and conflict, but also of solace and profound meaning. Here, productivity sits alongside self-erasure, resentment with tenderness, and the animal self is never far away, perpetually threatening to break through. Drawing on the work of figures such as Natalia Ginzburg, Paula Rego, and Virginia Woolf, Benjamin writes with fierce candour of the struggle to overwrite the gender conditioning that pulls her back into 'the mud-world of pre-feminism' even as she attempts to haul herself out. From her upbringing as the child of immigrants with fixed traditional values, to looking after her mother and seeing her teenager move out of home, she examines her relationships with family, community, her body, and even with language itself. Ultimately, she shows that a woman's true work may lie at the heart of her humanity, in the pursuit both of transformation and of deep acceptance.

An intense, lyrical, witty, and humane exploration of a state we too often consider only superficially. At once philosophical and poetical, Insomnia ranges widely over history and culture, literature and art, exploring a threshold experience that is intimately involved with trespass and contamination: the illicit importing of day into night.

In a society obsessed with living longer and looking younger, what does middle age mean today? Spurred by her own brutal propulsion into menopause, Marina Benjamin's clear-eyed account of our middle years takes inspiration from literature and philosophy to weigh the challenges and opportunities of mid-life. It offers an inspired and expanded vision of how to be middle-aged happily and harmoniously, without sentiment or delusion.

Marina Benjamin grew up in London feeling estranged from her family's exotic Middle Eastern ways. She refused to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home. She rejected the peculiar food they ate in favor of hamburgers and beer. But when Benjamin had her own child a few years ago, she realized that she was losing her link to the past.

In "Last Days in Babylon," Benjamin delves into the story of her family's life among the Jews of Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century. When Iraq gained independence in 1932, Jews were the largest and most prosperous ethnic group in Baghdad. They dominated trade and finance, hobnobbed with Iraqi dignitaries, and lived in grandiose villas on the banks of the Tigris. Just twenty years later the community had been utterly ravaged, its members effectively expelled from the country by a hostile Iraqi government. Benjamin's grandmother Regina Sehayek lived through it all. Born in 1905, when Baghdad was still under Ottoman control, her childhood was a virtual idyll. This privileged existence was barely touched when the British marched into Iraq. But with the rise of Arab nationalism and the first stirrings of anti-Zionism, Regina, then a young mother, began to have dark premonitions of what was to come. By the time Iraq was galvanized by war, revolution, and regicide, Regina was already gone, her hair-raising escape a tragic exodus from a land she loved -- and a permanent departure from the husband whose gentle guiding hand had made her the woman she was.

Benjamin's keen ear and fluid writing bring to life Regina's Baghdad, both good and bad. More than a stirring story of survival, "Last Days in Babylon" is a bittersweet portrait of Old World Baghdad and its colorful Jewish community, whose roots predate the birth of Islam by a thousand years and whose culture did much to make Iraq the peaceful desert paradise that has since become a distant memory.

In 2004 Benjamin visited Baghdad for the first time, searching for the remains of its once vital Jewish community. What she discovered will haunt anyone who seeks to understand a country that continues to command the world's attention, just as it did when Regina Sehayek proudly walked through Baghdad's streets. By turns moving and funny, "Last Days in Babylon" is an adventure story, a riveting history, and a timely reminder that behind today's headlines are real people whose lives are caught -- too often tragically -- in the crossfire of misunderstanding, age-old prejudice, and geopolitical ambition.

Remember when the race to the moon held the rapt attention of millions? Remember the "Apollo" missions that were supposed to herald the beginning of the Space Age? Thirty years after the last moonwalk, those missions now appear to have ushered in an era's conclusion. What happened?
Marina Benjamin has been asking that question ever since her childhood fascination with space exploration ended in disappointment. "Rocket Dreams" is her thought-provoking look at the Space Age and the shadow it casts on the fabric of our modern lives. When the futuristic expectations we pinned on "Apollo" came crashing back to earth, Benjamin argues, new phenomena took up the cause. Pulling movies, literature, junk culture, and the Internet into an irreverent alternative account of the post-"Apollo" years, she links the demise of the Space Age to groups like the "church" of Noetics -- founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell -- to the spread of UFO believers, even to the birth of fantasy literature. Propelling us through the golden age of Space Age-dreaming during the seventies and eighties, Benjamin finally touches down on...the Web. Has cyberspace become the new frontier we once thought outer space would be?
From Florida's overgrown rocket graveyards to Roswell, New Mexico, and beyond, this skillful blend of history and social observation examines the rise and fall of America's space obsession as never before.