“Translating Woman,” by Ruth Behar (Beacon Press),...

“Translating Woman,” by Ruth Behar (Beacon Press), is a riveting account of the life of a Mexican street peddler, mostly told in her own words. Her story is interspersed with an extraordinary look at the whole ethnographic endeavor by a first-rate feminist anthropologist. It’s a book about myth-making and boundaries and identity, about making sense of who we are and where we’ve been. It made me want to go back to graduate school.