Showing titles in Women

In My Life as My Self, Alice Walker takes you into her private world and summons the powerful spirits and events that have shaped her life: how she learned to fight oppression through her creativity; her reconnection to ancestral roots and the natural world; and her emergence as a courageous artist, recognized for both her brilliance and her compassion.

Small Animals is a riveting examination of the ways our culture of competitive, anxious, and judgmental parenting has profoundly altered the experiences of parents and children. In her signature style - by turns funny, penetrating, and always illuminating - which has dazzled millions of fans and been called "striking" by the New York Times Book Review and "beautiful" by the National Book Critics Circle, Brooks offers a provocative, compelling portrait of parenthood in America and calls us to examine what we most value in our relationships with our children and one another.

Not That I'm Bitter, her powerful, frank, moving, and characteristically funny memoir, reveals exactly how choppy the waters could be. Even in those ground-breaking, anti-Thatcher days, there was only room at top for so many women.

With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world.

Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen’s heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. But history hasn’t been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters’ works as his inspiration.

Soldier Girls follows the lives of three women on their paths to the military. These women, who are quite different in every way, become friends, and we watch their interaction and also what happens when they are separated. We see their families, their lovers, their spouses, their children. We see them work extremely hard, deal with the attentions of men on base and in war zones, and struggle to stay connected to their families back home.

In 1990, Sinéad O’Connor’s video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” turned her into a superstar. Two years later, an appearance on Saturday Night Live turned her into a scandal. For many people—including, for years, the author—what they knew of O’Connor stopped there. Allyson McCabe believes it’s time to reassess our old judgments about Sinéad O’Connor and to expose the machinery that built her up and knocked her down.

Katherine Ryan’s on-again, off-again high school romance with a genuinely decent boy named Bobby ended in lots of adolescent melodrama and angsty wallowing, fueled by Cool Ranch Doritos. Years later, Katherine is a successful comic in the UK, embracing single motherhood with her precocious daughter, Violet, and is happily resigned to a future without romance. She tells her audience as much. Until her job sends Katherine on a quick trip to her Canadian hometown.

Educated meets The Vow in this story of liberation and self-empowerment - an inspiring and stranger-than-fiction memoir of growing up in and breaking free from the Children of God, an oppressive, extremist religious cult.

Sheila Hancock looked like she was managing old age. She had weathered and even thrived in widowhood, taking on acting roles that would have been demanding for a woman half her age. She had energy, friends, a devoted family, a lovely home. She could still remember her lines. So why, at 89, having sailed past supposedly disturbing milestones—50, 70 even 80—without a qualm, did she suddenly feel so furious? Shocking diagnoses, Brexit and bereavement seemed to knock her from every quarter. And that was before lockdown.

Un autorretrato de insólita emotividad al tiempo que exquisita recreación de la sensibilidad de las mujeres de nuestra época.... Cualquier libro de Isabel Allende es un acontecimiento. Paula lo es especialmente porque se trata del más conmovedor, más personal y más íntimo de todos los que ha publicado hasta la fecha.

What can a forty-something childless woman do? Bored with her life and feeling stuck, Mia Kankimäki leaves her job, sells her apartment, and decides to travel the world, following the paths of the female explorers and artists from history who have long inspired her. She flies to Tanzania and then to Kenya to see where Karen Blixen—of Out of Africa fame—lived in the 1920s. In Japan, Mia attempts to cure her depression while researching Yayoi Kusama, the contemporary artist who has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades.

Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor - raising her in isolation and subjecting her to endless drills designed to "eliminate weakness." She endured a life without heat, hot water, adequate food, friendship, or any kind of affectionate treatment. But Maude's parents could not rule her inner life. Befriending the animals on the lonely estate as well as the characters in the novels she read in secret, young Maude nurtured in herself the compassion and love that her parents forbid as weak.

It was a wrong turn that changed everything. When Luma Mufleh—a Muslim, gay, refugee woman from hyper-conservative Jordan—stumbled upon a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia, something compelled her to join. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia, Afghanistan, and Sudan, soon welcomed her as coach of their ragtag but fiercely competitive group. Drawn into their lives, Mufleh learned that few of her players, all local public school students, could read a single word. She asks, “Where was the America that took me in? That protected me? How can I get these kids to that America?”

This is an honest, upfront, relatable account of one suburban housewife's journey from miserable wine-soaked boozer to self-respecting sober lady. This audiobook is an inspirational tale of self-transformation, addiction, and domesticity.

Edith Hamilton didn’t publish her first book until she was 62. But over the next three decades this former headmistress would become the twentieth century’s most famous interpreter of the classical world. Today, Hamilton’s Mythology (1942) remains the standard version of ancient tales. During the Cold War, her influence even extended to politics, as she argued that postwar America could learn from the fate of Athens after its victory in the Persian Wars. Victoria Houseman tells the fascinating life story of a remarkable classicist whose ideas were shaped by—and aspired to shape—her times.

In 2015, the Irish government commissioned an investigation into the state’s network of Mother and Baby Homes after the discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of up to eight hundred children prompted international outrage. The homes, which operated from the 1920s to the 1990s, were responsible for nearly nine thousand child deaths and countless other abuses. Yet in the face of overwhelming evidence, everyone seemed to forget what had actually occurred. No one remembered who the babies were, how they died, or where they were buried.

Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice that conspired to keep them out of the sky.

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history - a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the century since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside from juvenile biographies. The truth about Harriet Tubman has become lost inside a legend woven of racial and gender stereotypes.

When Marilyn Monroe became famous in the 1950s, the world was told that her mother was either dead or simply not a part of her life. However, that was not true. In fact, her mentally ill mother was very much present in Marilyn's world and the complex family dynamic that unfolded behind the scenes is a story that has never before been told...until now.