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Showing 1 - 11 of 11 items

The exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science

By Kate Zernike. 2023

DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Women biography, Science and medicine biography, History
Human-narrated audio

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who broke the story, the inspiring account of the sixteen female scientists who forced MIT…

to publicly admit it had been discriminating against its female faculty for years—sparking a nationwide reckoning with the pervasive sexism in science. "Excellent and infuriating." — The New York Times In 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted to discriminating against women on its faculty, forcing institutions across the country to confront a problem they had long ignored: the need for more women at the top levels of science. Written by the journalist who broke the story for The Boston Globe , The Exceptions is the untold story of how sixteen highly accomplished women on the MIT faculty came together to do the work that triggered the historic admission. The Exceptions centers on the life of Nancy Hopkins, a reluctant feminist who became the leader of the sixteen and a hero to two generations of women in science. Hired to prestigious universities at the dawn of affirmative action efforts in the 1970s, Dr. Hopkins and her peers embarked on their careers believing that discrimination against women was a thing of the past—that science was, at last, a pure meritocracy. For years they explained away the discrimination they experienced as the exception, not the rule. Only when these few women came together after decades of underpayment and the denial of credit, advancement, and equal resources to do their work did they recognize the relentless pattern: women were often marginalized and minimized, especially as they grew older. Meanwhile, men of similar or lesser ability had their career paths paved and widened. The Exceptions is a powerful yet all-too-familiar story that will resonate with all professional women who experience what those at MIT called "21st-century discrimination"—a subtle and stubborn bias, often unconscious but still damaging. As in bestsellers from Hidden Figures to Lab Girl and Code Girls , we are offered a rare glimpse into the world of high-level scientific research and learn about the extraordinary female scientists whose work has been overlooked throughout history, and how these women courageously fought for fair treatment as they struggled to achieve the recognition they rightfully deserve

Wifedom: Mrs. orwell's invisible life

By Anna Funder. 2023

DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Women biography, Literature biography, Social issues
Human-narrated audio

This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century —and…

a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world "Simply, a masterpiece...Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full." —Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of Horse At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. "I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife. A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre-bending and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere. *Includes a downloadable PDF of photographs and notes from the book

Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world

By Naomi Klein. 2023

DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Social issues, Biography, Politics and government, Environment, Science and medicine biography
Human-narrated audio

From the award-winning, bestselling author of No Logo , The Shock Doctrine , and This Changes Everything , a revelatory…

analysis of the collapsed meanings, blurred identities, and uncertain realities of the mirror world. "If ever a book was necessary, it’s this one." —Bill McKibben "Thoughtful and honest . . . Incisive . . . Klein moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times." —Judith Butler Over the past twenty-five years, Naomi Klein has charted and documented our politics and culture with a series of trenchant bestselling books laying bare the effects of branding, austerity, and climate profiteering on our societies and souls. With Doppelganger , Klein takes a more personal turn, braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, as she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere. Klein begins this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger—a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, to name a few—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises. Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now

A living remedy: A memoir

By Nicole Chung. 2023

DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Women biography, Journals and memoirs, Biography
Human-narrated audio

Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * Harper's Bazaar * Esquire * Booklist * USA Today *…

Elle * Good Housekeeping * Time From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter's search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she's lost. In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them. Nicole Chung couldn't hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society

Bottoms up and the devil laughs: A journey through the deep state

By Kerry Howley. 2023

DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Women biography, Criticism, Science and medicine biography
Human-narrated audio

A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown "At 25, [Reality] Winner—yoga teacher, beloved…

sister, AR-15 owner—was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking classified documents about a Russian election attack. Howley deftly analyzes the brutal, surreal conditions that underlie this drama and the way that they implicate all of us." —Glamour Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined. Following Winner’s unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life

A Living Remedy: A Memoir

By Nicole Chung. 2023

Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Biography, Journals and memoirs, Women biography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille

A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from: Dallas Morning News * Today.com * Good Housekeeping * Time * The Rumpus *…

The Week * Salon * Seattle Times * Electric Literature * Bookpage * The Millions * Elle.com * Washington Post * Book Riot * Lit Hub * NPR's Here & Now * Ms. Magazine * Town & Country * New York Times * USA Today * Sunset From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost.In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them. Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society. 

The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science

By Kate Zernike. 2023

Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Science and medicine biography, Women biography, History
Synthetic audio, Automated braille

A New York Times Notable Book As late as 1999, women who succeeded in science were called &“exceptional&” as if…

it were unusual for them to be so bright. They were exceptional, not because they could succeed at science but because of all they accomplished despite the hurdles. &“Gripping…one puts down the book inspired by the women&’s grit, tenacity, and brilliance.&” —Science &“Riveting.&” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The GeneIn 1963, a female student was attending a lecture given by Nobel Prize winner James Watson, then tenured at Harvard. At nineteen, she was struggling to define her future. She had given herself just ten years to fulfill her professional ambitions before starting the family she was expected to have. For women at that time, a future on the usual path of academic science was unimaginable—but during that lecture, young Nancy Hopkins fell in love with the promise of genetics. Confidently believing science to be a pure meritocracy, she embarked on a career. In 1999, Hopkins, now a noted molecular geneticist and cancer researcher at MIT, divorced and childless, found herself underpaid and denied the credit and resources given to men of lesser rank. Galvanized by the flagrant favoritism, Hopkins led a group of sixteen women on the faculty in a campaign that prompted MIT to make the historic admission that it had long discriminated against its female scientists. The sixteen women were a formidable group: their work has advanced our understanding of everything from cancer to geology, from fossil fuels to the inner workings of the human brain. And their work to highlight what they called &“21st-century discrimination&”—a subtle, stubborn, often unconscious bias—set off a national reckoning with the pervasive sexism in science. From the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who broke the story, The Exceptions chronicles groundbreaking science and a history-making fight for equal opportunity. It is the &“excellent and infuriating&” (The New York Times) story of how this group of determined, brilliant women used the power of the collective and the tools of science to inspire ongoing radical change. And it offers an intimate look at the passion that drives discovery, and a rare glimpse into the competitive, hierarchical world of elite science—and the women who dared to challenge it.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

By Naomi Klein. 2023

Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Science and medicine biography, Biography, Politics and government
Synthetic audio, Automated braille

#1 NATIONAL BESTELLERShortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2024 Writers&’ PrizeFinalist for the 2024 National Book…

Critics Circle Award for CriticismA New York Times Notable Book of 2023Vulture&’s #1 Book of 2023A Guardian Best Ideas Book of 2023Named a Best Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail • TIME • Esquire • Slate • Harpers&’ Bazaar • The Times • The New Republic • Toronto Star • CBC • The Boston Globe • Electric Lit What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against?Not long ago, Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were similar enough to her own that many people confused her for the other. For a vertiginous moment, she lost her bearings. And then she got interested, in a reality that seems to be warping and doubling like a digital hall of mirrors. It&’s happening in our politics as New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers find common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting &“the children&”). It&’s happening in our culture as AI gobbles up music, paintings, fiction and everything in between and spits out imitations that threaten to overtake the originals. And it&’s happening to many of us as individuals as we create digital doubles of ourselves, filtered and curated just so for all the other duplicates to see.    An award-winning journalist, bestselling author, public intellectual and activist, Naomi Klein writes books that orient us in our time. She has offered essential accounts of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Now, as liberal democracies teeter on the edge, Klein takes aim at absurdist authoritarianism, using a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the doubles that haunt us. Part tragicomic memoir, part chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Doppelganger invites readers on a wild ride, smashing through the mirror world, charting a path beyond despair towards true solidarity.

Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice

By Cristina Rivera Garza. 2023

Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Women biography, Death and bereavement, General non-fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille

October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old,…

unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of that quest . In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister’s history, depicting everything from Liliana’s early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before. Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence—handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones—to document her sister’s life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today.

Up Home: One Girl's Journey

By Ruth J. Simmons. 2023

Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Biography, Women biography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille

An &“extraordinary&” (The New York Times Book Review Editors&’ Choice) memoir from the daughter of sharecroppers in East Texas who became…

the first Black president of an Ivy League university—an uplifting story of girlhood and the power of family, community, and the classroom to transform one young person&’s life&“A riveting work of literature, destined to take its place in the canon of great African American autobiographies.&”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard UniversityI was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroad in North Houston County in East Texas.Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become one of America&’s preeminent educators. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas&’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.In Up Home, Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are young shape who we become. We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large family with an often empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his youngest daughter&’s dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child.From the farmland of East Texas to Houston&’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity guide her as she creates a place for herself in the world.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

By Kerry Howley. 2023

Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Science and medicine biography, Women biography, Criticism
Synthetic audio, Automated braille

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A…

VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR&“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.&” – The New York TimesA wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of ThrownWho are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.Following Winner&’s unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley&’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.

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