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Beauty In Disarray
By Sanford Goldstein, Harumi Setouchi, Kazuji Ninomiya. 1993
Setouchi was eminently qualified to write this historical novel on women's liberation in Japan, which had its roots in sexual…
politics, socialism, and anarchism, movements in decline following the famous massacre after the GreatKanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and neighboring prefectures on September 1, 1923. Among those put to death in the frenzied and prejudicial aftermath of the quake was Noe Ito (1895-1923), the heroine of Beauty in Disarray. In addition to the life of Noe Ito, Beauty in Disarray has in-depth portraits of Raicho Hiratsuka (1886-1971), Ichiko Kamichika (1888-1981), and Sakae Osugi (1885-1923). Raicho became famous in 1908 as a result of the Baien Incident, when she supposedly planned a double love suicide with the novelist Sohei Morita (1881-1949), whose later novel Baien (Smoke, 1909) celebrates the affair. In 1911 Raicho and other young unmarried women from the upper classes founded the Seitosha (the Bluestocking Society). Seito, the society's journal, was for women only. Its first number contained Raicho's famous manifesto "In the Beginning Woman was the Sun" (Genshijosei wa taiyo de atta)The FabYOUList
By Susan Campbell Cross. 2013
There comes a time in every woman's life when she realizes that the dreams she had as a girl are…
growing farther away in the rearview mirror. What can you do to make those childhood ambitions a reality?Join author Susan Campbell Cross as she tackles that very question in The FabYOUList: List It, Live It, Love Your Life, an inspiring, humorous and heartfelt story of reinvention. Susan's declaration of, "There are so many things I thought I would have done by now!" led her to reflect upon what exactly those things were. Pen and paper in hand, she composed a "wish I had done" list and challenged herself to do everything on it before her 40th birthday. Fly on the trapeze, skinny dip, learn to surf, go church shopping, take guitar lessons, run a 5K, and get a paid acting job, were just the tip of the iceberg. Ironically, the list ended with #40, "write a book." This is that book! It's all about how in conquering numbers 1 through 39, Susan transformed her life-and how YOU can, too.The FabYOUList: List it, Live it, Love Your Life invites you along on every madcap escapade as Susan ventures outside her comfort zone and into the adventure of her life, ultimately coming face-to-face with what she discovers has been her biggest obstacle all along-herself.Lady Nijo's Own Story
By Wilfrid Whitehouse. 1974
As a historical work, the book documents the routine of long-ago court life, with its great emphasis on poetry contests,…
"football" games, drinking parties, and clothing (at the most tragic moment, Lady Nijo stops to describe what the messenger bringing word of her lover's death is wearing).Lady Nijo's story is much more than a day-to-day record of trivial events. It is the tale of a courageous woman, told with consummate skill. Scholoars agree that the newly-discovered diary is one of the masterpieces of the country's literature, a genuine autobiography that not only records the social pastimes of the aristocracy, but also gives a contemporary view of the political and economic movements of the time.The Book of Sarahs
By Catherine E. Mckinley. 2002
Suffused with longing, this rueful, passionate memoir about an adopted woman's search for her birth parents explores themes of race…
and family. Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would better understand and encompass her. In an era shaped by the rhetoric of Black Power and Black Pride, McKinley's coming of age entailed her own detailed investigation into her birth history, a search complicated by the terms of a closed adoption that denied her all knowledge of the circumstances of her birth. THE BOOK OF SARAHS traces McKinley's own time of revelations: after a five-year period marked by dead ends and disappointments, she finds her birth mother and a half-sister named Sarah, the name that was originally given to her. When she locates her birth father and meets several of his eleven other children she begins to see the whole mosaic of her parentage-African American, WASP, Jewish, Native American-and then is confronted with a final revelation that threatens to destabilize all she has uncovered. At the center of the narrative is McKinley's angry passion for her two mothers and her quest for self-acceptance in a world in which she seems to herself to be always outside the bounds of social legitimacy. In telling of her struggles both to fit into and to defy social conventions, McKinley challenges us to rethink our own preconceptions about race, identity, kinship, loyalty, and love. Catherine McKinley is the author of The Book of Sarahs and Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she has taught Creative Nonfiction, and a former Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, West Africa. She lives in New York City. "McKinley writes beautifully in this debut memoir, never resorting to sentimentality or easy emotions within this tangled web of emotional and family secrets."- Publishers Weekly"In recounting her long and arduous journey in search of her birth parents, McKinley (Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing) draws us into a page-turning treasure hunt. Along the way she skillfully describes her upbringing as a black (or so she believed) child adopted by a white family during the 1960s, her tenacious efforts to winnow information out of the bureaucratic agency that handled her adoption and her often startlingly candid reactions to each new revelation about her background. Ultimately, she discovered that her parentage includes African American, WASP, Jewish, and Native American forbears. The multiple Sarahs of the title are just another confounding bit of information in this painful, funny, and very human memoir about race and family. In the end, the treasure McKinley seems to have discovered is her own independent self. Recommended for all libraries."- Library Journal"In elegant, original prose that springs from a mind and heart at turns spirited and pensive, Catherine McKinley tells her dramatic story with defiant candor, precocious wisdom, and courageous sensitivity."- Sarah Saffian, Author of Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Bing FoundThe Baroness
By Hannah Rothschild. 2013
Beautiful, romantic and spirited, Pannonica, known as Nica, named after her father's favorite moth, was born in 1913 to extraordinary,…
eccentric privilege and a storied history. The Rothschild family had, in only five generations, risen from the ghetto in Frankfurt to stately homes in England. As a child, Nica took her daily walks, dressed in white, with her two sisters and governess around the parkland of the vast house at Tring, Hertfordshire, among kangaroos, giant tortoises, emus and zebras, all part of the exotic menagerie collected by her uncle Walter. As a debutante, she was taught to fly by a saxophonist and introduced to jazz by her brother Victor; she married Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, settled in a château in France and had five children. When World War II broke out, Nica and her five children narrowly escaped back to England, but soon after, she set out to find her husband who was fighting with the Free French Army in Africa, where she helped the war effort by being a decoder, a driver and organizing supplies and equipment. In the early 1950s Nica heard "'Round Midnight" by the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and, as if under a powerful spell, abandoned her marriage and moved to New York to find him. She devoted herself to helping Monk and other musicians: she bailed them out of jail, paid their bills, took them to the hospital, even drove them to their gigs, and her convertible Bentley could always be seen parked outside downtown clubs or up in Harlem. Charlie Parker would notoriously die in her apartment in the Stanhope Hotel. But it was Monk who was the love of her life and whom she cared for until his death in 1982. Hannah Rothschild has drawn on archival material and her own interviews in this quest to find out who her great-aunt really was and how she fit into a family that, although passionate about music and entomology, was reactionary in always favoring men over women. Part musical odyssey, part love story, The Baroness is a fascinating portrait of a modern figure ahead of her time who dared to live as she wanted, finally, at the very center of New York's jazz scene.Reading Arab Women's Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells Her Story
By Nawar Al-Hassan Golley. 2003
Authors of autobiographies are always engaged in creating a "self" to present to their readers. This process of self-creation raises…
a number of intriguing questions: why and how does anyone choose to present herself or himself in an autobiography? Do women and men represent themselves in different ways and, if so, why? How do differences in culture affect the writing of autobiography in various parts of the world?The News Sorority
By Sheila Weller. 2014
"Weller rivetingly recounts these gutsy ladies' time on the front lines... an inspiration for future generations of journalists." --Vanity Fair…
For decades, women battered the walls of the male fortress of television journalism. After fierce struggles, three women--Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour--broke into the newsroom's once impenetrable "boys' club." These extraordinary women were not simply pathbreakers, but wildly gifted journalists whose unique talents--courage and empathy, competitive drive and strategic poise--enabled them to climb to the top of the corporate ladder and transform the way Americans received their news. Drawing on exclusive interviews with their colleagues and intimates from childhood on, The News Sorority crafts a lively and exhilarating narrative that reveals the hard struggles and inner strengths that shaped these women and powered their success. Life outside the newsroom--love, loss, child rearing--would mark them all, complicating their lives even as it deepened their convictions and instincts. Life inside the newsroom would include many nervy decisions and back room power plays previously uncaptured in any media account. Taken together, Sawyer's, Couric's, and Amanpour's lives as women are here revealed not as impediments but as keys to their success. Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Diane Sawyer was a young woman steering her own unique political course in a time of societal upheaval. Her fierce intellect, almost insuperable work ethic, and sophisticated emotional intelligence would catapult Sawyer from being the first female on-air correspondent for 60 Minutes, to early on interviewing the likes of Boris Yeltsin and Michael Jackson, to presenting heartbreaking specials on child poverty in America while anchoring the network flagship ABC World News. From her first breaks as a reporter all the way through her departure in 2014, Sawyer's charisma and drive would carry her through countless personal and professional changes. Katie Couric, always conveniently underestimated because of her "girl-next-door" demeanor, brazened her way through a succession of regional TV news jobs until she finally hit it big. In 1991, Couric became the tremen-dously popular cohost of Today, where, over the next fifteen years, she transformed the "female" slot from secondary to preeminent while shouldering devastating personal loss and launching an audacious and lifesaving public health campaign. Couric's greatest triumph--and most bedeviling challenge--was inheriting the mantle of Walter Cronkite at CBS Evening News, as the first woman to solo-anchor a prestigious nighttime network news program. Through it all, her contradictions--she's wry and sarcastic yet sensitive; seriously feminist while proudly sorority-girlish--made her beyond easy typecasting, and as original as she is relatable. A glamorous, unorthodox cosmopolite--the daughter of a British Catholic mother and an Iranian Muslim father, raised in pre-revolution Iran amid royalty and educated in England--Christiane Amanpour was an elite, wily, charis¬matic convent-school girl who would never have been picked out of a lineup as a future war reporter, until her character flourished on catastrophic soil: her family's exile during the Iranian Revolution. Once she knew her calling, Amanpour shrewdly made a virtue of her outsider status, joining the fledgling CNN on the bottom rung and then becoming its "face," catalyzing its rise to global prominence. Amanpour's fearlessness in war zones, and before presidents and despots, would make her the world's witness to some of its most acute crises and television's chief advocate for international justice. Revealing the tremendous combination of ambition, empathy, and skill that empowered Sawyer, Couric, and Amanpour to reach stardom, The News Sorority is at once a detailed story of three very particular lives and a testament to the extraordinary character of women everywhere.Wondrous Beauty
By Carol Berkin. 2014
From the award-winning historian and author of Revolutionary Mothers ("Incisive, thoughtful, spiced with vivid anecdotes. Don't miss it."--Thomas Fleming) and…
Civil War Wives ("Utterly fresh . . . Sensitive, poignant, thoroughly fascinating."--Jay Winik), here is the remarkable life of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, renowned as the most beautiful woman of nineteenth-century Baltimore, whose marriage in 1803 to Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, became inextricably bound to the diplomatic and political histories of the United States, France, and England. In Wondrous Beauty, Carol Berkin tells the story of this audacious, outsized life. We see how the news of the union infuriated Napoleon and resulted in his banning the thenpregnant Betsy Bonaparte from disembarking in any European port, offering his brother the threat of remaining married to that "American girl" and forfeiting all wealth and power--or renouncing her, marrying a woman of Napoleon's choice, and reaping the benefits. Jérôme ended the marriage posthaste and was made king of Westphalia; Betsy fled to England, gave birth to her son and only child, Jérôme's namesake, and was embraced by the English press, who boasted that their nation had opened its arms to the cruelly abandoned young wife. Berkin writes that this naïve, headstrong American girl returned to Baltimore a wiser, independent woman, refusing to seek social redemption or a return to obscurity through a quiet marriage to a member of Baltimore's merchant class. Instead she was courted by many, indifferent to all, and initiated a dangerous game of politics--a battle for a pension from Napoleon--which she won: her pension from the French government arrived each month until Napoleon's exile. Using Betsy Bonaparte's extensive letters, the author makes clear that the "belle of Baltimore" disdained America's obsession with moneymaking, its growing ethos of democracy, and its rigid gender roles that confined women to the parlor and the nursery; that she sought instead a European society where women created salons devoted to intellectual life--where she was embraced by many who took into their confidence, such as Madame de Staël, Madame Récamier, the aging Marquise de Villette (goddaughter of Voltaire), among others--and where aristocracy, based on birth and breeding rather than commerce, dominated society. Wondrous Beauty is a riveting portrait of a woman torn between two worlds, unable to find peace in either--one a provincial, convention-bound new America; the other a sophisticated, extravagant Old World Europe that embraced freedoms, a Europe ultimately swallowed up by decadence and idleness. A stunning revelation of an extraordinary age.From the Hardcover edition.She Matters
By Susanna Sonnenberg. 2013
The New York Times called Susanna Sonnenberg "immensely gifted," and Vogue, "scrupulously unsentimental." Entertainment Weekly described Sonnenberg's Her Last Death…
as "a bracing memoir about growing up rich and glamorous with a savagely inappropriate mother." Now, Sonnenberg, with her unflinching eye and uncanny wisdom, has written a compulsively readable book about female friendship. T he best friend who broke up with you. The older girl at school you worshipped. The beloved college friend who changed. The friend you slept with. The friend who betrayed you. The friend you betrayed. Companions in travel, in discovery, in motherhood, in grief; the mentor, the model, the rescuer, the guide, the little sister. These have been the women in Susanna Sonnenberg's life, friends tender, dominant, and crucial after her reckless mother gave her early lessons in womanhood. Searing and superbly written, Sonnenberg's She Matters: A Life in Friendships illuminates the friendships that have influenced, nourished, inspired, and haunted her--and sometimes torn her apart. Each has its own lessons that Sonnenberg seeks to understand. Her method is investigative and ruminative; her result, fearlessly observed portraits of friendships that will inspire all readers to consider the complexities of their own relationships. This electric book is testimony to the emotional significance of the intense bonds between women, whether shattered, shaky, or unbreakable.Driving the Saudis
By Jayne Amelia Larson. 2012
After more than a decade of working in Hollywood, actress Jayne Amelia Larson found herself out of luck, out of…
work, and out of prospects. Without telling her friends or family, she took a job as a limousine driver, thinking that the work might be a good way to dig out of debt while meeting A-list celebrities and important movie moguls. When she got hired to drive for the Saudi royal family vacationing in Beverly Hills, Larson thought she'd been handed the golden ticket. She'd heard stories of the Saudis giving $20,000 tips and Rolex watches to their drivers. But when the family arrived at LAX with millions of dollars in cash--money that they planned to spend over the next couple of weeks--Larson realized that she might be in for the ride of her life. With awestruck humor and deep compassion, she describes her eye-opening adventures as the only female in a detail of over forty assigned to drive a beautiful Saudi princess, her family, and their extensive entourage. To be a good chauffeur means to be a "fly on the wall," to never speak unless spoken to, to never ask questions, to allow people to forget that you are there. The nature of the employment--Larson was on call 24 hours a day and 7 days a week--and the fact that she was the only female driver gave her an up close and personal view of one of the most closely guarded monarchies in the world, a culture of great intrigue and contradiction, and of unimaginable wealth. The Saudis traveled large: they brought furniture, Persian rugs, Limoges china, lustrous silver serving trays, and extraordinary coffees and teas from around the world. The family and their entourage stayed at several luxury hotels, occupying whole floors of each (the women housed separately from the Saudi men, whom Larson barely saw). Each day the royal women spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery and mega-shopping sprees on Rodeo Drive. Even the tea setup had its very own hotel room, while the servants were crammed together on rollaway beds in just a few small rooms down the hall. Larson witnessed plenty of drama: hundreds of hours of cosmetic surgery recovery, the purchasing of Hermès Birkin bags of every color, roiling battles among the upper-echelon entourage members all jockeying for a better position in the palace hierarchy, and the total disregard that most of the royal entourage had for their exhausted staff. But Driving the Saudis also reveals how Larson grew to understand the complicated nuances of a society whose strict customs remain intact even across continents. She saw the intimate bond that connected the royals with their servants and nannies; she befriended the young North African servant girls, who supported whole families back home by working night and day for the royals but were not permitted to hold their own passports lest they try to flee. While experiencing a life-changing "behind the veil" glimpse into Saudi culture, Larson ultimately discovers that we're all very much the same everywhere--the forces that corrupt us, make us desperate, and make us human are surprisingly universal.The Interior Castle
By Ann Hulbert. 1992
An important moment in American literary history takes life in this stunning biography of Jean Stafford, one of the most…
successful, admired--and troubled--of the brilliant and influential midcentury circle of writers and critics that included Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Peter Taylor, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell, Stafford's first husband. Ann Hulbert shows us how Stafford, raised in Colorado, the daughter of a failed writer of Westerns, came of literary age in the East, yet fiercely maintained her connection with her provincial background, forging the unique style that marked her highly acclaimed first novel, Boston Adventure; her Masterpiece, The Mountain Lion; her third novel, The Catherine Wheel; and the stories she published in The New Yorker and elsewhere, which were honored in 1970 with a Pulitzer Prize. We follow Stafford through the early experiences to which she returned again and again in her fiction, and which helped shape her disenchanted vision--her father's sudden loss of his fortune; her shame as an adolescent, living in a boardinghouse in Boulder run by her mother; her aesthetic experimentation as a member of the intellectually maverick "Barbarians" at the University of Colorado; her exciting but troubling Wanderjahr in Nazi Germany, where she watched civilization crumbling. We see her take her place as a forceful, attractive, witty, yet also insecure woman among a group of spirited young writers who were learning from and challenging their older mentors--the increasingly powerful Southern critics and the Partisan Review circle in New York. With her marriage to Lowell at twenty-four, she embarked on a feverishly creative but ill-fated coursethat held auguries of his and his fellow poets' tragic paths: she struggled with Catholicism, confronted domestic violence, battled with alcoholism and mental instability, and throughout it all wrote formally impeccable fiction. And we see her as she finds some happiness with her third husband, the writer A. J. Liebling, part of the New Yorker world that had become her home in the late 1940s. Throughout, we are made aware of Stafford's constant search for a bastion of order--a safe place, an escape from the unsettling sense of vulnerability that engulfed her, an interior castle--from which to approach her life and her art.Rejuvenate!
By Tonya Bolden, Eartha Kitt. 2001
The purr-fect guide to staying mentally and physically healthy and vital from the legendary star who defines longevity. From her…
hit songs in the 1950s and television stardom as Catwoman on Batman in the 1960s to her sold-out shows at New York's Café Carlyle in the 1990s, her Tony-nominated role on Broadway in 1999, and her hilarious performance as Yzma, the villainess in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove in 2000, Eartha Kitt is one of America's most versatile and enduring performers. Now, at seventy-four and still going strong, Kitt reveals her secrets of vitality in Rejuvenate!, an elegant and inspiring book. Seductive, provocative, amusing, and calming, she combines the lessons of her life -- from a difficult childhood in the South and in Harlem to the joys and challenges of her life in the public eye -- to offer this wise window into her incredible mental and physical vigor and an open invitation to the joys of aging in style. Rejuvenate! is a simple, user-friendly guide that doesn't require a gym, a personal trainer, or even exercise equipment. Each of the nine chapters, with titles such as "Bend," "Stretch," and "Rock-and-Roll," features one basic exercise for the body with easy-to-follow instructions and an entertaining, inspiring message for the mind.Fire in My Soul
By Coretta Scott King, Joan Steinau Lester, Eleanor Holmes Norton. 2003
Here is the remarkable story of U.S. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton -- impassioned civil rights activist, hard-driving legislator, and one…
of the most powerful women in American history. They call her the "Warrior on the Hill," acknowledging the battles she's waged as a political pioneer across more than four decades of American history. Perhaps more than anyone else, she has taken to heart Eleanor Roosevelt's famous pronouncement that "every political woman needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide." Joan Steinau Lester shared much of the last forty years with Eleanor Holmes Norton. They met in 1958 when they were both students at Antioch College. Now an acclaimed author, Lester shares her friendship with the congresswoman and tells the story of one woman's rise to leadership. Charting forty years of political and personal challenge, Fire in My Soul shows Norton marching on the Capitol to demand a Senate hearing for Anita Hill; grilling Army generals about sex abuse; arguing before the Supreme Court to uphold first amendment rights, even for a segregationist; and much more. Norton's story is organically linked to Washington, D.C., home to her family for four generations, and reveals why she is now the voice of the city. This fascinating biography, told largely in Norton's words, showcases as never before the many facets of a woman who remains an iconic torch-bearer for the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Scores of conversations with Norton and nearly a hundred interviews with colleagues, family, and friends have made Fire in My Soul a remarkable document of how one extraordinary woman helped to effect lasting change in the ways we interact across racial and gender lines.Peace Mom
By Cindy Sheehan. 2006
"Writing this book is the second most difficult thing I have ever done, next to burying Casey." On April 4,…
2004, Cindy Sheehan learned that Casey, the eldest of her four children, had been killed in Iraq, where he was serving in the United States Army. After struggling through crippling grief for three weeks, she came to an epiphany: "I will spend my life trying to make Casey's sacrifice count for peace and love, not killing and hate." Peace Mom is the heartfelt and profoundly moving story of Cindy's journey to activism. She recounts the dark days following Casey's death, when it seemed her life would never have meaning again. She tells of her June 2004 meeting with President Bush, and how that encounter ultimately set her on a path that would take her to hearings in the Capitol, test old friendships and family ties, and culminate outside Crawford, Texas, in a monthlong peace action that would draw thousands of supporters and worldwide attention. Here are the stories Cindy has never shared before about her own experiences at the center of a media firestorm, the life-altering events that were sparked by her simple act of defiance one hot August day in Texas. Going behind the headlines and sound bites, Cindy writes candidly about the toll her activism has taken on her own life and her family, as well the unforeseen rewards her quest for peace has brought. Through days of rage, despair, laughter, and tears, Cindy has found ways to celebrate the life of her son Casey and give meaning to his death. Her story points the way to a future of peace and justice for the world and for our children. Heartrending and powerful, Peace Mom is at once an honest account of one woman's triumph over loss and a clarion call to all those who wonder if they can make a difference.Bad Girls: Sirens, Jezebels, Murderesses, Thieves & Other Female Villains
By Jane Yolen, Heidi E. Y. Stemple. 2013
From Jezebel to Catherine the Great, from Cleopatra to Mae West, from Mata Hari to Bonnie Parker, strong women have…
been a problem for historians, storytellers, and readers. Strong females smack of the unfeminine. They have been called wicked, wanton, and willful. Sometimes that is a just designation, but just as often it is not. "Well-behaved women seldom make history," is the frequently quoted statement by historian and feminist Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. But what makes these misbehaving women "bad"? Are we idolizing the wicked or salvaging the strong? In BAD GIRLS, readers meet twenty-six of history's most notorious women, each with a rotten reputation. But authors Jane Yolen and Heidi Stemple remind us that there are two sides to every story. Was Delilah a harlot or hero? Was Catherine the Great a great ruler, or just plain ruthless? At the end of each chapter, Yolen and Stemple appear as themselves in comic panels as they debate each girl's badness--Heidi as the prosecution, Jane for context. This unique and sassy examination of famed, female historical figures will engage readers with its unusual presentation of the subject matter. Heidi and Jane's strong arguments for the innocence and guilt of each bad girl promotes the practice of critical thinking as well as the idea that history is subjective. Rebecca Guay's detailed illustrations provide a rich, stylized portrait of each woman, while the inclusion of comic panels will resonate with fans of graphic novels.The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
By Suze Orman, Terry Ryan. 2001
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry,…
and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Stepping back into a time when fledgling advertising agencies were active partners with consumers, and everyday people saw possibility in every coupon, Terry Ryan tells how her mother kept the family afloat by writing jingles and contest entries. Mom's winning ways defied the Church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of housewives. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay when it came to securing a happy home for her six sons and four daughters. Evelyn, who would surely be a Madison Avenue executive if she were working today, composed her jingles not in the boardroom, but at the ironing board. By entering contests wherever she found them -- TV, radio, newspapers, direct-mail ads -- Evelyn Ryan was able to win every appliance her family ever owned, not to mention cars, television sets, bicycles, watches, a jukebox, and even trips to New York, Dallas, and Switzerland. But it wasn't just the winning that was miraculous; it was the timing. If a toaster died, one was sure to arrive in the mail from a forgotten contest. Days after the bank called in the second mortgage on the house, a call came from the Dr Pepper company: Evelyn was the grand-prize winner in its national contest -- and had won enough to pay the bank. Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. From her frenetic supermarket shopping spree -- worth $3,000 today -- to her clever entries worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, the story of this irrepressible woman whose talents reached far beyond her formidable verbal skills is told in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit will triumph over the poverty of circumstance.A Traveled First Lady
By Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor, Louisa Catherine Adams. 1821
Congress adjourned on 18 May 1852 for Louisa Catherine Adams's funeral, according her an honor never before offered a first…
lady. But her life and influence merited this extraordinary tribute. She had been first the daughter-in-law and then the wife of a president. She had assisted her husband as a diplomat at three of the major capitals of Europe. She had served as a leading hostess and significant figure in Washington for three decades. And yet, a century and a half later, she is barely remembered. A Traveled First Lady: Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams" seeks to correct that oversight by sharing Adams's remarkable experiences in her own words. These excerpts from diaries and memoirs recount her early years in London and Paris (to this day she is the only foreign-born first lady), her courtship and marriage to John Quincy Adams, her time in the lavish courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg as a diplomat's wife, and her years aiding John Quincy's political career in Washington. Emotional, critical, witty, and, in the Adams tradition, always frank, her writings draw sharp portraits of people from every station, both servants and members of the imperial court, and deliver clear, well-informed opinions about the major issues of her day. Telling the story of her own life, juxtaposed with rich descriptions of European courts, Washington political maneuvers, and the continuing Adams family drama, Louisa Catherine Adams demonstrates why she was once considered one of the preeminent women of the nineteenth century.Detour
By Lizzie Simon. 2002
A finely wrought memoir of mental health, Detour takes a genre explored by Susanna Kaysen and Kay Redfield Jamison and…
propels it in a revelatory and rebellious new direction. Detour is the extraordinary first book by Lizzie Simon, a twenty-three-year-old woman with bipolar disorder. We meet her as she is set to abandon her successful career as a theatrical producer in New York City, with plans to hit the road and find other bipolars like herself -- young, ambitious, opinionated, and truth-seeking. Her goal: to speak with them candidly without judgment, fear, or the slightest trace of anything clinical or jargon-laden. She wants their stories in their words. But after falling in love with her first interviewee, a troubled millionaire, the truth and the path become increasingly difficult to find. She indeed finds inspiring bipolars. Marissa, a twenty-something African-American adoptee; Jan, a popular rock 'n' roll radio deejay and mother of two; Matt, a quiet college student from the South. Each is resilient, wise, healthy, and hopeful. Yet each harbors stories of mania and depression that defy the limits of human experience and survival. But if she's achieving what she set out to do, then why does she feel more alien and alone than ever? Part road trip, part love story, part mystery, Simon has created a heartbreaking narrative of her cross-country quest. With brave humor, Simon writes guilelessly about herself, her past, and her search for "a herd of her own." She explores that shifting gray area where illness and identity intersect and blur, with the eye of an insider and the heart and soul of a survivor. Accessible and unique, Detour not only opens an intimate window on the day-to-day condition of living with a mood disorder, it also speaks to our universally human struggle to become whole.My Name is Love
By Darlene Love, Rob Hoerburger. 1998
Featured in the film Twenty Feet From Stardom, the woman whose voice the New York Times said "is as embedded…
in the history of rock 'n' roll as Eric Clapton's guitar and Bob Dylan's lyrics" tells her story Right out of high school, Darlene Love began singing lead vocals for legendary producer Phil Spector, cutting such classic hits as the number one "He's a Rebel," "Da Doo Ron Ron," and "He's Sure the Boy I Love. " As part of the girl group the Blossoms, she held a regular spot on television's Shindig!, and with Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans she toured the country. Later, she sang backupâ#128;#148;and collected numerous scintillating backstage storiesâ#128;#148;with, among others, Dionne Warwick, the Mamas and the Papas, and Sonny and Cher. Now in My Name Is Love, Darlene is ready to tell her tales about Elvis coming on to her backstage during his famous '68 Comeback Special, about wild parties she witnessed at Tom Jones's house, and about her love affair with Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers. She also recalls how she found herself cleaning houses in Beverly Hills, heard herself on the radio, and vowed to make a comeback. That comeback has included roles in all of the Lethal Weapon movies, starring roles on Broadway, and headlining concert appearances worldwide. A dishy, behind-the-scenes showbiz memoir, My Name Is Love is also the inspiring story of a woman who refused to give up.Petal Pusher
By Laurie Lindeen. 2007
Set in the years between the meteoric launches of Madonna and Courtney Love, Petal Pusher takes readers on a stirring…
journey across rock and roll, from the big-haired 1980s to the grunge-filled 1990s, when Laurie Lindeen brought her all-girl band, Zuzu's Petals, to compete in the indie rock arena. Minneapolis in the eighties was a musical hotbed, the land of 10,000 lakes and 10,000 bands that gave birth to Prince, the Replacements, and Soul Asylum. For Laurie Lindeen it was the perfect place to launch her rock-and-roll dream. She moved to the city with her best friends Phyll ("Annie Oakley meets Patsy Cline") and Coleen ("former cheerleader gone off the arty deep end") to crash in decrepit apartments and coax punk rock from crappy used guitars. But unbeknownst to her friends, Laurie has a secret in her past -- a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis that fuels her passion to make it big on the local, national, and international rock scene. With inspiring determination, Laurie and her Zuzu's Petals survive the many challenges of being underdogs in a man's world. Then Laurie is thrown a curveball when she falls for Paul Westerberg of Replacements fame and reevaluates exactly what it means to "make it big." By turns hilarious and heartrending, Petal Pusher is a brilliant behind-the-scenes look at music on the front lines, and the awe-inspiring tale of one woman's fight against disease and the disillusionment of life in the rock underground.