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Everything beautiful in its time: seasons of love and loss
By Jenna Bush Hager. 2020
Jenna Bush Hager, the former first daughter and granddaughter, author, and co-anchor of the Today show, shares moving, funny stories…
about her beloved grandparents and the wisdom they passed on that has shaped her lifeWhat To Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!
By Barbara Kerley, Edwin Fotheringham. 2008
A witty and stylish biography of a maverick American heroine -- the outspoken, irresistible daughter of Teddy Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt…
had a small problem. Her name was Alice. Alice Lee Roosevelt was hungry to go places, meet people, do things! Father called it running riot. Alice called it eating up the world. Whether she was entertaining important White House visitors with her pet snake or traveling the globe, Alice bucked convention and turned every new experience into an adventure! Brimming with affection and wit, this spirited biography gives readers a peek at family life inside the White House. Prose and pictures spring, gambol, and two-step across the pages to celebrate a maverick American heroine.Shirley Chisholm: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
By Shirely Chisholm. 2020
Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968 after campaigning under the slogan, "Unbought and Unbossed,"…
and her political career never swerved from that principle--she was fearless, undaunted, brilliant, and always first and foremost a servant to nobody but the people.When Shirley Chisholm announced her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major party's nomination just four years after she had become the first ever black woman in Congress. In typical fashion, she acknowledged the landmark but knew it was beside the point: "I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman and I'm equally proud of that." What she emphasized was: "I am the candidate of the people of America."Her legacy has only further demonstrated her profoundly humane politics and her undaunted and tireless work ethic. In a set of interviews that extend from the first major profile by Susan Brownmiller to her final interview documenting her life and reflecting on her legacy, Shirley Chisholm reveals her disciplined and demanding childhood, the expectations on her placed by her family and the public, her tireless advocacy for the poorest and most disadvantaged in the halls of government, and the darkening course of American history. But on her legacy, Chisholm had one priority: "I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd like to be remembered."Who Is Kamala Harris? (Who HQ NOW)
By Kirsten Anderson, Who Hq. 2021
The inspiring story of the 2020 Democratic vice presidential nominee, told in the new Who HQ NOW format for trending topics.On August…
22, 2020, Kamala Harris, a senator from California, became the first African-American and South Asian-American woman to be selected as the vice presidential running mate on a major party's ticket. While her nomination was not unexpected, her rise to national prominence was one filled with unexpected turns and obstacles. After failing her first bar exam to become a lawyer, she tried again and passed. From there, she quickly rose through the legal ranks, serving as district attorney of San Francisco, then California's attorney general, and soon, senator. As a politician, Kamala Harris has been a vocal champion of progressive reforms and women's rights. This exciting story details the defining moments of what led to her nomination and all the monumental ones since that have shaped her career and the future of America.With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism
By Laura L. Lovett. 2021
The first biography of Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a trailblazing Black feminist activist whose work made children, race, and welfare rights…
central to the women's movement.Historian Laura Lovett weaves together a biography of an activist who was intersectional to the core revealing a remarkable legacy that few have known until now and will appeal to readers interested in urban studies, activism, and Black women's history.Dorothy Pitman Hughes was a transformative community organizer in New York City in the 1970s, who shared the stage with Gloria Steinem for five years, captivating audiences around the country. After leaving rural Georgia in the 1950s, she moved to New York, determined to fight for civil rights and equality. Lovett traces Pitman Hughes' transformation into a powerhouse activist determined to take on the needs of her community and build a platform for empowerment. She created lasting change by revitalizing her West Side neighborhood, a community subjected to racial discrimination, with nonexistent childcare and sub-standard housing, in which poverty, drug use, lack of job training, and the effects of the Vietnam War were evident She imagined and then created a high quality child care center which also offered job training, adult education classes, a Youth Action corps, housing assistance and food resources. Pitman Hughes' realization that the area could be revitalized by actively engaging and including the community was prescient and is startlingly relevant. As her stature and influence grew to a national level, Pitman Hughes went from the West Side to spending several years traversing the country with Steinem and educating people about feminism, childcare, and race. Pitman Hughes's community activism was transformed when she moved to Harlem in the 1970s to counter gentrification. She bought the franchise to the Miss Greater New York City pageant in order to demonstrate that black was beautiful. She also opened an office supply store and became a powerful voice for Black women entrepreneurs and Black-owned business only to be thwarted by plans for economic development that favored national chains over local businesses. Throughout every phase of her life, Pitman Hughes' understood the transformative power of activism with the Black community.This timeless memoir documents two sisters’ bravery leading up to WWII—a singular historical account that shines a light on one…
of humanity’s darkest hours.Ida and Louise Cook are two ordinary Englishwomen, seemingly destined never to stray from their quiet London suburb and comfortable jobs—Ida as a budding romance novelist and Louise as a civil service typist. But in 1923, a chance hearing of an aria from Madame Butterfly sparked a passion for opera in the sisters that led to the formation of friendships with some of Europe’s leading singers and their network, many of them Jewish. As the Nazis rose to power, Ida and Louise began working with the opera world’s insiders to save members of the community from persecution and death. Through ingenuity, thrift and bottomless goodwill, the sisters eluded the suspicion of the Nazis and helped secure safe passage for dozens of refugees. No one would have predicted such daring lives for Ida and Louise Cook—but that underestimation is exactly how they were able to save lives.First published in 1950, Ida’s memoir of the adventures she and Louise shared remains as fresh, vital and entertaining as the woman who wrote it, and is a moving testament to the extraordinary acts of courage by two everyday heroes.My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir
By Jenn Shapland. 2020
“Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a monumental achievement." -Carmen Maria Machado While working as an intern…
in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson and a woman named Annemarie—letters are that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language—but does not see Carson as history has portrayed her. And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of Carson's life: She wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at Carson’s childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives Carson’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and Carson, she sees the way Carson’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results articulate something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories. In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of America’s most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.Brother & Sister: A Memoir
By Diane Keaton. 2020
From the beloved film star and best-selling author of Then Again--a heartfelt memoir about Diane Keaton's relationship with her younger…
brother, and a poignant exploration of the divergent paths siblings' lives can take. When they were children in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1950s, Diane Keaton and her younger brother, Randy, were best friends and companions: they shared stories at night in their bunk beds; they swam, laughed, dressed up for Halloween. Their mother captured their American-dream childhoods in her diaries, and on camera. But as they grew up, Randy became troubled, then reclusive. By the time he reached adulthood, he was divorced, an alcoholic, a man who couldn't hold on to full-time work--his life a world away from his sister's, and from the rest of their family. Now Diane is delving into the nuances of their shared, and separate, pasts to confront the difficult question of why and how Randy ended up living his life on "the other side of normal." In beautiful and fearless prose that's intertwined with photographs, journal entries, letters, and poetry--many of them Randy's own writing and art--this insightful memoir contemplates the inner workings of a family, the ties that hold it together, and the special bond between siblings even when they are pulled far apart. Here is a story about love and responsibility: about how, when we choose to reach out to the people we feel closest to--in moments of difficulty and loss--surprising things can happen. A story with universal echoes, Brother & Sister speaks across generations to families whose lives have been touched by the fragility and "otherness" of loved ones--and to brothers and sisters everywhere. A New York Times BestsellerThe Way We Weren't
By Jill Talbot. 2015
After years of futon passion, Hemingway discussions, and three-mile runs, Jill Talbot's relationship with a man carved in her doubts…
so deep she wrote to ignore them. And even though he was as unwilling to commit to a place or a job as Talbot was to marrying him, he insisted that she keep the baby when a pregnancy surprised them during their fourth year together. As it turned out, Kenny wasn't able to commit to a child either, so when the court ordered visitation and support for their four-month-old daughter, he vanished. His disappearing act was the catalyst for Talbot's own, as she moved her daughter through nine states in as many years-running from the memory of their failed relationship and the hope of an impossible reunion, all the while raising a daughter on her own. Then, one day while packing boxes, she found a photograph that changed everything.In this memoir-in-essays, Talbot attempts to set the record straight, even as she argues that our shared histories are merely competing stories we choose to tell ourselves. A bold look at the challenges of love and the struggles of a single mother in America today, The Way We Weren't tells a complex, unforgettable story of loss and leaving, and of how Talbot learned that writing can't bring anything back, but that because of it, nothing is ever really lost.Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race
By Lara Prior-Palmer. 2019
"Taking off on a horse into the Mongolian Steppe sounds like the bracing inverse to an overpopulated, busy urban life,…
but having the skills and grit to pull it off is another thing entirely. . . . Lara Prior–Palmer attempted the Mongol Derby not really knowing what she was getting into; she ended it knowing much more about herself, and a race champion besides." ―Estelle Tang, ElleAt the age of nineteen, Lara Prior–Palmer discovered a website devoted to “the world’s longest, toughest horse race”―an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty–five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her.Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that re–creates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan. Many fail to finish. Prior–Palmer had no formal training. She was driven by her own restlessness, stubbornness, and a lifelong love of horses. She raced for ten days through extreme heat and terrifying storms, catching a few hours of sleep where she could at the homes of nomadic families. Battling bouts of illness and dehydration, exhaustion and bruising falls, she decided she had nothing to lose. Each dawn she rode out again on a fresh horse, scrambling up mountains, swimming through rivers, crossing woodlands and wetlands, arid dunes and open steppe, as American television crews chased her in their jeeps.Told with terrific suspense and style, in a voice full of poetry and soul, Rough Magic captures the extraordinary story of one young woman who forged ahead, against all odds, to become the first female winner of this breathtaking race."Think the next Educated or Wild. Palmer’s memoir of beating the odds to become a horse champion is an inspiring saga of perseverance—and a classic underdog tale." —Entertainment WeeklyA Train through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined
By Elizabeth Farnsworth. 2017
"It has been a long time since I read a book so moving, plainspoken, and beautiful." —Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize…
winner and author of MoonglowHow much of our memory is constructed by imagination? And how does memory shape our lives? As a nine–year–old, Elizabeth Farnsworth struggled to understand the loss of her mother. On a cross–country trip with her father, the heartsick child searches for her mother at train stations along the way. Even more, she confronts mysteries: death, time, and a locked compartment on the train.Weaving a child’s experiences with memories from reporting in danger zones like Cambodia and Iraq, Farnsworth explores how she came to cover mass death and disaster. While she never breaks the tone of a curious investigator, she easily moves between her nine–year–old self and the experienced journalist. She openly confronts the impact of her childhood on the route her life has taken. And, as she provides one beautifully crafted depiction after another, we share her journey, coming to know the acclaimed reporter as she discovers herself.Landslide: True Stories
By Minna Zallman Proctor. 2017
Landslide is that rare book that somehow succeeds in being both knowing and open-hearted, both formally sly and emotionally direct.…
Its timeless subjectsgrief, storytelling, the giving up of childish thingsare rendered in ways that are as movingly honest as they are probing and unfamiliar. A swift, compelling read. Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone Minna Zallman Proctor's Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These €œtrue stories explore the authors complicated relationship with her motherwho was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty-seven and died fifteen years laterand the ways in which their connection was long the prime mover of Proctors life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of Proctors own lifeshifting between America and Italy (and loving €œbeing a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her €œJewish, not quite Jewish mother. Proctor has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite lifes mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. €œNot having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory, she writes. €œ[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin. The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live.Beyond the High Blue Air: A Memoir
By Lu Spinney. 2017
“Like The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Beyond the High Blue Air is a spare, sharp memoir about…
the speed with which a comfortable existence can be blighted by grief.” —Bee Wilson, The Sunday Times Lu Spinney’s memoir Beyond the High Blue Air is at once a portrait of the fearlessness of familial love and the profound dilemma posed by modern medicine. When Spinney’s twenty–nine–year–old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, “he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp,” writes his mother, “skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead . . .” He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma. Thus begins the erratic loss—Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness—that unravels over the next five years. Spinney, her husband, and three other children put their lives on hold to tend to Miles at various hospitals and finally in a care home. They hold out hope that he will be returned to them. With blunt precision, Spinney chronicles her family’s intimate experience. And yet, as personal a book as this is, it offers universal meaning, presenting an eloquent and piercing description of what it feels to witness an intimate become unfamiliar. This is a story about ambiguous loss: the disappearance of someone who is still there. Three quarters of the way through, however, Spinney’s story takes a turn. The family and, to the degree that he can communicate, Miles himself come to view ending his life as the only possible release from the prison of his body and mind. Spinney, cutting her last thread of hope, wishes for her son to die. And yet, even as she allows this difficult revelation to settle, she learns that this is not her decision to make. Because Miles is diagnosed as being in a “minimally conscious state” rather than a “persistent vegetative state,” there is no legal way to bring about his death, a bewildering paradox that Spinney navigates with compassion and wisdom. This profound book encompasses the lyrical revelations of a memoir like Jean–Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as well as the crucial medical and moral insights of a book such as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.Fighting for space: two pilots and their historic battle for female spaceflight
By Amy Shira Teitel. 2020
This is the mostly unknown tale of Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb--two accomplished aviatrixes, one generation apart, who each dreamed…
of being the first woman in space, but along the way battled their egos, their expectations, and ultimately the patriarchal society that stood between them and the starsBeauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo
By Carole Maso. 2002
"Maso's incantatory description of her conjured–up subject's embrace takes on extraordinary power . . . Like Frida Kahlo's painting—impossible to…
look away from." —Kai Maristed, Los Angeles TimesAt the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo’s life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self–portraits.A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century’s most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo’s biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo’s paintings.The Baltimore Book of the Dead
By Marion Winik. 2018
“This book is both brief and miraculous, and it will be finished before you’re ready to let it go. Like…
life.” —Ann Patchett, author of CommonwealthWhen Cheryl Strayed was asked by The Boston Globe to name a book she finds herself recommending time and again, she chose The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Now, a decade later, that beloved book has a moving companion volume. The Baltimore Book of the Dead is a new collection of portraits of the dead, weaving an unusual, richly populated memoir of compressed narratives.Approaching mourning and memory with intimacy, humor, and an eye for the idiosyncratic, the story starts in the 1960s in Marion Winik’s native New Jersey, winds through Austin, Texas, and rural Pennsylvania, and finally settles in her current home of Baltimore.Winik begins with a portrait of her mother, the Alpha, introducing locales and language around which other stories will orbit: the power of family, home, and love; the pain of loss and the tenderness of nostalgia; the backdrop of nature and public events. From there, she goes on to create a highly personal panorama of the last half century of American life.The Crying Book
By Heather Christle. 2019
This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry,…
how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review).Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.The Big Book of the Dead
By Marion Winik. 2019
Marion Wink is esteemed for bringing humor and wit to that most unavoidable of subjects: death. At last, Winik's critically…
acclaimed, cult favorites, Glen Rock Book of the Dead and Baltimore Book of the Dead, have been carefully combined in their proper chronological order, revealing more clearly than ever before the character hidden throughout these stories: Winik herself. Featuring twelve additional vignettes along with a brand–new introduction, The Big Book of the Dead continues Winik's work as an empathetic, witty chronicler of life.Romance of Elsewhere: Essays
By Lynn Freed. 2017
"A marvelous collection." —The New York Times Book Review Traversing decades and continents, The Romance of Elsewhere captures the dilemma…
of the expat with Lynn Freed’s signature honesty and humor. She takes on subjects as disparate as Disneyland, lovers, ecotourism, shopping, serious illness, and the anomaly of writers who blossom into full power only in old age. Freed's new collection further establishes her as a renowned voice in memoir and the exploration of identity. "If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed—or, at least, the resulting book would be Lynn Freed’s essay collection, The Romance of Elsewhere . . . in equal turns funny, wise, and sardonic." —Bustle