Book picks similar to
Radicals, Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930 by Meredith Stabel
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memoirs-bios
high-pri-for-this-lifetime
not-just-womens-issues
5-Ingredient Cooking for Two: 100 Recipes Portioned for Pairs
Robin Donovan - 2020
5-Ingredient Cooking for Two simplifies small-batch cooking to its core, highlighting wholesome, healthy recipes requiring only 5 everyday ingredients--perfectly portioned for any twosome.5-Ingredient Cooking for Two gives you a rundown of streamlining your dishes with budget-savvy shopping lists and step-by-steps on meal planning. You'll find 100 deliciously easy two-person meals, from Breakfast Quesadillas to Blueberry Clafoutis, as well as 10 effortless cooking techniques designed to elevate each flavorful dish--and please more than just two palates.5-Ingredient Cooking for Two includes:Top it off--Whether you're cooking for company or whipping up a romantic meal, transform your dishes with special finishing touches like vibrant garnishes, tasty variations, and pairing tips.In a pinch--Short on time? Cooking for two is even quicker with recipes for 30-minute meals, one pan or one pot, freezer-friendly foods you can make ahead, and more.Trick or two--Cut down your cook times and costs while cooking for two with a look at the essential tools and ingredients, as well as help with making your own spice blends, buying in bulk, and minimizing food waste.Scale down your plates without sacrificing taste with 5-Ingredient Cooking for Two.
Fragile: Beauty in Chaos, Grace in Tragedy, and Hope that Lives In Between
Shannon Sovndal - 2020
He thought he was going in with his eyes wide open. Really, he had no clue. Nothing could prepare him for the harsh reality of being a compassionate human and working as an ER doctor. In his emotionally charged memoir, Sovndal examines the tenuous balance between trying to compartmentalize the trauma of tragedy while also preserving his own humanity. With candor and humility, Fragile pulls back the curtain on the ER, a place where Sovndal has learned that universal truths about the human condition can be discovered—if you pause long enough to take a breath. At turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, serious and funny, Sovndal’s memoir is about trying to reconcile the beautiful and horrific tension that makes life so fragile, and how accepting that hard truth opens us up to appreciate life’s most precious moments—which are often the ones most filled with connection, hope, and love.ABOUT THE AUTHOR:SHANNON SOVNDAL, MD, a board-certified doctor in both emergency medicine and emergency medical services (EMS), serves as a physician and medical director for multiple EMS agencies and fire departments. Dr. Sovndal has a wide range of career experience, working in tactical medicine (TEMS) with the FBI, as a team doctor for the Garmin Professional Cycling team, and as a flight physician. As the producer of the podcast Match on a Fire: Medicine and More, he is the founder of 3Hundred Training Group, which focuses on educating and training pre-hospital providers.Dr. Sovndal attended medical school at Columbia University, where he earned the prestigious Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award, and completed his residency in Emergency Medicine at Stanford University. He is also the author of Cycling Anatomy and Fitness Cycling and lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his family.
Making Peace with Change: Navigating Life's Messy Transitions with Honesty and Grace
Gina Brenna Butz - 2020
Whether it’s a good transition like a job promotion or a bad disruption like a devastating health diagnosis, it’s stressful. Gina Brenna Butz shares her personal stories of struggling with change and encourages you to trust God. She writes with compassion as she urges you to rely on God’s goodness, lean on Him for strength, rejoice that He is constant, and ultimately to find satisfaction in Him rather than in circumstances. Scripture helps you see change from the viewpoint of your heavenly Father. You can rest knowing He works all things together for the good of His children, even in seasons of stress-inducing change.
Me Time
Jessica Sanders - 2019
Me Time reframes self care, from acts of indulgence to a holistic practice of self love that nurtures both mind and body. Filled with timed self care ideas that range from one minute activities to day long adventures, this book shows you how to make time for self care. Remind yourself that you are worthy of your own care with Me Time.
Small Cures
Della Hicks-Wilson - 2020
Using the stages of pathology as an extended metaphor, this book-length poem skilfully takes the reader on a persuasively healing journey in three parts. In what reads like an effortlessly honest and lyrical conversation, Hicks-Wilson works through the complexities of pain, love, loss, self-love, acceptance, growth and repair with both sensitivity and confidence. Featuring never-before-seen poems and follower favourites, Small Cures is the transformative and soothing bite-sized prescription every person craving to fall in love after love with themselves has been waiting for.
Mafia Boss Sam Giancana: The Rise and Fall of a Chicago Mobster
Susan McNicoll - 2015
Born in 1908, in The Patch, Chicago, Giancana joined the Forty-Two gang of lawless juvenile punks in 1921 and quickly proved himself as a skilled 'wheel man' (or getaway driver), extortionist and vicious killer. Called up to the ranks of the Outfit, he reputedly held talks with the CIA about assassinating Fidel Castro, shared a girlfriend with John F. Kennedy and had friends in high places, including Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Marilyn Monroe and, some say, the Kennedys, although he fell out with them.The story of Sam Giancana will overturn many of your beliefs about America during the Kennedy era. If you want to know Giancana's role in the brother's deaths, and more of the intrigue surrounding that of Marilyn Monroe, this book will fill you in on the murky lives of many shady characters who really ruled the day, both in Chicago and elsewhere.
Coconut
Florence Olajide - 2021
Nan fosters one-year-old Florence Olajide and calls her "Ann". Florence adores her foster mother more than anything but Nan, and the children around her, all have white skin, and she can’t help but feel different. Then, four years later, after a weekend visit to her birth parents, Florence never returns to Nan. Two months after, sandwiched between her mother and father plus her three siblings, six-year-old Florence steps off a ship in Lagos to the fierce heat of the African sun.Swapping the lovely, comfortable bed in her room at Nan’s for a mat on the floor of the living room in her new home, Florence finds herself struggling to adjust. She wants to embrace her cultural heritage but doesn’t speak Yoruba and knows nothing of the customs. Clashes with her grandmother, Mama, the matriarch of the family, result in frequent beatings. Torn between her early childhood experiences and the expectations of her African culture, she begins to question who she is. Nigerian, British, both?Florence’s story is a tale of loss and loneliness, surviving poverty, maltreatment, and fighting to get an education. Most of all, it’s a moving, uplifting and inspiring account of one woman’s self-determination to discover who she is and find her way to a place she can call home. Perfect for fans of Lemn Sissay’s My Name Is Why and Tara Westover’s Educated.
The High Moments
Sara-Ella Ozbek - 2020
(counts as exercise)Move out of home TO LONDON (career??)Make more friends
Be better
New Year’s Day is the ultimate cliché for Scarlett: hangover, check feeling weepy, check broken sense of self, check check check She is in her twenties, stuck living at home in small-town Topsham with an academic mother who has no time for pep-talks or consolation. The one saving grace is that her friend, Billie, still works at the pub down the road, but even the pub is losing its appeal. Feeling desperate to do something with her life and with no real plan (but the mother of all hangovers), Scarlett picks up her stuff and moves to London. But moving isn’t a miracle cure and she ends up facing exactly the same problems she was desperate to escape. In the search for ‘her path’, Scarlett is offered an internship at a fashion agency. This might not be her dream job but her mother is disgusted. So she takes it. This is her first step to becoming something but it is also her first step to becoming someone else. Each terrible decision she makes leads to another and her life begins to spiral. But people are starting to know her; she is starting to become someone. And surely it’s better to be someone – even if it’s someone you hate? With a vein of dark humour at its core, The High Moments gives an astute, often stark, look at the fashion industry. This is a filthier, more sordid Devil Wears Prada which asks real questions about what it means to be a woman today. Fans of Fleabag and Girls will love this.
Clouds: A Memoir
Laura Sobiech - 2020
“Okay, Lord, you can have him. But if he must die, I want it to be for something big. I want someone’s life to be changed forever.” This is what Laura Sobiech prayed when she found out her seventeen-year-old son had only one year to live. With this desperate prayer, she released her son to God’s will.At that point, Zach Sobiech was just another teenager battling cancer. When his mother told him to think about writing goodbye letters to family and friends, he decided instead to write songs. One of them, “Clouds,” captured hearts and changed lives, making him an international sensation.This story is a testament to what can happen when you live as if each day might be your last. It’s a story about the human spirit. It shows how God used a dying boy from a small town in Minnesota to touch the hearts of millions—including top executives in the entertainment industry, major music artists, news anchors, talk show hosts, actors, priests and pastors, and schoolchildren across the globe. And above all, it’s an example of the amazing things that happen when someone shares the most precious thing he has—himself. “I’m not a musician; I’m just a filmmaker, and my prayer is that you get an opportunity—both through the reading of this beautiful book and the watching of our film based on it—to experience what I will fail to put into words: the magic and inspiration of Zachary David Sobiech.”—Justin Baldoni, filmmaker and director of Clouds
Cold Blooded: A chilling, true tale of terror, rape, and murder in the Arkansas River bottoms
Anita Paddock - 2019
On a cold January morning in 1981, a knock on an apartment door began what would become one of the bloodiest crime sprees in Arkansas history. In the coming days the bodies of newlyweds Larry and Jawana Price, businessman Holly Gentry, and Police Detective Ray Tate were discovered. They had been executed in cold blood and discarded like so much trash. What kind of person murders four people in cold blood? Did the right one go to prison?Praise for Anita Paddock, author of Blind Rage and Closing Time!“Paddock is a gifted storyteller, and Blind Rage is a riveting read.”– Sonny Brewer, author of The Poet of Tolstoy Park “The newest and strongest voice in true crime writing . . . makes you feel as if you are there, seeing what happened, and feeling the terror and sorrow of those felled by these brutal crimes.” – Marla Cantrell, author and Arkansas Art Council Fellow “Somehow [the author] is able to create tension and suspense even when the outcome is already known. She has a way of making each character as familiar as the guy next door, be they ordinary people or despicable creeps! Truman Capote, even though you can't roll over, maybe you should step aside because a new ‘true crime’ star is here!”– John McFerran
The Truth is a Theory
Karyn Bristol - 2019
Twenty-eight years ago, Allie’s mother disappeared; never to be heard from again. Allie survived by becoming the toast of the party—any party—and never looking back. But as a thirty-two-year-old mother of two, parties have morphed into playdates, and the closest she gets to Dom Pérignon is watered-down Mott’s. Even her once golden marriage has tarnished into a “How was your day” fly-by. When her husband storms out, Allie knows that this time, she can’t just bury her pain. This time, she needs to sift through it, knowing that the key to her future lies at rock bottom, in the truth about her mother. Allie’s story weaves through a friendship of four women, a no-holds-barred camaraderie that ferries them through the adventure of dates and deadlines, husbands and babies, and cradles them through the heartbreak of date-rape, infidelity, and alcoholism. As they each grapple with what life has thrown at them, they wrestle with the question: if you ever find the truth, does it heal you or destroy you?
The Drowned Village
Norma Curtis - 2022
He’s not ready to let go.Sixty-five years ago. Pushing aside drooping hollyhocks, Elin Jenkins tosses back her dark hair and runs up the familiar path to the tiny village of Capel Celyn, past the mossy graveyard with its crumbling stones, towards the farm that’s been in her family for generations. Laughing, Al catches her around the waist, squeezing her tight. ‘Marry me,’ he whispers. ‘I’ll use my Navy liberty leave, we’ll go ask your parents. I don’t want this to end.’ Tears prick her eyes as she smiles up at him.Three days later, Al is on his ship back to Pennsylvania. And in the months that follow, Elin’s frantic telegrams to him go unanswered. Then she receives the wedding invitation. Scribbled on the back are three words: No hard feelings.Present day. Al Locke, retired Navy Captain, smooths his silver hair and finishes up with a spritz of aftershave. With a spring in his step he hasn’t had for decades, he sets off up the well-worn track through the valley. As he rounds the last bend, his heart begins to race. He has no doubt he will meet her in the village today. He will at last hear the horrible truth of what happened to Elin after he left, and he’ll confess why he couldn’t face coming back… until now.As Al crests the final, familiar hill, a startling brightness draws him in like a vision. Before him, a glittering lake fills the entire valley. The pretty stone village of Capel Celyn, and all trace of Elin, are gone…A beautiful and heartbreaking story about lost love, forgiveness and family secrets. Fans of Fiona Valpy, Kate Morton and Kathleen McGurl will love this book.
Love Under French Skies
Gill Bryant - 2016
In a career rut, abandoned by her husband, with a daughter who has left home and a best friend who has recently re-married, life seems to be passing her by. Then a letter from a French lawyer shakes everything up: it seems she has inherited a house in France from an aunt she didn’t even know she had. Fiona recognises that this might be just what she needs and, taking voluntary redundancy from her lecturing job, packs up and goes to see the house for herself. The beautiful Lot valley and the people she meets in the village begin a much-needed healing process. Fiona falls head over heels in love with France, and with the house — not to mention two very different but equally attractive men: sensible, solid Englishman Mike and wildly impulsive Frenchman Xavier. And Aunt Bernice’s real legacy turns out to be something more deeply significant and life-changing than the house itself. But Fiona has to find out exactly what that is for herself…. Love Under French Skies is a charming contemporary romance, inspired by a real house, with a wonderful view, in the beautiful Lot region of South West France. Praise for Gill Bryant 'A charming love story' - Holly Kinsella, bestselling author of Uptown Girl In February 2015 Gill Bryant's first short story, 'The Swim', was judged runner-up in the Purbeck Literary Festival's Short Story Competition. Love Under French Skies is her first novel. Following a varied career in Adult Basic Education and community project work, Gill retired to rural Wiltshire, where she pursues her love of writing and wide interest in arts and crafts.
Defending Innocence
Peter Kirkland - 2021
Now he’s back in his hometown to hit restart and repair the relationship with his troubled son. But the past is always present in a small town.Leland returns to find his high school sweetheart hasn’t had the easiest of lives—especially now that her son faces a death sentence for murdering his father. Yet what appears to be an open and shut case is anything but. As Leland digs deeper to uncover a truth even his client is determined to keep buried, a tangled web of corruption weaves its way throughout his once tranquil hometown.Leland soon realizes it’s not just his innocent young client’s life that’s at stake—powerful forces surface to threaten the precious few loved ones he has left.