Later, during three years of brutal captivity at the hands of the Japanese, they also demonstrated their ability to survive. Filled with the thoughts and impressions of the women who lived it, "every page of this history is fascinating" (The Washington Post). "We Band of Angels"In the fall of 1941, the Philippines was a gardenia-scented paradise for the American Army and Navy nurses stationed there. War was a distant rumor, life a routine of easy shifts and evenings of dinner and dancing under the stars. On December 8 all that changed, as Japanese bombs rained on American bases in Luzon, and the women's paradise became a fiery hell. Caught in the raging battle, the nurses set up field hospitals in the jungles of Bataan and the tunnels of Corregidor, where they saw the most devastating injuries of war, and suffered the terrors of shells and shrapnel.But the worst was yet to come. As Bataan and Corregidor fell, a few nurses escaped, but most were herded into internment camps enduring three years of fear and starvation. Once liberated, they returned to an America that at first celebrated them, but later refused to honor their leaders with the medals they clearly deserved. Here, in letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, is the story of what really happened during those dark days, woven together in a compelling saga of women in war.

    Enraged by injustice, they are each in touch with what is most painful about being human, bound together by their willingness to bring the unspeakable to light.

    Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered” three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son.Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.

    In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.

    There were 712 survivors of the Titanic disaster and their horrific experience has captivated readers and movie goers for almost 100 years. But what was it actually like for a woman to say goodbye to her husband? For a mother to leave her teenage sons? For the unlucky many who found themselves in the freezing Atlantic waters (a few did live to tell the tale)? TITANIC VOICES is the most comprehensive collection of Titanic survivors' accounts ever published and includes many unpublished, and long forgotten accounts, unabridged, together with an authoritative editorial commentary. It is also the first book to include substantial accounts from women survivors - most of the previously well known accounts were written by men.

    At the heart of this cultural explosion was Harlem, where everything was changing, including the influential denizens who helped define it. Among these were a little-known group of white women who for decades have been relegated to the shadows of history. In this groundbreaking cultural biography, esteemed scholar Carla Kaplan offers a captivating and full-blooded portrait of this band of independent-minded and spirited white women collectively referred to as "Miss Anne."Sexualized and sensationalized in the white press--often portrayed as monstrous or insane--Miss Anne was sometimes derided in black literature and among the Harlem community as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for "exotic" dancers and "hot" jazz, a white woman who embraced life on West 125th Street found herself ostracized. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women--many from New York's highest social echelons, many of them Jewish--who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. In this superb blend of social history and biography, illustrated with black-and-white photos and two eight-page color inserts, Kaplan illuminates the myriad faces of Miss Anne, explores her motivations, and makes clear her often misunderstood choices. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan's formidable history remaps the landscape of the 1920s and alters our perception of this historical moment.

    He survives this perilous wheel of fortune, and thrives in the face of danger! I would like to add to why my book is important, is that we are true authentic Alaskans that live life off of the grid and that we have been entrepreneurs, making our living off of the land and sea. We are wilderness and off the grid consultants if that is important. On our website we have a variety of things we consult on from sport fishing, hunting, adventures, lodges/outfitters, developing or improving remote properties, and much more.

    Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘coloured computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts, into space. Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women’s rights movement, ‘Hidden Figures’ interweaves a rich history of mankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.

    It features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. By culling the most fascinating characters — the average as well as the celebrated — Gail Collins, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes — thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate — wound up marrying their way through three or four. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, America's Women describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too. "The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders." Told chronologically through the compelling stories of individual lives that, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, America's Women is both a great read and a landmark work of history.

    . . . "For a long time, Edie thought she had escaped. It started in an Appalachian trailer park, where a young girl dreamed of becoming a doctor. But every day, Edie woke up to her reality: a poverty-stricken world where getting out seemed impossible. Where, at twelve years old, she taught herself to drive a truck so she could get her drunk daddy home from the bar. Where the grownups ate while the children went hungry. Where, when the family trailer burned down, she couldn't be caught squawlin' over losing her things--she just had to be grateful anyone had remembered to save her at all.And at the center of it all, there was her daddy. She never knew when he would show up; she learned the hard way that she couldn't count on him to protect her. But it didn't matter: All she wanted was to make him proud. Against all odds, Edie "made doctor," achieving everything that had once seemed beyond her reach. But her past caught up with her--and it would take her whole life burning down once again for Edie to be finally able to face the truth about herself, her family, and her relationship with God. Readers of The Glass Castle will treasure this refreshing and raw redemption story, a memoir for anyone who has ever hungered for home, forgiveness, and the safe embrace of a father's love.

    Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.

    Chess Bitch, written by the 2004 U.S. Woman's Chess Champion, is an eye-opening account of how today's young female chess players are successfully knocking down the doors to this traditionally male game, infiltrating the male-owned sporting subculture of international chess, and giving the phrase "play like a girl" a whole new meaning. Through interviews with and observation of the young globetrotting women chess players who challenge male domination, Chess Bitch shines a harsh light on the game's gender bias. For those who think of chess as two people sitting quietly across a table, Shahade paints a colorful world that most chess fans never knew existed.

    John Edmund Delezen felt a kinship with the people he was instructed to kill in Vietnam; they were all at the mercy of the land. His memoir begins when he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was sent to Vietnam in March of 1967. He volunteered for the Third Force Recon Company, whose job it was to locate and infiltrate enemy lines undetected and map their locations and learn details of their status. The duty was often painful both physically and mentally. He was stricken with malaria in November of 1967, wounded by a grenade in February of 1968 and hit by a bullet later that summer. He remained in Vietnam until December, 1968. Delezen writes of Vietnam as a man humbled by a mysterious country and horrified by acts of brutality. The land was his enemy as much as the Vietnamese soldiers. He vividly describes the three-canopy jungle with birds and monkeys overhead that could be heard but not seen, venomous snakes hiding in trees and relentless bugs that fed on men. He recalls stumbling onto a pit of rotting Vietnamese bodies left behind by American forces, and days when fierce hunger made a bag of plasma seem like an enticing meal. He writes of his fallen comrades and the images of war that still pervade his dreams. This book contains many photographs of American Marines and Vietnam as well as three maps.

    "Highly recommended." --trailsbib.blogspot.comFrom the book: "We stood for a moment before the venerable signpost marking the summit. Scored with graffiti and the constant onslaught of weather, it stands perhaps three feet high, a wooden A-frame painted Forest Service brown with recessed white letters: KATAHDIN 5268 ft.Northern Terminus of the Appalachian TrailBelow this were a few waypoints: Thoreau Spring, 1.0, Katahdin Stream Campground, 5.2. At the bottom of the list: Springer Mountain, Georgia, 2160.2. More than two thousand miles. It was simply a number, too large and incomprehensible to have any bearing on me. The farthest I had ever walked in a day was ten miles and that was with a daypack. Now I was contemplating a journey of months, covering thousands of miles. All of a sudden, there on the summit with the clouds screaming past us, it didn't seem like such a great idea.I turned to my sister, half-expecting to see the same doubt mirrored in her face. But her eyes were shining, and she smiled with an almost feral intensity. It was a look I would come to know all too well over the next year and a half, and it meant, I am going to do this and no one had better try to stop me. 'We're really doing this, ' she shouted over the wind's howl and the lashing rain. 'We're hiking the Appalachian Trail!'"At the ages of twenty-five and twenty-one, Lucy and Susan Letcher set out to accomplish what thousands of people attempt each year: thru-hike the entire 2,175 miles of the Appalachian Trail. The difference between them and the others? They decided to hike the trail barefoot. Quickly earning themselves the moniker of the Barefoot Sisters, the two begin their journey at Mount Katahdin and spend eight months making their way to Springer Mountain in Georgia. As they hike, they write about their adventures through the 100-mile Wilderness, the rocky terrain of Pennsylvania, and snowfall in the Great Smoky Mountains--a story filled with humor and determination. It's as close as one can get to hiking the Appalachian Trail without strapping on a pack.Listen to the Barefoot Sisters read excerpts from their book here: Southbound Podcast - part 1 and here: Southbound Podcast - part 2

    As editor Charlotte Mosley notes, not since the Brontës have the members of a single family written so much about themselves, or have been so written about. The Mitfords offers an unparalleled look at these privileged sisters: Nancy, the scalding wit who transformed her family life into bestselling novels; Pamela, who craved nothing more than a quiet country life; Diana, the fascist jailed with her husband, Oswald Mosley, during World War II; Unity, a suicide, torn by her worship of Hitler and her loyalty to home; Jessica, the runaway Communist and fighter for social change; and Deborah, the genial socialite who found herself Duchess of Devonshire. Spanning the twentieth century, the magically vivid letters of the legendary Mitford sisters constitute not just a superb social and historical chronicle; they also provide an intimate portrait of the stormy but enduring relationships between six beautiful, gifted and radically different women who wrote to one another to confide, commiserate, tease, rage and gossip -- and above all, to amuse.