A Brave Face: Two Cultures, Two Families, and the Iraqi Girl Who Bound Them Together


Barbara Marlowe - 2019
    This is a story of the astonishing power of self-sacrificial love.On a typical Sunday morning in 2006, Barbara Marlowe saw a photo that changed her life: a photo of four-year-old Teeba Furat Fadhil, whose face, head, and hands had been severely burned during a roadside bombing in the Diyala Province of Iraq. Teeba’s eyes captivated Barbara, and she yearned to help this child who had already endured more pain and suffering than anyone should bear.Because surgeons were fleeing the war-torn country, Teeba would be unable to receive much-needed treatments if she stayed in Iraq. With powerful faith and determination, Barbara overcame obstacle after obstacle to bring Teeba from Iraq to the United States for medical treatments.A Brave Face explores the connection forged between Barbara and Teeba’s Iraqi mother Dunia over the past decade—a deep bond between two mothers that has flourished despite the distance, the strife of war, and the horrors of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. With chapters written by Teeba, now a young woman, and Dunia, the three women recount the story of courage and sacrifice that bound them together.A Brave Face contains the messages that:Tremendous trust can cross borders and war zonesTragedies can turn into miraclesLove can be found in the most unexpected of placesIn the end, this is a story of hope. A story of building bridges. A story of the always astonishing power of self-sacrificial love.

The Girl in the Photo


Gaspar González - 2015
    troops died in Vietnam in May 1968 than during any other month of the war. Among the casualties was the author’s brother. Not yet born, the author would come to know his brother only through photos. The one with “the girl” always stood out. No one remembered the girl’s name, or knew where to find her. For more than forty years, she remained a mystery. Then the past came calling. “The Girl in the Photo” is the story of a man’s search for the brother he never knew—the truth about how his brother had lived, and how he had died—and the lessons he learned along the way: about love, loss, and coming to terms with the past. Gaspar González has written for, among others, The Miami Herald, Village Voice Media, and Grantland. His film credits include the PBS documentary Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Cover design by Evan Twohy.

Benazir Bhutto: Favored Daughter


Brooke Allen - 2016
    Born to privilege as the daughter of one of Pakistan’s great feudal families, she was groomed for a diplomatic career and was thrust into the political arena when her father, Pakistan's charismatic and controversial prime minister, was executed. She then led Pakistan, one of the most turbulent and impoverished nations in the world, through two terms as prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s, but she struggled to ward off charges of corruption and retain her tenuous hold on power and was eventually forced into exile. Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 2007, only to be assassinated in Rawalpindi after a triumphant speech.Including interviews with key figures who knew Bhutto and have never before spoken on the record, Benazir Bhutto: Favored Daughter illuminates Bhutto’s tragic life as well as the role she played as the first female prime minister of Pakistan. Celebrated literary critic Brooke Allen approaches Bhutto in a way not many have done before in this taut biography of a figure who had a profound effect on the volatile politics of the Middle East, drawing on contemporary news sources and eyewitness reports, as well as accounts from her supporters and her enemies.

Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them


Siân Evans - 2021
    It was an extraordinary undertaking made by many women, whose lives were changed forever by their journeys between the Old World and the New. Some traveled for leisure, some for work; others to reinvent themselves or find new opportunities. They were celebrities, migrants and millionaires, refugees, aristocrats and crew members whose stories have mostly remained untold—until now. Maiden Voyages is a fascinating portrait of the era, the ships themselves, and these women as they crossed the Atlantic. The ocean liner was a microcosm of contemporary society, divided by class: from the luxury of the upper deck, playground for the rich and famous, to the cramped conditions of steerage or third class travel. In first class you’ll meet A-listers like Marlene Dietrich, Wallis Simpson, and Josephine Baker; the second class carried a new generation of professional and independent women, like pioneering interior designer Sibyl Colefax. Down in steerage, you’ll follow the journey of émigré Maria Riffelmacher as she escapes poverty in Europe. Bustling between decks is a crew of female workers, including Violet “The Unsinkable Stewardess” Jessop, who survived the Titanic disaster.Entertaining and informative, Maiden Voyages captures the golden age of ocean liners through the stories of the women whose transatlantic journeys changed the shape of society on both sides of the globe.

Truth Unchanging: Hearing God Daily in the Midst of Motherhood


Becky Thompson - 2019
    Learn to hear God speaking above all the noise in these daily devotions that can be completed in five minutes or less.As moms know, even when there isn't noise around us, there is usually noise within us. The constant to-do lists that spin in our minds, the worry and wonder if we are doing a good job, and the need to stay two steps ahead of our families when we feel two steps behind keeps our minds routinely restless. So when quiet time with God isn't so quiet, and alone time is nearly nonexistent, how does a modern-day momma tune in the voice of the Lord?With Truth Unchanging, you don't have to wait until you're alone to talk with Jesus. Designed to be read in five minutes or less, each powerful, hope-filled devotion will:* refocus your heart on the Word of God * refresh your mind with God's Truth for your life * revive your spirit as you realize God is speaking to you personallyTruth Unchanging is not just a devotional. It's an opportunity to begin daily conversations with Jesus, the One who has everything we need to take on the days ahead, the One who wants to speak to you right now. Tune in to His voice today.

What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance


Carolyn Forché - 2019
    Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence


Becky Cooper - 2020
    government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.   Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.

Apple Island Wife: Slow Living In Tasmania


Fiona Stocker - 2018
    It was the lifestyle change that many dream of and most are too sensible to attempt.Wife, mother and now reluctant alpaca owner, Fiona jumped in at the deep end. Gradually Tasmania got under her skin as she learned to stack wood, round up the kids with a retired lady sheepdog, and stand on a scorpion without getting stung.This charming tale captures the tussles and euphoria of living on the land in a place of untrammelled beauty, raising your family where you want to and seeing your husband in a whole new light. Not just a memoir but an everywoman’s story, and a paean to a new, slower age

The Churchill Sisters: The Extraordinary Lives of Winston and Clementine's Daughters


Rachel Trethewey - 2021
    Rachel Trethewey's biography, The Churchill Sisters, tells their story.Bright, attractive and well-connected, in any other family the Churchill girls – Diana, Sarah, Marigold and Mary – would have shone. But they were not in another family, they were Churchills, and neither they nor anyone else could ever forget it. From their father – ‘the greatest Englishman’ – to their brother, golden boy Randolph, to their eccentric and exciting cousins, the Mitford Girls, they were surrounded by a clan of larger-than-life characters which often saw them overlooked. While Marigold died too young to achieve her potential, the other daughters lived lives full of passion, drama and tragedy.Diana, intense and diffident; Sarah, glamorous and stubborn; Mary, dependable yet determined – each so different but each imbued with a sense of responsibility toward each other and their country. Far from being cosseted debutantes, these women were eyewitnesses at some of the most important events in world history, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. Yet this is not a story set on the battlefields or in Parliament; it is an intimate saga that sheds light on the complex dynamics of family set against the backdrop of a tumultuous century.Drawing on previously unpublished family letters from the Churchill archives, The Churchill Sisters brings Winston’s daughters out of the shadows and tells their remarkable stories for the first time.

Women of Westminster: The MPs who Changed Politics


Rachel Reeves - 2019
    Her achievement was all the more remarkable given that women (and even then only some women) had only been entitled to vote for just over a year. In the past 100 years, a total of 491 women have been elected to Parliament. Yet it was not until 2016 that the total number of women ever elected surpassed the number of male MPs in a single parliament. The achievements of these political pioneers have been remarkable – Britain has now had two female Prime Ministers and women MPs have made significant strides in fighting for gender equality from the earliest suffrage campaigns to Barbara Castle's fight for equal pay to Harriet Harman's recent legislation on the gender pay gap. Yet the stories of so many women MPs have too often been overlooked in political histories. In this book, Rachel Reeves brings forgotten MPs out of the shadows and looks at the many battles fought by the Women of Westminster, from 1919 to 2019.

Cecily


Annie Garthwaite - 2021
    They can start a fire with it, or smother it in their fingertips.She chooses to start a fire.You are born high, but marry a traitor's son. You bear him twelve children, carry his cause and bury his past.You play the game, against enemies who wish you ashes. Slowly, you rise.You are Cecily.But when the King who governs you proves unfit, what then?Loyalty or treason - death may follow both. The board is set. Time to make your first move.Told through the eyes of its greatest unseen protagonist, this astonishing debut plunges you into the blood and exhilaration of the first days of the Wars of the Roses, a war as women fight it.

Little Miss Little Compton: A Memoir


Arden Myrin - 2020
    Her paternal grandparents ran off and got married twenty-four hours after they met. Arden's parents did one better -- they married on a dare. Growing up in Arden's family, her dad ate nothing but sheet cake, while her mom was busy teaching a Cub Scout troop how to put on a Broadway musical. Oh, and she grew up in a small farm town called Little Compton, Rhode Island. Human population: 3,518. Cow population: 278. General Store: One. Stop Lights: Zero. At nineteen, Arden packed her bags with stars in her eyes and landed at ImprovOlympic in Chicago, where for the first time in her life she felt like she finally made sense. After drinking in as much comedy experience (and Sea Breezes) as she could, Arden got her big break when she was cast on an NBC sitcom. She moved to Los Angeles, knowing no one, and quickly realized she had no clue how to be a fully-grown human adult on her own.How do you date someone and not ruin it? How do you interact with people if you have a teeny bit of social anxiety? How do you stand up for yourself if you're a people pleaser? And most of all, how do you start to believe that you are enough?From small town Rhode Island to accidentally kicking Courteney Cox in the face on a soundstage in Hollywood, Arden's hilarious, inspiring, and honest story shows readers how one totally unconventional upbringing might be the very thing one needs to thrive, all while showing up as your most outrageous, authentic self. Shout out to Little Compton!! Woot Woot!!!

On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist


Clarissa Ward - 2020
    . . From Russia to China to Syria, [she] navigate[s] the most intense of human experiences while finding the tools to stay emotional."--Lynsey Addario, author of It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and WarThe recipient of multiple Peabody and Murrow awards, Clarissa Ward is a world-renowned conflict reporter. In this strange age of crisis where there really is no front line, she has moved from one hot zone to the next. With multiple assignments in Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan, Ward, who speaks seven languages, has been based in Baghdad, Beirut, Beijing, and Moscow. She has seen and documented the violent remaking of the world at close range. With her deep empathy, Ward finds a way to tell the hardest stories. On All Fronts is the riveting account of Ward's singular career and of journalism in this age of extremism.Following a privileged but lonely childhood, Ward found her calling as an international war correspondent in the aftermath of 9/11. From her early days in the field, she was embedding with marines at the height of the Iraq War and was soon on assignment all over the globe. But nowhere does Ward make her mark more than in war-torn Syria, which she has covered extensively with courage and compassion. From her multiple stints entrenched with Syrian rebels to her deep investigations into the Western extremists who are drawn to ISIS, Ward has covered Bashar al-Assad's reign of terror without fear. In 2018, Ward rose to new heights at CNN and had a son. Suddenly, she was doing this hardest of jobs with a whole new perspective.On All Fronts is the unforgettable story of one extraordinary journalist--and of a changing world.

Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers


Michael G. Long - 2015
    We do not usually think of him as radical, partly because he wore colorful, soft sweaters made by his mother. Nor do we usually imagine him as a pacifist; that adjective seems way too political to describe the host of a children's program known for its focus on feelings. We have restricted Fred Rogers to the realm of entertainment, children, and feelings, and we've ripped him out of his political and religious context. Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and although he rarely shared his religious convictions on his program, he fervently believed in a God who accepts us as we are and who desires a world marked by peace and wholeness. With this progressive spirituality as his inspiration, Rogers used his children's program as a platform for sharing countercultural beliefs about caring nonviolently for one another, animals, and the earth.To critics who dared call him "namby-pamby," Rogers said, "Only people who take the time to see our work can begin to understand the depth of it." This is the invitation of Peaceful Neighbor, to see and understand Rogers's convictions and their expression through his program. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, it turns out, is far from sappy, sentimental, and shallow; it's a sharp political response to a civil and political society poised to kill.

Say Yes to What’s Next: How to Age with Elegance and Class While Never Losing Your Beauty and Sass!


Lori Allen - 2020
    But she’s also a wife, mother, grandmother, and breast cancer survivor.Whether you’re feeling invisible, disappearing into the fabric of your couch a little more every year, or simply being indecisive about what’s next, Lori offers herself as the poster child of what to do, not do, and how to see your way through the unexpected.In Say Yes to What’s Next she addresses essential issues, such as don’t let yourself go, marriage is awesome, but it’s no fairytale, keep your mouth shut and your heart open to your kids (and they’ll bring you grandkids), make time to parent your parents, maintain a close circle of girlfriends, get off the couch and live your passion, take charge of your money, and what to do when life gives you a faceplant. Say Yes to What’s Next is a life makeover and therapy session from a relatable you-can-and-you-should-do-this straight-shooter as Lori helps women shape their own futures with confidence, style, and sass.