Monique Dembele saved lives and dispensed hope in a place where childbirth is a life-and-death matter. This book tells of her unquenchable passion to better the lives of women and children in the face of poverty, unhappy marriages, and endless backbreaking work. Monique's buoyant humor and willingness to defy tradition were uniquely hers. In the course of this deeply personal narrative, as readers immerse themselves in the rhythms of West African village life, they come to know Monique as friend, mother, and inspired woman.

    Filled with 'the holy spirit of rock n roll' his destiny is sealed with the arrival of the Sex Pistols and punk rock which to Bobby, represents an iconoclastic vision of class rebellion and would ultimately lead to him becoming an artist initially in the Jesus and Mary Chain then in Primal Scream.Structured in four parts, Tenement Kid builds like a breakbeat crescendo to the final quarter of the book, the Summer of Love, Boys Own parties, and the fateful meeting with Andrew Weatherall in an East Sussex field. As the '80s bleed into the '90s and a new kind of electronic soul music starts to pulse through the nation's consciousness, Primal Scream become the most innovative British band of the new decade, representing a new psychedelic vanguard taking shape at Creation Records.Ending with the release of Screamadelica and the tour that followed in the autumn, Tenement Kid is a book filled with the joy and wonder of a rock n roll apostle who would radically reshape the future sounds of fin de siecle British pop. Published thirty years after the release of their masterpiece, Bobby Gillespie's memoir cuts a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house.

    They knew to keep things clean, to stay quiet, and to look the other way when things started to get ‘a bit much for your mum’.It’s only when her mother reaches her 70s, and Anna has a family of her own, that the cracks really start to appear. More manic. More irrational. More detached from the world. And when her father, the man who has calmed and cajoled her mother through her entire life is diagnosed with cancer, the whole world turns upside down.This is a story of a life lived with undiagnosed Aspergers, about the person behind the disorder, those big unspoken family truths, and what it means to care for our parents in their final years.

    Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero - the figure, often a female, who suffers pain and fright but eventually rises to vanquish the forces of oppression.

    Whether harboring a dark mood or suffering from mental illness, such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or manic depression, a select few of these women have deftly rendered the psychological turmoil that has touched their lives in writing that ranks among the most intriguing and emotionally compelling in American literature. In this anthology-the first of its kind Rebecca Shannonhouse has collected the most affecting, finely wrought essays, memoirs, and fiction by women writing on madness. Some of the selections in this volume are literary classics, such as Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and an excerpt from Sylvia Plath's The Belljar. Several selections are taken from contemporary works, including Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted and Lauren Slater's "Black Swans." Still others are published here for the first time, most notably several letters written by Zelda Fitzgerald during her stays in a mental hospital. All these works offer powerful insights into the largely private world of emotional suffering, and at the same time possess the elements of great literature. As a collection, these voices provide a diverse and remarkable chronicle of women struggling with madness.

    They were also used as guerrilla theatre. The poems in this edition address some of the history of the past 20 years and were written as the various occasions arose.

    Half a decade later, she’s still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.           The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.           Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?

    I want to describe those changes and the resistances to them through the magnifying glass of my own life, a life that coincides with our turbulent post-war history. Shirley Williams was born to politics. As well as being influenced by her mother, Vera Brittian, her father George Caitlin, a leading political scientist, encouraged his daughter to have high ambitions for herself—including daring to climb the bookshelves in his library. Elected as MP for Hitchin in 1964, she was a member of the Wilson and Callaghan governments and was also the Secretary of State for Education.  As one of the "Gang of Four," Shirley Williams famously broke away from the Labour Party to found the SDP in 1981 and later supported its merger with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats.

    Featuring rewritten fairytale heroines, goddess wisdom, and poetry that burns with revolution, this collection is an explosion of femininity, empowerment, and personal growth.

    Yearning for more tangible work, she applied for a job she saw on Craigslist—Carpenter’s Assistant: Women strongly encouraged to apply—despite being a Classics major who couldn't tell a Phillips from a flathead screwdriver. She got the job, and in Hammer Head she tells the rich and entertaining story of becoming a carpenter.Writing with infectious curiosity, MacLaughlin describes the joys and frustrations of making things by hand, reveals the challenges of working as a woman in an occupation that is 99 percent male, and explains how manual labor changed the way she sees the world. We meet her unflappable mentor, Mary, a petite but tough carpenter-sage (“Be smarter than the tools!”), as well as wild demo dudes, foul-mouthed plumbers, grizzled hardware store clerks, and the colorful clients whose homes she and Mary work in.Whisking her readers from job to job—building a wall, remodeling a kitchen, gut-renovating a house—MacLaughlin examines the history of the tools she uses and the virtues and varieties of wood. Throughout, she draws on the wisdom of Ovid, Annie Dillard, Studs Terkel, and Mary Oliver to illuminate her experience of work. And, in a deeply moving climax, MacLaughlin strikes out on her own for the first time to build bookshelves for her own father.Hammer Head is a passionate book full of sweat, swearing, bashed thumbs, and a deep sense of finding real meaning in work and life.

    Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb. Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women's achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.

    Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both were survivors of previous bad divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which-after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing-gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving into this topic completely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. Told with Gilbert's trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, Committed attempts to "turn on all the lights" when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, family tradition, social expectations, divorce risks and humbling responsibilities. Gilbert's memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.

    Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm.

    But I was getting there. I wanted the world to know that all of this pain I had been feeling…that it was related to my vagina. Thus, Vagina Problems was born. It was a cutesy name. It was my way of taking this pain and saying, “Whatever. I’m here. I have it. It sucks. Let’s talk about it.”In April 2014, Deputy Editorial Director at BuzzFeed Lara Parker opened up to the world in an article on the website: she suffers from endometriosis. And beyond that? She let the whole world know that she wasn’t having any sex, as sex was excruciatingly painful. Less than a year before, she received not only the diagnosis of endometriosis, but also a diagnosis of pelvic floor dysfunction, vulvodynia, vaginismus, and vulvar vestibulitis. Combined, these debilitating conditions have wreaked havoc on her life, causing excruciating pain throughout her body since she was fourteen years old. These are her Vagina Problems. It was five years before Lara learned what was happening to her body. Five years of doctors insisting she just had “bad period cramps,” or implying her pain was psychological. Shamed and stigmatized, Lara fought back against a medical community biased against women and discovered that the ignorance of many doctors about women’s anatomy was damaging more than just her own life. One in ten women have endometriosis and it takes an average of seven years before they receive an accurate diagnosis—or any relief from this incurable illness’ chronic pain. With candid revelations about her vaginal physical therapy, dating as a straight woman without penetrative sex, coping with painful seizures while at the office, diet and wardrobe malfunctions when your vagina hurts all the time, and the depression and anxiety of feeling unloved, Lara tackles it all in Vagina Problems: Endometriosis, Painful Sex, and Other Taboo Topics with courage, wit, love, and a determination to live her best life."

    Rousing and empowering, There Are Girls like Lions is a celebration of womanhood in all its dimensions, including love, beauty, friendship, motherhood, work, aging, and much more. Packaged in an attractive case with foil stamping and featuring striking illustrations in metallic ink throughout, this powerful collection will resonate as a gift for any modern woman.