(Nancy Pearl)

    Based on her diary, the tale of Libby, her husband, and the powerful first officer is told in all its passion. 20 line drawings.

    Theirs is a world of red dirt and backbreaking chores and roof-raising revival meeting--a far cry from the magnolias and mint juleps of Gone with the Wind.

    It follows the adolescent plans and dreams of Li as she struggles for independence against the traditional values of her family home, marriage and the lure of the city and all it can offer.

    Later, as the terrible events of wartime Germany swirled around her, she risked death to smuggle food, medicine, and emotional support to hundreds of political prisoners, ultimately saving them from mass execution by the Nazis. Walls is her story. For her wartime work, Zassenhaus was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. Walls was named on of the 25 best books of 1974 for young adults by the American Library Association and received a Christopher Award in 1975.

    She was also pregnant. When her boyfriend’s family opposed their marrying, her parents sequestered her in a Catholic home for unwed mothers a state away, where she was isolated and where secrecy prevailed. She had only to give up her baby for her sin to be forgiven and then all would soon be forgotten she was told. The child, in turn, would be placed with a “good” family, instead of having his life ruined by the stigma of illegitimacy. Carol tried to find the strength to oppose this dogma but her shame had become too deep. “The first time I looked deep into my son’s eyes, I felt like a criminal. As I unwrapped his hospital blanket and took in the heady fragrance of a newborn, I feared the nurses or the sisters would come in and slap me for contaminating my own son.” Finding no way out, she signed the fateful papers leaving her son in the hands of strangers, but with a vow to her baby she would find him one day. For years, Carol struggled to forget and live the “normal” life promised, not understanding the consequences of the trauma she’d endured. On his eighteenth birthday, she set out to find him, although the law denied access to records. Her search became a spiritual quest to reclaim her own lost self, as she came to understand the emotional and psychological wounds she and other mothers like her had endured. Against all odds she succeeded in finding him and discovered that in many ways they had never really been apart. With her son’s encouragement and his adoptive mother’s cooperation, she tells their story.

    Packed with details of everyday life from giving birth in a Soviet hospital to living in a Moscow communal apartment. Forced to give up her American citizenship during Stalin's reign, Wettlin was coerced into becoming an informant for the KGB. She describes what Russia was like during and after World War II, her travels from the Baltic states to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Leningrad, Uzbekistan and Georgia. Her mesmerizing book offers a background for understanding Soviet events that molded the Russian mind--from revolutionary enthusiasm to a complete repudiation of communism.

    Appalled with the coruption of his daily life, Siladri decides to live the life of an ascetic with his wife and niece, but arch-witch Daya Datu and her protegee conspire to kill Siladri and kidnap his niece.

    She has a fine ear, a fine eye, and a magician's impeccable timing."—Judith Foosaner, Los Angeles Times"The day-to-day lives in The Lover of Horses are mined wth small, extraordinary moments of epiphany and unsettling insight."—Elizabeth Alexander, Washington Post Book WorldTess Gallagher's previous publications include Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, A Concert of Tenses (essays on poetry), and Moon Crossing Bridge. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she has recently completed the introduction to No Heroics, Please, the first of two volumes of The Uncollected Works of Raymond Carver, edited by William Stull.

    Distanced from her heritage, Amparo is nevertheless spellbound by the histories of her grandmother, aunt, and mother. Listening to the ancestral music, Amparo learns to hear its strains woven throughout her life.

    As she weaves together four generations of her own family's history. Kim Chernin explores, what it means to be a daughter, a mother, a writer, and a woman.

    Drawing from Scientific American's "Fact or Fiction" and "Strange But True" columns, we've selected fifty-eight of the most surprising, fascinating, useful, and just plain wacky topics confronted by our writers over the years.

    A third-generation black nationalist feminist, Pearl Cleage recognizes the pure power of telling the truth — about African-American life and about the fate of the race in racist America. This book will incite any and all thinking people to ponder, argue, rage, reflect, and maybe even riot . . . ."Uncompromising . . . Blistering." — San Francisco Chronicle

    Fisher, one of the most admired writers of our time, embraces age as St. Francis welcomed Brother Pain. With a saint to guide us, she writes in her Foreword, perhaps we can accept in a loving way "the inevitable visits of a possibly nagging harpy like Sister Age" But in the stories, it is the human strength in the unavoidable encounter with the end of life that Mrs. Fisher dramatizes so powerfully. Other themes -- the importance of witnessing death, the marvelous resilience of the old, the passing of vanity -- are all explored with insight, sympathy and, often, a sly wit.

    An enduring cultural icon, she came to symbolize a new kind of woman, one who successfully combined marriage & motherhood with a career & scholarship with a singular concern for its role in the lives of ordinary people. Even today, when memoirs of successful women scientists & scholars remain scarce, Blackberry Winter, 1st published in '72, provides a rare glimpse of a pioneering woman's formative journey. In her chapters "On Being a Granddaughter" & "The Pattern My Family Made Me," Mead examines the wisdom she gained from her maternal grandmother as well as the inheritance she recieved from her ancestors, & how her upbringing fueled her desire for a fulfilling career that would reflect her own emerging values. We are treated to captivating portraits of bohemian life in NYC in the '20s; her early days at the American Museum of Natural History, where she met her longtime mentor, Franz Boas, & friend, Ruth Benedict; & 1st field trip to study adolescent girls in Samoa. Near the book's end, in "On Being a Grandmother," she reflects on the legacy she leaves her descendants, indeed, all of humanity. This autobiography, reissued for a new generation of readers, will appeal to any eager to discover a woman of our century who made her way in a world seldom hospitable to the dreams & accomplishments of women.