Biography & Autobiography

For half a century Sarah Josepha Hale was the most influential woman in America. As editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale was the leading cultural arbiter for the growing nation. Women (and many men) turned to her for advice on what to read, what to cook, how to behave, and—most important—what to think. Twenty years before the declaration of women’s rights in Seneca Falls, NY, Sarah Josepha Hale used her powerful pen to promote women’s right to an education, to work, and to manage their own money.

There is hardly an aspect of nineteenth-century culture in which Hale did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. She was one of the first editors to promote American authors writing on American themes. Her stamp of approval advanced the reputations of Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She wrote the first antislavery novel, compiled the first women’s history book, and penned the most recognizable verse in the English language, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Americans’ favorite holiday—Thanksgiving—wouldn’t exist without Hale. Re-imagining the New England festival as a patriotic national holiday, she conducted a decades-long campaign to make it happen. Abraham Lincoln took up her suggestion in 1863 and proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving.

Most of the women’s equity issues that Hale championed have been achieved, or nearly so. But women’s roles in the “domestic sphere” are arguably less valued today than in Hale’s era. Her beliefs about women’s obligations to family, moral leadership, and principal role in raising children continue to have relevance at a time when many American women think feminism has failed them. We could benefit from re-examining her arguments to honor women’s special roles and responsibilities.

Lady Editor re-creates the life of a major nineteenth-century woman, whose career as a writer, editor, and early feminist encompassed ideas central to American history.

“My father’s ranch is now a testament to the fact that cattlemen and coyotes can live in peace,” Ann Daum writes. But it wasn’t always so. Reared on her father’s thirty-thousand-acre ranch, Daum grew up to become a rancher herself, raising sport horses. And in The Prairie in Her Eyes, she captures the beauty, despair, rewards, and loneliness of ranching in the modern West.

Daum’s essays rise and fall with the undulations of the prairie and can pack a punch like South Dakota weather. She writes about actual artifacts buried in the prairie soil, as well as of what lies hidden in the lives of people who live there and the “white line” you can never go beneath without drawing blood. Warm memories of her girlhood on the ranch turn cold as she recalls brutalities both casual and calculated—the writhing of a captive coyote, a ranch hand’s predatory sexuality, and the horrors of a chicken research facility.

Unflinching and understated, Daum breaks the silence that for too long has marked (and marred) the lives of western women. With humor and insight, her essays touch on different aspects of rural life and convey her vision for a good life in the west.

This is the most complete and authoritative account of the childhood and tumultuous life of Jiang Qing, from her early years as an aspiring actress to her marriage and partnership with Mao Zedong, the controversial years of power after Mao's death, her final years of disgrace and imprisonment, and her suicide in 1991.

A woman's fight to reclaim her body after a paralysis-inducing cycling accident

In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.

In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation.

Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.

A candid and intimate chapter in the life of a modern woman, Yvette Eastman's vivid narrative also contributes richly to the life story of Theodore Dreiser. Dearest Wilding: A Memoir records the journey that took Yvette Szekely from an upper-middle-class scholar's home in Budapest to the intellectual and artistic centers of urban America in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1929 sixteen-year-old Yvette Szekely met Dreiser, who was fifty-eight at the time, and within a year he became her lover. Dreiser remained central to her life—as lover, father figure, and mentor—until his death in 1945. Her portrait of Dreiser, who is by no means idealized, is of a complex man—often troubled, suspicious, and jealous, but also caring and supportive.

The book is much more than an account of a sixteen-year relationship, however. It describes Eastman's attempt to understand her bond with Dreiser, forcing her back to her childhood, to memories of her distinguished but distant father who remained in Hungary, and to the early experiences that made the aging Dreiser so important to her life. In an afterword, the author thoughtfully reflects on the patterns of love and loss that form part of her past.

Dearest Wilding is a valuable primary source in literary history and among the last documents from this era. One of the most important figures in the memoir is Max Eastman, whose early relationship with Yvette Szekely resulted in marriage years later.

As perhaps the last reminiscence of Dreiser and his circle that will ever appear, Dearest Wilding: A Memoir promises rewarding reading.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

The Education of Jane Addams traces, with unprecedented care, Addams's three-decade journey from a privileged prairie girlhood through her years as the competent spinster daughter in a demanding family after her father's death to her early seasoning on the Chicago reform scene. It weaves her spiritual struggles with Christianity into her political struggles with elitism and her emotional struggles with intimacy. Finally, it reveals the logic of her journey to Chicago and makes biographical sense of the political and personal choices she made once she arrived there. The founder of Chicago's Hull-House and, later, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom is portrayed here as a complicated young woman who summoned the energy to pursue public life, the honesty to admit her own arrogance, and the imagination to see joy in collective endeavor.

"Music, I have come to realize, is for me a kind of golden thread running through my life. It has helped maintain my connection with the past that otherwise might have been severed by catastrophe and time. I am often asked—indeed, I often wonder myself—why it is that I should always have had such joie de vivre in the face of the losses and dislocations I had to endure in my early years. The answer I always gave was that the warmth and security of my early childhood had a remarkable power and influence. This is certainly true. But now I have realized that there is another part to the answer. And that is music."—from the introduction

Who among us does not have a song that triggers vivid memories—of jubilation, of belonging, of sorrow, of love? In Musically Speaking, Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, one of America's most beloved personalities, has written a warm and contemplative book about the role music has played in her life and the ineradicable traces it has left on her thoughts, emotions, her very being.

In this memoir through song, Dr. Ruth invites us to share her story from a uniquely musical perspective. By the time she was thirty, Ruth Westheimer had lived in five countries, each with a distinctive musical culture, each with a different hold on her sensibility. For the first ten years of her life, the comforting melodies of childhood helped drown out the anthems of Nazism to be heard elsewhere in her native Germany; as an adolescent refugee in Switzerland, she came to be aware that, however loudly she sang the patriotic songs of the land that gave her shelter, she could never truly be at home there.

Present at the creation of the modern state of Israel, she sang and danced to the new music of a new nation; as a young woman eagerly absorbing all that Paris had to offer in the way of romance and worldliness in the early 1950s, the songs of Edith Piaf, Mouloudji, and Yves Montand were her tutors. An almost accidental emigration to America brought new challenges and new stability, as she became a wife, mother, and professional; tremendous and unforeseen celebrity came later, and with it the giddy opportunity to indulge her love of music as never before.

Always, the classical repertoire of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms has drawn Westheimer to a German culture that has belonged—and not belonged—to her throughout her life. And always, the music of the Jewish tradition has given her strength and comfort beyond words.

Affording a view of Dr. Ruth from a rare private vantage point, Musically Speaking offers wondrous testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. This is a book full of color, verve, humor, and wisdom, unfolding gracefully through the beloved music of the Jewish holidays, the lullabies of childhood, the songs that sustained an orphan and roused the courage of a young woman, the melodies that enable a widow grieving for her husband to recall, from deep within the years of love, companionship, and happiness.

Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, forced her fellow Americans to come to terms with the full meaning of equality after the Civil War. A sometime collaborator with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, yet never fully accepted into mainstream suffragist circles, Woodhull was a flamboyant social reformer who promoted freedom, especially freedom from societal constraints over intimate relationships. This much we know from the several popular biographies of the nineteenth-century activist. But what we do not know, as Amanda Frisken reveals, is how Woodhull manipulated the emerging popular media and fluid political culture of the Reconstruction period in order to accomplish her political goals.

As an editor and public speaker, Woodhull demanded that women and men be held to the same standards in public life. Her political theatrics brought the topic of women's sexuality into the public arena, shocking critics, galvanizing supporters, and finally locking opposing camps into bitter conflict over sexuality and women's rights in marriage. A woman who surrendered her own privacy, whose life was grist for the mills of a sensation-mongering press, she made the exposure of others' secrets a powerful tool of social change. Woodhull's political ambitions became inseparable from her sexual nonconformity, yet her skill in using contemporary media kept her revolutionary ideas continually before her peers. In this way Woodhull contributed to long-term shifts in attitudes about sexuality and the slow liberation of marriage and other social institutions.

Using contemporary sources such as images from the "sporting news," Frisken takes a fresh look at the heyday of this controversial women's rights activist, discovering Woodhull's previously unrecognized importance in the turbulent climate of Radical Reconstruction and making her a useful lens through which to view the shifting sexual mores of the nineteenth century.

Traces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences

My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit.

As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to
glimpse her vibrant past.

Brings the trailblazing career of a Saskatchewan icon, Sylvia Fedoruk, to life

Award-winning author Merl Massie brings to the page the life and career of Sylvia Fedoruk (1927-2012), which encompassed some of the most ground-breaking scientific, athletic and public transformations of the twentieth century. A pioneer in leading-edge cancer research, primarily in the field of nuclear medicine, she was the first woman to join the Atomic Energy Board of Canada. Sylvia was an outstanding athlete, competing at an elite level in women’s softball and curling. Elected as the first woman chancellor of the University of Saskatchewan, she went on to be the first woman to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, coaching two premiers through potential legislative and constitutional crises. With support from the University, the provincial government and the media, she withstood a major outing controversy, revealing a particular provincial touchpoint around issues of homosexuality, artistic activism, and power dynamics in the midst of the AIDS crisis of the 1990s. Known for a warm but no-nonsense style, Sylvia Fedoruk built a legacy which drew Saskatchewan’s north into the provincial consciousness, advocated for equal education for all, pushed for support for women in science, technology, engineering, and math, and worked tirelessly as the University of Saskatchewan and the province’s most vocal cheerleader.

Brings the trailblazing career of a Saskatchewan icon, Sylvia Fedoruk, to life

Award-winning author Merl Massie brings to the page the life and career of Sylvia Fedoruk (1927-2012), which encompassed some of the most ground-breaking scientific, athletic and public transformations of the twentieth century. A pioneer in leading-edge cancer research, primarily in the field of nuclear medicine, she was the first woman to join the Atomic Energy Board of Canada. Sylvia was an outstanding athlete, competing at an elite level in women’s softball and curling. Elected as the first woman chancellor of the University of Saskatchewan, she went on to be the first woman to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, coaching two premiers through potential legislative and constitutional crises. With support from the University, the provincial government and the media, she withstood a major outing controversy, revealing a particular provincial touchpoint around issues of homosexuality, artistic activism, and power dynamics in the midst of the AIDS crisis of the 1990s. Known for a warm but no-nonsense style, Sylvia Fedoruk built a legacy which drew Saskatchewan’s north into the provincial consciousness, advocated for equal education for all, pushed for support for women in science, technology, engineering, and math, and worked tirelessly as the University of Saskatchewan and the province’s most vocal cheerleader.

Traces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences

My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit.

As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to
glimpse her vibrant past.

Marie Rose Delorme Smith was a woman of French-Métis ancestry who was born during the fur trade era and who spent her adult years as a pioneer rancher in the Pincher Creek district of southern Alberta. Sold by her mother at the age of sixteen to a robe and whiskey trader several years older than her, Marie Rose went on to raise seventeen children, establish a boarding house, take a homestead, serve as medicine woman and midwife, and to publish several articles in the early prairie ranch periodical, Canadian Cattlemen. The author relies on close readings of these articles, as well as the diaries, manuscripts, and fictional writing of Marie Rose Delorme Smith, along with personal interviews with her descendants. These sources allow a close examination of the self-identifying process for Marie Rose as she negotiated the changing environment of the western plains during the late 1800s and early 1900s when large numbers of Anglo-speaking immigrants settled in the area.

Clearly proud of her Métis identity, Marie Rose was a member of an extended family who served as Louis Riel’s soldiers, and she presented that identity tentatively in her own writings. Roles which Marie Rose assumed with pride were those of author, historian, mother, and historical character, and these roles serve as themes from which to examine her life.

A woman ahead of her time, Florence James revolutionized American theatre before finding safe haven in Canada from a fascistic strain of American politics that continues to exist to this day.

Born on the Idaho frontier, Florence James was a New York City suffragette. The first to put Jimmy Cagney on stage, she founded both the Negro Repertory Theatre and the Seattle Repertory Playhouse. She worked with Francis Farmer, Paul Robson, and Helen Hayes, but her views on art and politics and her choice of plays led to a clash with the Un-American Activities Committee. In the wake of two Kafkaesque trials, where she condemned her persecutors as liars, she fled to Canada and kick-started professional theatre in Saskatchewan, the home to North America’s first socialist government.

This new edition of Fists Upon a Star (called “sensational” by Jimmy Cagney) tells an inspiring story of one woman speaking truth to power.

In Sons and Mothers, Mennonite men write about their mothers, and speak of the often close, but sometimes troubled, relationships that exist between mothers and sons. The collection includes stories of migration and its ripple effect on the next generation, of mothers whose idealistic notions of faith cause rifts, of aging mothers who resist moves to care homes, of mothers who live their dreams vicariously through their sons.

Sons of all ages and a variety of upbringings reflect on the relationships they had with their mothers. But they also show readers who their mothers were as younger women, and who they are today.

A book that speaks to the Mennonite community but also draws on universal themes, this book is a must-read for anyone wanting to delve deeper into this fundamental relationship.

With contributions from Paul Tiessen, John Rempel, Josiah Neufeld, Nathan Klippenstein, Byron Rempel, Lukas Thiessen, Christoff Engbrecht, Howard Dyck, Andrew Martin, Lloyd Ratzlaff, Michael Goertzen, Patrick Friesen

The history of Everywoman—the Book of Genesis's famously debated character

Eve: A Biography is the history of Everywoman. Her brief adventure in the Book of Genesis is where the Western idea of woman began, and three thousand years after Eve offered Adam the forbidden fruit, everyone still knows that losing Paradise was Eve's fault.

Pamela Norris traces the evolution of Eve's bad reputation, drawing on a rich and diverse tradition of storytelling that embraces myth, folk tale and popular romance, and puts the spotlight firmly on women and their sexuality. From Dinah and Delilah, Pandora and Psyche, to the snaky Lamias and Liliths who haunted nineteenth-century painting and literature, centuries of disobedient women have been linked with Eve, the original bad girl, providing ample ammunition for male fears and fantasies. But Eve's story has also been retold by women, who have found ingenious and often subversive ways to free her from her disreputable past.

Stimulating, intriguing and wittily erudite, Eve: A Biography is the entrancing tale of a folk maiden who metamorphoses into a vamp, a mermaid, a bluestocking, a witch, a virgin trapped inside the walls of a fertile garden and finally, perhaps, into a thoroughly modern woman who chews the apple of knowledge with gusto and wouldn't dream of offering Adam a bite.

A young woman’s struggle with marriage and motherhood on some of the most remote ranches in the American West.

Jolyn Young grew up in the “real” northern California—the forgotten area at the tip-top of the state with small towns, extreme poverty, and about 40 miles to the Oregonian mountains. In a childhood defined by a subdivision, she decided she wanted to be a cowboy, and two years out of college, she saw that dream through, taking a job at a Nevada ranch in the search for a lifestyle subsisting of horses, cattle, and the wide open range.

Falling in love was never part of the plan.

Jim Young was tall, strong, and could ride a bronc and rope a steer like no one’s business. And before she knew it Jolyn found her cowboyin’ dreams overtaken by a new and intoxicating cowboy reality. With long days side by side in the saddle, nights sharing a bedroll, and the deep satisfaction that came with hard physical work in a place filled with natural beauty, it seemed life was all a strong-willed young woman might want it to be.

But when a baby-to-be suddenly spun her wild romance into a very practical marriage, and one decrepit ranch trailer home led to the next, Jolyn found her young family desperately seeking stability in what is by definition a transient lifestyle that moves with the seasons. Often hours from the nearest grocery store and half-a-day from the closest hospital, pregnancy, childbirth, and illness required a do-it-yourself mentality. With days, sometimes weeks on her own as Jim worked the farthest reaches of whatever ranchlands they currently called home—and first with one child to care for…and eventually with three—Jolyn fought profound loneliness, finding comfort in writing and company in her camera.

As the cowboy lifestyle pulled them further toward the brink of civilization and Jim’s drinking became a liability, losing him jobs and sending them packing, again, to yet another, different, distant cow camp, Jolyn struggled with the knowledge that she was choosing a life of scrubbing filthy mobile home floors and bunkhouse bathrooms in order to keep her family together. It would take leaving it, and Jim, for her to determine whether a world built on risk could coexist with the responsible mother she had needed to become.

With a memoir that is brave, honest, and heartbreakingly funny, Jolyn Young has written the story of every young adventure-seeker, every new mother, and every partner who has loved an alcoholic in a whole new light—that of a campfire, on the edge of the desert night, miles away from cell phone reception.

Adelaide Hunter Hoodless, lifelong crusader for the recognition of the domestic sciences (cooking, sewing, childcare and housework) and an early proponent of home economics in Canada, was considered one of the radical new woman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She helped turn the Canadian YWCA into a national organization. She founded the Women's Institute, assisted in the founding of the Victorian Order of Nurses and represented Canada on numerous International Councils of Women, as well as establishing the first school for the training of domestic science teachers in Canada and putting together the first Canadian domestic science textbook, popularly known as the Little Red Book.

Johanne Durocher fights to free her daughter and four grandchildren from a nightmarish life of abuse and poverty in Saudi Arabia.

In 2001, Nathalie Morin was just seventeen when she met Saeed, a Saudi man who claimed to be studying in Montreal. She fell in love with him, but soon after she gave birth to their son, Saeed was deported back to his country of origin. Struggling as a single mother and wanting Samir to know his father, Nathalie travelled to Saudi Arabia to reunite her family, confident that she would be able to return to Canada whenever she wanted. But a trap was closing around her — her partner turned out to be authoritarian and violent, the abuse continuing until their last child was born.

According to Saudi law, Nathalie was considered married and under Saeed’s legal authority. All too often she was shut away in her own house, a place of hellish poverty. In 2005, Johanne Durocher, Nathalie’s mother, began her decades-long struggle to get Nathalie back home to Canada with her four children: Samir, Abdullah, Sarah, and Fowaz. While Nathalie is allowed to return on her own, her children cannot leave because of a travel ban imposed by the Saudi government. And Nathalie will not leave without them.

Johanne’s relentless fight for her family has garnered the support of several members of the provincial and federal governments, activists, and NGOs, including Amnesty International, who considers Nathalie to be a survivor of gender-based violence.

In 1988 Penelope Williams was told she had breast cancer. And with this pronouncement she found herself flung into a different world, one with a reluctant citizenry and a frightening terrain. That Other Place is an absorbing and utterly candid account of Penny's journey in this country.

Each stage of the journey provides an illuminating view on issues such as conventional cancer treatments, research, the mythical cancer personality, cancer shibboleths and holistic mind/body medicine.

This is a story written from a cancer patient's point of view. The subject is grim, and Penny is unflinching in descrbing the reality of the pain and terror on initial diagnosis and treatment, the whole wrenching process of the change of perceptions, lifestyle and goals. The reader is taken on the roller coaster of emotions experienced in a world knocked out of focus by the blow of sudden, perhaps terminal, illness. But there is also humour — sometimes black, sometimes liberating. And there is emphasis on the bonds of support among cancer sufferers, an empathy as important to the healing process as medical treatment.

In writing That Other Place, Penny gained a measure of control over the dragon. She concludes her story with words of honesty and courage, knowing that self-proclaimed cancer survivors lose their impact as role models when they die: "It is enough to say I am here; and here is always the goal, not a milestone to somewehre else."

This book pays tribute to 14 women who donated millions of dollars to causes close to their hearts. Iris Nowell is the author of five books. Writing her 1996 book, Women Who Give Away Millions, has given her a solid foundation of philanthropy, the not-for-profit sector, and the wealthy. She has also written a memoir of Canadian artist Harold Town, and a biography of artist, filmmaker, and impassioned feminist, Joyce Wieland.

Co-winner of the Canada-Japan Literary Awards 1997

By either folly or design, Gabrielle Bauer finds herself on a plane bound for Tokyo, leaving her career, home, and husband behind.

Canada's foremost cookbook author began her career, not as a cook, but as a journalist writing for Canadian magazines. She was 60 when she turned her attention to food. Food That Really Schmecks immediately became a best-seller, and continues to sell 35 years later. It's more than a book of wonderful recipes - it also describes the Mennonite way of life. The success of that book led to two more Schmecks books and many other cookbooks. Edna has received the Order of Canada among many other awards.

Over the years, Edna developed longstanding friendships with many of Canada's greatest writers, including Margaret Laurence, W.O. Mitchell, Sheila Burnford, and Pierre Berton. In 1991 she established The Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction to recognize the first or second book of a Canadian writer.

To Experience Wonder is the first book to explore behind the scenes of this successful writer's life. At the age of 97, Edna leads an active life at her cottage on Sunfish Lake, where she writes, reads, and welcomes the many aspiring writers who come to visit.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canada's most beloved author, not only gave the world the classic novel Anne of Green Gables, but she was also a devoted minister's wife, mother, neighbour, and friend to many, who in turn were honoured to have know this great lady.

In Remembering Lucy Maud Montgomery, the writer is remembered through first-hand reminiscences of the people who knew her. Her Sunday school students, neighbours, maids, family, and friends paint a portrait of Montgomery as she has never before been seen. Not only does this book uncover fascinating sides of the author and provide fresh anecdotes, but it includes many photographs that are published for the first time.

Even Montgomery's most devoted fans will find stories to surprise, delight, and at times even shock them.

In 1933, a young Canadian woman rejected the expectations of society and her upper-class family and became a crew member aboard one of the last great four-masted sailing vessels that still plied the ocean.

It was not an easy task. Young Annette had to fight pressures from her family, rejection from schools of navigation, and doubts from ship owners. When she finally found a berth as an apprentice seaman, she faced hostility from officers and crew, who grumbled that she should be home "raising babies." In the end, however, Annette won their respect, taking in sails, standing night watches, hauling and coiling ropes all the tasks the men were doing, with no concession to a girl's lesser strength.

My Year Before the Mast tells the story of Annette Brock Davis's life on the sea as the first female crew member of a commercial sailing line. Her courage and determination to break into a closed male world are central to this book, but we cannot ignore the fact that, while this is a book about a woman's struggle, it is also a book about the sea. Davis brings to life an era long gone, and introduces an incredible cast of characters the crew, officers, and passengers, each with his own foibles, humour, generosity, and flashes of meanness. But through it all, Annette emerges as the most remarkable character of them all.

Kathleen Rice was an inspiring woman who lived ahead of her time. Born in St. Marys, Ontario, she graduated as a gold medallist in Mathematics at the University of Toronto in 1906. After a conventional beginning teaching school in Ontario and Saskatchewan, Kate broke free of the mold, searching for new frontiers as a prospector in Manitoba during the gold rush. She formed a partnership with Dick Woosey and began a life in the remote areas around Herb Lake, prospecting and trapping. After Woosey's death, Kate faced her final and most difficult challenge - living alone in the wildness of the north.

The diaries, letters, and sketches of Elizabeth Simcoe are drawn upon as sources in this portrayal of the energetic and remarkable woman who came to Upper Canada with her husband when he was appointed lieutenant governor.

This is the story of Rene M. Caisse of Bracebridge, Canada and describes her extraordinary perseverance to obtain official recognition of her herbal cancer remedy she called Essiac, her name spelled backwards. Rene Caisse was thrust into a life-long medical-legal-political controversy that still persists since her death in 1978. Rene wrestled with the Hepburn government of Ontario over the operation of her Bracebridge cancer clinic during 1935 to 1941 and her use of Essiac. She refused to reveal her secret formula and legislation demanding the recipe forced the closing of her clinic. The government was embroiled in the dilemma of ensuring their public favour and appeasing cancer patients. This documented research presents a biography of a remarkable woman and her struggle to help "suffering humanity."

100 Canadian Heroines profiles some remarkable women; from the adventurous Gudridur the Viking to murdered Mi'kmaq activist Anna Mae Aquash. You'll meet heroines in science, sport, preaching and teaching, politics, war and peace, arts and entertainment, etc.

The book is full of amazing facts and fascinating trivia about intriguing figures like mountaineer Phyllis Munday, activist Hide Shimizu, Arctic guide Tookoolito, unionist Lea Roback, sexy movie mogul Mary Pickford and singer Portia White. Great quotes and photos are featured in this inspiring collection. As we celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Persons Case on October 18, 2004, discover some of the many heroines Canada can be proud of. Find out how we're remembering them. Or not!

Short-listed for the 2002 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

So you grow up as a member of the baby boom. You're well-brought up, well-educated, and your parents have great expectations. And, yet, somehow, you just don't feel you belong.

Along the way, you find the right wrong boyfriends: the poet-husband, and bane of your mother's existence, the married Japanese doctor. When love at last arrives, and the realization that it's just not in your nature to hold down a nine-to-five, stick-with-the-program corporate job, you discover that the one thing you thought would be very easy - conception - doesn't happen. Square peg in a round hole? Absolutely. But now it's called Waltzing the Tango - the humorous memoir of Gabrielle Bauer. It's a tale most women will not only identify with, but will also laugh along with - occasionally with the painful pangs of self-recognition.

Solitary Courage is the story of a mother’s tough-love determination, her severely disabled daughter’s astonishing triumphs, and a documentary record of the political battles, organizational conflicts, and human struggles that citizens with disabilities face and fight every day of their lives.

Mona Winberg became a pioneer of independent living, and emerged a leading advocate for citizens with mental and physical disabilities. Her courageous causes erupted from her deep reservoir of compassion and concern. Her unflinching challenges to the status quo expressed both optimism and realism about life and society. Her life is testament to the power of Solitary Courage.

Between 1986 and 1999 she was the only newspaper columnist in North America regularly writing about disability issues. Through her award-winning column "Disabled Today" in Toronto’s Sunday Sun, Mona Winberg painstakingly built up a body of work of more than 600 articles chronicling front-line battles for equality. She was a realist, a wise person with a no-nonsense approach, kindly, but clear-eyed.

Solitary Courage begins with the story of Mona Winberg’s life, followed by a representative selection of 156 of her columns organized into 20 thematic chapters, the best of Mona in her own words. The last part of the book reflects upon Mona Winberg’s legacy of lessons that still connect to programs and policies touching the lives of Canadians with disabilities today.

The subjects are wide-ranging and engaging because Mona used personal examples of individuals with disabilities and news-making issues raised by their plight. She also reported on the street-level outcomes of government policies. This variety and approach to disability issues provides real education and genuine human interest, whatever a reader’s background or experience.

Neuville’s status as a woman, and an outsider, made her a particularly keen and sympathetic observer of individuals from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. She drew the earliest ethnographically correct images of indigenous Americans, together with vistas predating the works of other traveler-artists, and long-vanished buildings. Although she arrived in America as an outcast, by the end of her second residency, as the celebrated wife of the French Minister Plenipotentiary, she was interacting with political leaders and making her mark on society in Washington, DC and New York City. Artist in Exile tells her compelling story.

Mountain midwife Orlean Puckett endured many trials during her lifetime. A bride at the age of 16, she had given birth to and buried 24 babies by the time she was in her mid-thirties. When John Puckett, her husband, deserted the Civil War, Orlean was besieged by Home Guard Troops. Still, she secretly carried food to John and others who hid out near her home. Orlean became a midwife when she was 45 years of age. During the next 49 years, she successfully delivered over a thousand babies. Traveling on foot or by horse, Orlean never failed to make her way to a birthing. When ice covered the mountain paths, she hammered nails into the soles of her shoes to assure proper footing. A year after Orlean “caught” her last baby, construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway forced her from her home. Three weeks later, at the age of 95, she died. A marker honoring the life of this remarkable woman now stands at Milepost 189.9 along Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway.

Karen attended Guilford College and holds a BA in English from Salem College. During her last semester at Salem, she became a freelance writer for a local magazine. After graduation, Karen worked as a newspaper reporter, photographer, and editor. Her stories and poetry have been featured in national magazines and literary journals.

The Nazi regime opened its first concentration camps within weeks of coming to power, but with the exception of Dachau the history of these early, improvised camps and their inmates is not yet widely known. Gabriele Herz's memoir, published for the first time, is a unique record of a Jewish woman's detention in the first women's concentration camp in Moringen (housed in part of an old-established workhouse), at a time when most other inmates were communists or Jehovah's Witnesses. This original translation of her wry and perceptive memoir is accompanied by an extensive introduction that sets Herz's experience in the history both of political detention under the Nazi regime and of the German workhouse system.

Drawing on family materials, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, this book shows the impact of war on individual women caught up in diverse and often treacherous situations. It relates stories of partisans in Holland, an Italian woman carrying guns and provisions in the face of hostile soldiers, and Kikuyu women involved in the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. A woman displaced from Silesia recalls fleeing with children across war-torn Germany, and women caught up in conflicts in Burma and in Rwanda share their tales. War's aftermath can be traumatic, as shown by journalists in Libya and by a midwife on the Cambodian border who helps refugees to give birth and regain hope. Finally, British women on active service in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters also speak.

Drawing on family materials, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, this book shows the impact of war on individual women caught up in diverse and often treacherous situations. It relates stories of partisans in Holland, an Italian woman carrying guns and provisions in the face of hostile soldiers, and Kikuyu women involved in the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. A woman displaced from Silesia recalls fleeing with children across war-torn Germany, and women caught up in conflicts in Burma and in Rwanda share their tales. War's aftermath can be traumatic, as shown by journalists in Libya and by a midwife on the Cambodian border who helps refugees to give birth and regain hope. Finally, British women on active service in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters also speak.

Her joyous remembrance of her first decade on an enchanted island

And of those cherished friends who inspired her best-selling trilogy, Lighthouse, New Moon Rising, and Beloved Invader. After only a few golden hours on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, Eugenia Price longed to make it her home. Even though she loved her old town house in Chicago, and her busy writing and lecturing schedule, the shadow-streaked, light-filled place had cast its spell and would not let her go. The reader, too, will feel the Island’s magic as Genie describes her odyssey with her friend Joyce Blackburn from the urban North to Southern small-town community life and peace.

With deep affection and humor she shares her many friendships—with “the first six,” the elderly folk who gave her their love, their stories, and their memories so that she could write her novels of St. Simons; with her beloved editor, Tay Hohoff, who encouraged and goaded her; and with all the other people who helped with her writing and with the building of her Island home in the midst of the “dear dark woods.”

Although she had been uncertain at first of her welcome to St. Simons, she later experienced the rare privilege of having the Island name a day in her honor.

These intimate pages are also filled with Genie’s quiet faith in God and her eternal gratitude for His grace in sending her to St. Simons. She calls her book a memoir, but it is more than that. It is a thanksgiving celebration of life and of its surprising goodness even in the midst of sorrow and loss. So that she can exclaim to Joyce, “How could life be better than it is right now?”

Her joyous remembrance of her first decade on an enchanted island

And of those cherished friends who inspired her best-selling trilogy, Lighthouse, New Moon Rising, and Beloved Invader. After only a few golden hours on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, Eugenia Price longed to make it her home. Even though she loved her old town house in Chicago, and her busy writing and lecturing schedule, the shadow-streaked, light-filled place had cast its spell and would not let her go. The reader, too, will feel the Island’s magic as Genie describes her odyssey with her friend Joyce Blackburn from the urban North to Southern small-town community life and peace.

With deep affection and humor she shares her many friendships—with “the first six,” the elderly folk who gave her their love, their stories, and their memories so that she could write her novels of St. Simons; with her beloved editor, Tay Hohoff, who encouraged and goaded her; and with all the other people who helped with her writing and with the building of her Island home in the midst of the “dear dark woods.”

Although she had been uncertain at first of her welcome to St. Simons, she later experienced the rare privilege of having the Island name a day in her honor.

These intimate pages are also filled with Genie’s quiet faith in God and her eternal gratitude for His grace in sending her to St. Simons. She calls her book a memoir, but it is more than that. It is a thanksgiving celebration of life and of its surprising goodness even in the midst of sorrow and loss. So that she can exclaim to Joyce, “How could life be better than it is right now?”

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, has been the subject of adoring television dramas and enthusiastic biographies, but her life and work were anything but inspiring. Killer Angel is a close-up look at Sanger that brings to light much that has been ignored or suppressed in most of the films and books that are available today.

Sanger’s personal life was marked by tumult and immorality. The views underlying her formation of the American Birth Control League (renamed Planned Parenthood after World War II) were racist and White Supremacist. Her personal friend and advisor Ernst Rudin, Adolph Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization, was deeply involved in the American Birth Control League. And she hated all religion, Christianity in particular. These are just a few of the revelations to be found in this revised edition of a work that has opened many eyes to aspects of Sanger’s work that have been largely ignored until now.

The last and longest private owner of the Hope Diamond, Evalyn Walsh McLean led anything but an ordinary life. Evalyn grew up a poor girl in a rough Colorado mining town where her father discovered one of the largest gold mines in the United States. The newly wealthy family relocated to Washington, D.C., where she met and married Ned McLean, who inherited the renowned Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer. With the combined influence of the Walsh and McLean families, Evalyn developed friendships with the politically prominent in the nation’s capital and became the city’s favorite hostess. Notorious for giving magnificent parties, she counted the Tafts, the Hardings, the Coolidges, Alice Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Ethel Barrymore among her many personal friends.

The McLeans purchased the Hope Diamond when Evalyn was only twenty-four.Wagging tongues and the diamond’s supposed curse did not, however, prevent her from wearing it. She lost the diamond a few times, too, once by putting it around her Great Dane’s neck. When she left the Hope Diamond to her grandchildren in 1947, it was worth two million dollars.

Evalyn loved her diamonds, but she loved children, pets, and life more. The deep indigo stone is but a single facet of her story. Her autobiography, Father Struck It Rich, became a best-seller in the mid-thirties. Now illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, Queen of Diamonds is that autobiography with a foreword by her great-grandson and an epilogue describing the last decade of her life.

Nominated in Scotland’s National Book Awards

In this searing, frank and funny memoir, Catherine Simpson describes what it’s been like to live in her woman’s body, and to reach the realisation that all that time she’d spent trying to change her body to conform - often to unattainable standards - could be seen from a completely different perspective.

By the time she reached her fifties, Catherine Simpson and her body had gone through a lot together—from period pain and early menopause to shaming and harassment. But there had been success, joy, love, and laughter too: far more freedoms than her mother had, a fulfilling family life and career, and even the promise of further gains for her daughters.

So when a cancer diagnosis upends her life, Catherine is forced to reflect on her body, then and now. From growing up on a farm where veterinarians were more common than doctors, and where illness was “a nuisance,” she finds herself faced with the nuisance of a lifetime.

One Body is the demystifying, relatable, often hilarious and sometimes hair-raising story of how Catherine navigates her treatment and takes stock of the emotions and reflections it provokes. And how she comes to appreciate the skin she is in—to be grateful for her body and all that it does and is.

Women in Japanese Studies: Memoirs from a Trailblazing Generation brings together trailblazing women scholars from diverse disciplines in Japanese Studies to reflect on their careers and offer advice to colleagues.

Most books present research and pedagogies. We do something different: We share lives—personal stories of how women scholars earned graduate degrees and began careers bridging Japan and North America between the 1950s and 1980 and balanced professional and personal responsibilities. We challenge the common narrative that Japanese Studies was established by men who worked for the US military after World War II or were from missionary families in Japan. This is only part of the story—the field was also created by women who took advantage of postwar opportunities for studying Japan. Women of this generation were among the first scholars to use Japanese source materials in research published in English and the first foreigners to study at Japanese universities. Their careers benefitted from fellowships, educational developments, activist movements to include the study of women and Asia in university curricula, and measures to prevent gender discrimination. Yet there were instances when, due to their gender, women received smaller salaries, faced hurdles to tenure, and were excluded from, or ignored, at conferences.

Our book pioneers a genre of academic memoirs, capturing emotional and intellectual experiences omitted from institutional histories. We offer lively, engaging, thoughtful, brave, empowering stories that start larger conversations about gender and inclusion in the academy and in Japan-American educational exchange.

Against the harsh realities of the Second Congo War, Cockroaches, God, Death, and Mangoes reveals an extraordinary tale of survival and resilience. 

When six-year-old Bikonzi and his family are torn from their home and thrust into the horrors of a concentration camp, they must navigate a world where hope is scarce and survival comes at a steep cost. As Bikonzi grapples with the absence of God and the omnipresence of Death, his family makes a pact to endure—no matter the compromises and sacrifices required. 

In this gripping true story, the Moise family’s journey reveals the unyielding human spirit’s ability to find light even in the darkest of times.

En 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, un tapicero judío de Viena, fue capturado por los nazis. Junto a Fritz, su hijo adolescente, fueron mandados al campo de Buchenwald, en Alemania.

Empieza así una desgarradora historia en la que sus protagonistas serán víctimas del hambre y de las palizas, mientras participan como mano de obra en la construcción del mismo campo de concentración en el que permanecerán cautivos. Cuando Gustav reciba la noticia de su traslado a Auschwitz, una segura sentencia de muerte, su hijo Fritz hará todo lo posible por no separarse de su padre y seguirlo hasta Polonia. Ante el horror cotidiano del que serán testigos, solo una fuerza les mantendrá con vida: el amor entre un padre y su hijo.

Basado en el diario secreto que Gustav escribió durante los seis años de cautiverio, así como en entrevistas con miembros de la familia y supervivientes, este libro emerge como un extraordinario relato de coraje, lealtad y supervivencia.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer from Vienna, was captured by the Nazis. Together with Fritz, his teenage son, they were sent to Buchenwald camp in Germany.

Thus begins a heartbreaking story in which the protagonists will be victims of hunger and beatings while they participate as labor in the construction of the very concentration camp where they will remain captive. When Gustav receives the news of his transfer to Auschwitz, a sure death sentence, his son Fritz will do everything possible to not be separated from his father and follow him to Poland. In the face of the daily horror they will witness, only one force will keep them alive: the love between a father and his son.

Based on the secret diary that Gustav wrote during his six years of captivity, as well as interviews with family members and survivors, this book emerges as an extraordinary tale of courage, loyalty, and survival.

Un testimonio sobrecogedor sobre el horror nazi, la superación y expiación, de la mano de uno de los mayores expertos en psiquiatría del mundo.

“Algo terrible está sucediendo: el pasado está haciendo erupción; mis dos vidas, día y noche, se están uniendo. Necesito hablar."

Un viejo amigo de la facultad de medicina de Irvin Yalom le está pidiendo ayuda imperiosamente. En sus cincuenta años de amistad, Bob Berger nunca había compartido sus terrores nocturnos con su íntimo amigo. Sin embargo, ahora, se ve obligado a hacerlo: único superviviente de una familia húngara de origen judío, a los diecisiete años Berger logró escapar de los nazis y se exilió en Estados Unidos donde, con el tiempo, se convirtió en un cardiocirujano de prestigio. Desde entonces su vida se desarrolló en dos planos: uno diurno, como reconocido profesional y padre de familia, y otro nocturno, en el que fragmentos de aquel terrible pasado se estaban colando en sus sueños. En cinco décadas, jamás había confesado a nadie la oscuridad que lo atormentaba. Ahora, sin embargo, se ve obligado a compartir con él ese gran secreto. Tras una vida definida por la expiación y la represión, un peligroso encuentro ha desencadenado el doloroso recuerdo de aquellos años. Para sanar, Yalom y Berger deberán interpretar los fragmentos del pasado y lograr que el presente vuelva a ser una realidad.

Éste es un magnífico relato sobre el silencio, la represión y la memoria, así como un poderoso ejemplo de cómo la amistad puede llegar a curarnos.

Irvin Yalom, uno de los mayores expertos en la mente humana comparte en esta fascinante obra una historia maravillosa de superación y valentía.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A harrowing testimony about the Nazi horror, overcoming, and atonement, by one of the world's leading experts in psychiatry.

“Something terrible is happening: the past is erupting; my two lives, day and night, are coming together. I need to talk.”

An old friend from Irvin Yalom's medical school days is urgently asking for his help. In their fifty years of friendship, Bob Berger had never shared his night terrors with his close friend. However, now he feels compelled to do so: the only survivor of a Hungarian family of Jewish origin, Berger managed to escape the Nazis at seventeen and exiled to the United States, where he eventually became a prestigious cardiothoracic surgeon. Since then, his life has unfolded on two levels: one by day, as a recognized professional and family man, and another by night, where fragments of that terrible past have been seeping into his dreams. For five decades, he had never confessed the darkness that tormented him to anyone. Now, however, he is compelled to share this great secret with Yalom. After a life defined by atonement and repression, a dangerous encounter has triggered the painful memory of those years. To heal, Yalom and Berger must interpret the fragments of the past and make the present a reality again.

This is a magnificent story about silence, repression, and memory, as well as a powerful example of how friendship can heal us.

Irvin Yalom, one of the greatest experts in the human mind, shares in this fascinating work a wonderful story of overcoming and bravery.

The biography of motor racing mechanic Tony Robinson, who worked with some of the great names of the sport in the 1950s and '60s. Tony started as one of the mechanics for Stirling Moss in 1954: the year of Stirling's first serious assault on the world championship. After a semi-nomadic period touring Europe with privateer Bruce Halford, who also raced a Maserati 250F, Tony joined the British Racing Partnership – a Formula One and Two team part-owned by (Sir) Stirling's father, Alfred. Stirling was driving a BRP-entered Lotus on the day of the accident that effectively ended his racing career.
At BRP, Tony responded to the Lotus 25 by building what was the first monocoque F1 car following Colin Chapman's groundbreaker. He also designed a car for Indianapolis, before going on to work for Cooper. During his time in motor racing, Tony rubbed shoulders with such great names as Juan Manual Fangio and Mike Hawthorn; Stuart Lewis-Evans – whose manager was Bernie Ecclestone – was one of Tony's drivers, and McLaren's Ron Dennis worked for him during his time at Cooper.
This is the fascinating story of one of motorsport's most enduring characters.

The autobiography of Ted Macauley, award-winning newspaper reporter, columnist, and sports journalist. A story filled with the excitement of the sports that he covered, tales of enviable assignments, and featuring a host of celebrity friends and sporting superstars, including Mike Hailwood, George Best, Barry Sheene, and many more.
After spending a lifetime writing about the careers and achievements of others, Ted Macauley has now turned the focus on his own life, and the glamorous lifestyle he enjoyed as he travelled to exotic locations, and rubbed shoulders with sporting heroes and Hollywood stars alike.
With many original photos from Ted’s private collection to accompany the text, this autobiography is a fascinating glimpse into the life of a top sports journalist.

When the Philadelphia Phillies signed Dick Allen in 1960, fans of the franchise envisioned bearing witness to feats never before accomplished by a Phillies player. A half-century later, they're still trying to make sense of what they saw.

Carrying to the plate baseball's heaviest and loudest bat as well as the burden of being the club's first African American superstar, Allen found both hits and controversy with ease and regularity as he established himself as the premier individualist in a game that prided itself on conformity. As one of his managers observed, "I believe God Almighty hisself would have trouble handling Richie Allen." A brutal pregame fight with teammate Frank Thomas, a dogged determination to be compensated on par with the game's elite, an insistence on living life on his own terms and not management's: what did it all mean? Journalists and fans alike took sides with ferocity, and they take sides still.

Despite talent that earned him Rookie of the Year and MVP honors as well as a reputation as one of his era's most feared power hitters, many remember Allen as one of the game's most destructive and divisive forces, while supporters insist that he is the best player not in the Hall of Fame. God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen explains why.

Mitchell Nathanson presents Allen's life against the backdrop of organized baseball's continuing desegregation process. Drawing out the larger generational and business shifts in the game, he shows how Allen's career exposed not only the racial double standard that had become entrenched in the wake of the game's integration a generation earlier but also the forces that were bent on preserving the status quo. In the process, God Almighty Hisself unveils the strange and maddening career of a man who somehow managed to fulfill and frustrate expectations all at once.

One of the most decorated and celebrated women’s basketball players of all time breaks down her ultimate recipe to success, using her own deeply inspiring journey to teach readers how to live bravely, unapologetically, and with purpose.

“Candace Parker has been a trailblazer on and off the court, inspiring us all with her resilience, authenticity, and purpose-driven life. We are thrilled to work with Candace and present her extraordinary book to readers from all walks of life. The Can-Do Mindset delivers a playbook for how we can all achieve greatness on our own terms.” —John Legend, Mike Jackson, and Ty Stiklorius, Get Lifted Books

Candace Parker is a living legend. Her storied career includes three WNBA titles, two Olympic gold medals, and countless MVP Awards. Her career accolades are endless and her impact on the WNBA beyond measure, but Candace is even more inspiring off the court. A proud wife and mother of three, whose love story resonated with the LGBTQ+ community around the world, Candace is fiercely purpose-driven, paving the way for the WNBA’s rise in American culture, and for female basketballers to have the impact and platform that used to be reserved for the NBA. But this success didn’t happen by accident. From the start, Candace turned her childhood nickname, Can-Do, into a daily mantra that helped her overcome enormous physical and mental hurdles while embracing her vulnerability. In her first-ever book, Candace breaks down that ultimate recipe for success, drawn from the experiences that made her a better person and player. CAN-DO becomes an acronym to live by:

Learn from and lean on your Community
Show up as Authentically you
Realize that Negativity is a part of life
Embrace the excitement of the everyday Dash
And fight for Opportunity for yourself and others.

It’s how Candace has succeeded on the court and off, and it can help readers do so, too. Told through personal stories, The Can-Do Mindset is for Candace’s countless fans who want to see behind the curtain of her meteoric career and life, and for all of us who could learn from an icon who lives bravely, unapologetically, and guided by purpose.

Paul Bear Bryant, the legendary Head Football Coach at the University of Alabama
from 1958-1982 continues to inspire athletes and fans. Books have been
written about Bryant for the last 30 years examining this coaching legend,
but never has he been examined under the microscope of leadership.Leadership
expert Pat Williams has teamed up with University of Alabama athletics
executive Tommy Ford to bring to light what made Coach Bryant so successful
and how you can incorporate his leadership principles into your own
life.Williams and Ford have interviewed over 200 former players, coaches and
members of the media that knew Bryant well. The book uncovers never before
revealed leadership insights from Bryants leadership and coaching genius.
This 200 page book is packed with riveting stories and illustrations that
will appeal to leaders at all levels of society.Football fans will love it
and individuals with any leadership role will benefit immeasurably.

Marta dreamed of an extraordinary life: she wanted to conquer the world, she wanted to write. But the Second World War and Holocaust destroyed everything. Marta's Notebooks tells the story of the one thing Marta wrote, decades after the war, when she was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and suffering from deep depression. A close relationship developed between Marta and her psychiatrist, leading her to write her story: her poignant memoir, an intimate and historical document, is a testimony to a woman’s life and a place that was destroyed.

Marta’s Notebooks brings together three components: an authentic memoir written by Marta Wollner, a Holocaust survivor; a literary, fictive biography based on this diary; and an auto-fiction novella, the confession of her daughter reflecting on the profound impact of her mother’s trauma on her own life. Providing a unique approach to telling a survival story, Marta's Notebooks is a testament to the complex wounds trauma leaves behind.

Marta dreamed of an extraordinary life: she wanted to conquer the world, she wanted to write. But the Second World War and Holocaust destroyed everything. Marta's Notebooks tells the story of the one thing Marta wrote, decades after the war, when she was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and suffering from deep depression. A close relationship developed between Marta and her psychiatrist, leading her to write her story: her poignant memoir, an intimate and historical document, is a testimony to a woman’s life and a place that was destroyed.

Marta’s Notebooks brings together three components: an authentic memoir written by Marta Wollner, a Holocaust survivor; a literary, fictive biography based on this diary; and an auto-fiction novella, the confession of her daughter reflecting on the profound impact of her mother’s trauma on her own life. Providing a unique approach to telling a survival story, Marta's Notebooks is a testament to the complex wounds trauma leaves behind.

An extraordinary Holocaust survival story about an Orthodox Jewish woman who managed to survive in wartime Poland by pretending to be a Catholic.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

When Dutch journalist Pieter van Os stumbled upon Mala’s story, he set out to revive the world through which she had made her way from war-ravaged middle Europe to the nascent state of Israel before finally settling in the Netherlands. With her memoir and their interviews as guide, van Os physically retraced Mala’s steps, stopping in at local archives and remote villages, searching for anyone who might have known or helped her seventy-five years before.

At times reading like an erudite detective story, this poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the “other”, and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.

La película de Netflix La sociedad de la nieve, fue nominada a los premios Oscar 2024 por España.

Se cumplen cincuenta años de una de las historias más increíbles jamás contadas. Si fuera ficción resultaría inverosímil, pero es y fue verdad.

En La sociedad de la nieve, publicada originalmente en 2008, todos los sobrevivientes hablaron por vez primera desde que el 13 de octubre de 1972 un avión de la Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya se estrellara en la cordillera de los Andes. Iban a bordo cuarenta y cinco personas, dieciséis de las cuales fallecieron en el acto o pocas horas después. Con alrededor de veinte años, a cuatro mil metros de altura y treinta grados bajo cero, sin abrigo ni comida, la relación entre víctimas y sobrevivientes se invirtió y solo regresaron con vida dieciséis. En esta nueva edición especial por el aniversario del accidente, los sobrevivientes narran no solo lo que sucedió sino, fundamentalmente, lo que «nos pasó».

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Fifty years after the Andean tragedy, sixteen survivors tell the story of how they overcame the insurmountable trauma.

On October 13, 1972 an Uruguayan Air Force plane crashed in the Andes. Forty-five people were on board. Many died on impact, or in the hours following the crash. At over 4,000 feet above sea level, under temperatures of –22°F, and without shelter or food, the line separating victims and survivors was increasingly blurry. Only sixteen of them would make it out alive.

Pablo Vierci—a close acquaintance of many of those onboard—tells us about the survivors and the victims: where they came from, what they were doing preceding the crash, their experience in the mountains, including the decision to commit cannibalism, the expedition that found them, the days following their rescue, and the life after the tragedy. All of this, from the accounts of those who managed to create a society different from any other, driven by the will to survive.

Bestselling UK author Toni Maguire shares the real story of Amy’s abuse and rejection, and how she found the strength to save herself and her daughter

Gone in the blink of an eye. Amy’s happy life changed forever when her mother suddenly passed. Abandoned by her family as they struggled to cope, she found herself facing hardships and exploitation alone, which eventually led to severe drug addiction at twelve years old. Now she shares what it was like to survive her new life in UK #1 bestselling author Toni Maguire’s latest survivor story, Abandoned Child. This book, full of dark secrets and hard choices, follows Amy’s journey from a victim to a fighter. The lesson? Change isn’t easy, but it is worth it.

Leaving the past in the past. Without love and support growing up, Amy found herself in a world full of betrayal, imprisonment, and loveless relationships for several years. Yet when faced with the reality of her daughter’s safety, she decided to take action to save them both from any more pain and violence. Reflecting on her memories and self-worth during those difficult times, Amy reveals how we can regret the mistakes we made. Yet the lessons we learn can change not only our lives but others as well.

Abandoned Child is a childhood trauma book full of Amy’s honest moments:

• Her mother’s passing and the life that followed
• Her struggle with homelessness as a teenager
• Her departure from her abusive relationship
• Her reflection on life while writing her story

If you’re looking for a book about healing from childhood trauma like What My Bones Know; The Deepest Well; or Why, Father?, you’ll want to read Toni Maguire’s Abandoned Child.

The remarkable, untold story of one Holocaust survivor's resilience against all odds, discovered through a chance encounter with a collection of her wartime poetry.

Originally from Nuremberg, Germany, Else Dormitzer dedicated much of her life to combating antisemitism in a city that became synonymous with Nazi propaganda and spectacle in the Third Reich. Drawing on materials from the family’s extensive personal archive, Traces of Memory follows her life from pre-war Nuremberg to war-torn Amsterdam, from the confines of the Theresienstadt ghetto to post-war life in London. The result is a deeply personal story of a woman at the margins of memory. Accompanied by historical photographs, the book includes Dormitzer’s original poetry collection from Theresienstadt and three testimonial accounts of her Holocaust experience to keep alive the work and story of a singular woman.

The remarkable, untold story of one Holocaust survivor's resilience against all odds, discovered through a chance encounter with a collection of her wartime poetry.

Originally from Nuremberg, Germany, Else Dormitzer dedicated much of her life to combating antisemitism in a city that became synonymous with Nazi propaganda and spectacle in the Third Reich. Drawing on materials from the family’s extensive personal archive, Traces of Memory follows her life from pre-war Nuremberg to war-torn Amsterdam, from the confines of the Theresienstadt ghetto to post-war life in London. The result is a deeply personal story of a woman at the margins of memory. Accompanied by historical photographs, the book includes Dormitzer’s original poetry collection from Theresienstadt and three testimonial accounts of her Holocaust experience to keep alive the work and story of a singular woman.

Wasyl Andreievych Kushnir was born in Ukraine in 1923, and was witness to the tragedies and horrors of the early years of collectivization under the Soviet regime in his homeland. His father fought in the Ukrainian National Army against the Russian Bolshevik invasion and ultimate occupation of Ukraine, and his grandfather was murdered by Chekist Bolsheviks. Early in Wasyl's life, his family's home and all personal possessions were confiscated by the communist authorities, and both parents were exiled, his father to Siberia, and mother to a prison in Mariopol. His uncle Danylo was also arrested and exiled to forced labor in Siberia, and then to Komi SSR. During this period, Ukraine experienced genocidal famine, and Wasyl himself suffered hunger during the Ukrainian Holodomor, in which millions perished. Upon the escape of his parents from prison camps, the family reunited, only to be torn apart again during World War II when Wasyl was taken by the Nazis as a slave laborer to Germany. At the war's conclusion, Wasyl drove trucks for the American Army in Germany, and married his wife, Maria, also a forced labor survivor, who bore him two sons. The family ultimately emigrated to Mississippi, and then Chicago, Illinois where two other children were born. Wasyl pursued the American dream, sought an education, and was ultimately successful in business, retiring in Florida where he spent his last years.

“Epic Journey is indeed an epic journey, a sad, tragic, and ultimately inspiring tale of oppression, defeat, flight, and salvation that addresses the very essence of the human condition. But Epic Journey is also an important addition to the small, but steadily growing, body of memoirs that give voice to the Ukrainian encounter with catastrophe in the twentieth century. As such, it sounds a warning about the dangers of authoritarianism, fanaticism, and intolerance to all people of good will.” —Alexander J. Motyl, Rutgers University-Newark

Wasyl Andreievych Kushnir was born in Ukraine in 1923, and was witness to the tragedies and horrors of the early years of collectivization under the Soviet regime in his homeland. His father fought in the Ukrainian National Army against the Russian Bolshevik invasion and ultimate occupation of Ukraine, and his grandfather was murdered by Chekist Bolsheviks. Early in Wasyl's life, his family's home and all personal possessions were confiscated by the communist authorities, and both parents were exiled, his father to Siberia, and mother to a prison in Mariopol. His uncle Danylo was also arrested and exiled to forced labor in Siberia, and then to Komi SSR. 

 During this period, Ukraine experienced genocidal famine, and Wasyl himself suffered hunger during the Ukrainian Holodomor, in which millions perished. Upon the escape of his parents from prison camps, the family reunited, only to be torn apart again during World War II when Wasyl was taken by the Nazis as a slave laborer to Germany. At the war's conclusion, Wasyl drove trucks for the American Army in Germany, and married his wife, Maria, also a forced labor survivor, who bore him two sons. The family ultimately emigrated to Mississippi, and then Chicago, Illinois where two other children were born. Wasyl pursued the American dream, sought an education, and was ultimately successful in business, retiring in Florida where he spent his last years.

Wheat Songs is a memoir of two interconnected Greek-American journeys—an actual physical journey for the grandfather, Pericles Rizopoulos, and a philosophical quest by the author, Perry Giuseppe Rizopoulos. 

When the grandfather, Pericles Rizopoulos, a proud old man, tells his fascinating, tragic and true stories of the Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II and the following Greek Civil War, to his twenty-something grandson, Perry Giuseppe Rizopoulos, Perry’s philosophical reflections on his grandfather’s stories along with his own memories of growing up in his extended Greek/Italian/American family in the Bronx combine to create an enduring story about the strength created by a tightly-knit family and the powerful values passed down from generation to generation.

Witness True Resilience in These Incredible Survival Stories

“Michael Tougias converts the wisdom of survivors into advice we can all use...” —Amanda Ripley, bestselling author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why

#1 New Release in Disaster Relief

Extreme Survival will have you on the edge-of-your-seat with truly amazing survival stories.

New York Times bestselling author Michael Tougias has earned critical acclaim and literary awards for his many best-seller non-fiction narratives. Extreme Survival is the long-awaited follow-up to The Finest Hours, co-authored with Casey Sherman.

Explore the stories and the causes of manmade disasters. To answer the question of why disasters happen and how some survive, Tougias interviewed over 100 people who survived against all odds, first chronicling their harrowing survival stories, and then discussing in detail lessons learned. Extreme Survival delivers the entertainment and exceptional research Michael Tougias fans expect.

Understand resilience through the mindset of survivors. Surviving disasters requires survival techniques to kick in at the right moment. Learn what a person is capable of when under extreme pressure and facing imminent disaster.

Inside find:

• Captivating and narrative survival stories told in true Tougias trademark style
• Analysis of major man-made disasters and the faulty decisions that led to them
• First-person accounts and detailed survival tactics that can apply to your every-day life

If you like true survival books like The Greatest Survival Stories of All Time, Into Thin Air, The Gift of Fear, Into the Abyss, Deep Survival, or If I Live Until Morning, you’ll love Extreme Survival. Also don’t miss reading other Michael Tougais survival books, including Fatal Forecast, Ten Hours Until Dawn, A Storm Too Soon, and Overboard!

WINNER PRIX FEMINA AND PRIX DU ROMAN NEWS

A 2019 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (Evening Standard・New Statesman ・Lit Hub)

Paris, January 7, 2015. Two terrorists who claim allegiance to ISIS attack the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The event causes untold pain to the victims and their families, prompts a global solidarity movement, and ignites a fierce debate over press freedoms and the role of satire today.

Philippe Lançon, a journalist, author, and a weekly contributor to Charlie Hebdo is gravely wounded in the attack. This intense life experience upends his relationship to the world, to writing, to reading, to love and to friendship. As he attempts to reconstruct his life on the page, Lançon rereads Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and others in search of guidance. It is a year before he can return to writing, a year in which he learns to work through his experiences and their aftermath.

Disturbance is not an essay on terrorism nor is it a witness’s account of Charlie Hebdo. The attack and what followed are part of Lançon’s narrative, which, instead, touches upon the universal. It is an honest, intimate account of a man seeking to put his life back together after it has been torn apart.

Disturbance is a book about survival, resilience, and reconstruction, about transformation, about one man’s shifting relationship to time, to writing and journalism, to truth, and to his own body.

Caroline finds relief in teaching and peace work in South Sudan, but the heavy responsibility she now carries for dozens of vulnerable families—coupled with the prevailing ideas of Biblical womanhood that put pressure on her personal life—makes it increasingly clear that Caroline is under-prepared for the high-stakes crisis in which she is now embedded.

Through a number of consequential mistakes and increasingly debilitating self-doubt, Caroline clings to hope that her willingness to stand with the South Sudanese will count for something in the end. A deeply personal examination of South Sudan at war—and a woman at war with herself—Today is Tomorrow shines a warm light on the darkest of places.

Caroline Kurtz grew up in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s. Inside her mud adobe home with her missionary parents and three sisters, she enjoyed American family life. Outside, her world was shaped by drums and the joy cry; Jeep and mule treks into the countryside; ostriches on the air strip; and the crackle of several Ethiopian languages she barely understood but longed to learn.

She felt she’d been exiled to a foreign country when she went to Illinois for college. She returned to Ethiopia to teach, only to discover how complex working in another culture and language really is. Life under a Communist dictatorship meant constant outages—water, electricity, sugar, even toilet paper. But she was willing to do anything, no matter how hard, to live in Ethiopia again. Yet the chaos only increased—guerillas marched down from the north, their t-shirts crisscrossed by Kalashnikov bandoliers. When peace returned, Caroline got the chance she’d longed for, to revisit that beloved childhood home in Maji. But maybe it would have been better just to treasure the memories.

Caroline Kurtz speaks Amharic fluently and spearheads development in Ethiopia’s Maji District, introducing apples, solar energy, and women’s cottage industries.

A thousand years ago, a young Japanese girl embarked on a journey from deep in the countryside of eastern Japan to the capital. Forty years later, with the long account of that journey as a foundation, the mature woman skillfully created an autobiography that incorporates many moments of heightened awareness from her long life. Married at age thirty-three, she identified herself as a reader and writer more than as a wife and mother; enthralled by fiction, she bore witness to the dangers of romantic fantasy as well as the enduring consolation of self-expression.

This reader’s edition streamlines Sonja Arntzen and Moriyuki Itō’s acclaimed translation of the Sarashina Diary for general readers and classroom use. This translation captures the lyrical richness of the original text while revealing its subtle structure and ironic meaning, highlighting the author’s deep concern for Buddhist belief and practice and the juxtaposition of poetic passages and narrative prose. The translators’ commentary offers insight into the author’s family and world, as well as the style, structure, and textual history of her work.

It is a tale which pits the serial escapers of Colditz against the traitor in their own ranks and the Gestapo against the double agents of MI9.

Britain's hopes are pinned on two of the war's unlikeliest heroes - a Jewish Glaswegian dentist and an East End black-marketeer in a story which ranges from Auschwitz to the Cabarets of Berlin.

Colditz is an iconic part of the British WW2 story, up there with Spitfires and D-Day and the subject of many books, films and TV programs. This strangely neglected facet of the WW2 story, but with a bigger story which for all sorts of reasons (not least of which were live security issues) has never been told and which Robert Verkaik has uncovered for the first time.