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Mishegas: A concrete Tale of Family Quicksand
by Harley Md DresnerSenseless behavior—that’s mishegas. According to Harley Dresner, it means life with overbearing, obstreperous, melodramatic parents and a pugilistic, caffeine-addicted, octogenarian uncle. Blend Jerry Seinfeld’s and Raymond Barone’s parents together. The result is the Vesuvian mess that Dresner calls his family. Social graces are callously thrown to the Las Vegas desert wind when Gerry and Uncle Bernard offend everyone from hotel receptionists to street hookers in chapters like “Even Leona Helmsley Would Have Apologized” and “Henry Ford Would Have Had a Stroke.” Along the way, flashbacks to Dresner’s past provide decades of head-banging material as he goes “Wasting Away in Geriatricville.” Restaurant etiquette ends up with food scraps in the dumpster when blind patrons are unabashedly insulted. Doctoring for sport becomes a new American pastime through obsessions with colonoscopies and wars waged against mucous and phlegm. Dresner’s unmistakable, take-no-prisoners sarcasm and wit shine through this dysfunctional Cruise to Nowhere. His memoir is a fresh, laugh-out-loud study of life-long relationships that proves one can embrace familial roots while maintaining perspective—and sanity. Readers will revel in the uncomfortable, squirming circumstances in which a family routinely embroils a child. Anyone who wouldn’t dream of running away from the family they would love to escape understands Mishegas.
Misremembering Dr. King: Revisiting The Legacy Of Martin Luther King Jr
by Jennifer J. YancoWe all know the name. Martin Luther King, the great American Civil Rights leader. But most people today know relatively little about King, the campaigner against militarism, materialism, and racism—what he called the "giant triplets. " Jennifer J. Yanco takes steps to redress this imbalance. "My objective is to highlight the important aspects of Dr. King’s work which have all but disappeared from popular memory, so that more of us can ‘really see King. ’" After briefly telling the familiar story of King’s civil rights campaigns and accomplishments, she considers the lesser-known concerns that are an essential part of his legacy. Here we are reminded that King was an anti–Vietnam War activist who argued that resources spent on militarism and national security served few at the expense of many; that growing materialism and an ethos of greed was damaging the moral and spiritual health of the country even as it impoverished a disproportionate number of blacks; and that the way to address the harm done to blacks by centuries of racism was to do something special to help them compete on a just and equal basis.
Miss-adventures: A Tale of Ignoring Life Advice While Backpacking Around South America
by Amy BakerAfter planning to backpack round South America, Amy spends the next three months fending off well-meaning but absurd advice, which she ignores… right up until she runs into trouble. Part memoir and part inspirational traveller’s tale, Miss-adventures is a funny and frank account of a young woman exercising her independence.
Miss-adventures: A Tale of Ignoring Life Advice While Backpacking Around South America
by Amy BakerAfter planning to backpack round South America, Amy spends the next three months fending off well-meaning but absurd advice, which she ignores… right up until she runs into trouble. Part memoir and part inspirational traveller’s tale, Miss-adventures is a funny and frank account of a young woman exercising her independence.
Miss Alcott's Email: Yours for Reforms of All Kinds
by Kit BakkeShouldn’t life be more than simply showing up? Is it enough to be part of a family, make another family, earn your living, and then exit stage left? Or should you engage and be engaged in a bit of purposeful shaking and shoving along the way? These are questions that Kit Bakke urgently needs answered. Tired of self-proclaimed gurus and self-help books, she turns to her childhood role model — Louisa May Alcott — for direction. She sends an e-mail to Louisa, and is amazed when she receives a reply. Their correspondence becomes a dance of ideas and tales bridging the mid-1800s and the twenty-first century. But why Louisa? “Her abolitionist zeal, her women’s rights advocacy, her hospital work, her crazy commune days, her heartfelt desire to leave the world a better place, her humor and her energy all materialized in front of me,” writes Bakke. “Louisa was serious when she signed her letters, ‘Yours for reforms of all kinds.’ She made her life, she didn’t just live it.” When Kit Bakke came of age in the late 1960s, America was going through major social and political turmoil. She and many of her generation elected to pursue radical ways to protest the Vietnam War and civil rights injustices at home, and Bakke joined the notorious Weather Underground. Eventually she left the movement to become a wife, a mother, and a professional nurse, but the persistent questions about the best way to live her life, make her contribution, and find satisfaction remained. By initiating her extraordinary correspondence with Louisa May Alcott, Kit hopes to “pick up some clues for my friends and myself about how better to live the thirty or so years that might be remaining to us. And besides, we would be giving Louisa a treat that couldn’t be beat—a peek into the future.”
Miss Aluminum: A Memoir
by Susanna MooreA revealing and refreshing memoir of Hollywood in the 1970sIn 1963 after the death of her mother, seventeen-year-old Susanna Moore leaves her home in Hawai’i with no money, no belongings, and no prospects to live with her Irish grandmother in Philadelphia. She soon receives four trunks of expensive clothes from a concerned family friend, allowing her to assume the first of many disguises she will need to find her sometimes perilous, always valorous way.Her journey takes her from New York to Los Angeles where she becomes a model and meets Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. She works as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, and is given a screen test by Mike Nichols. But beneath Miss Aluminum’s glittering fairytale surface lies the story of a girl’s insatiable hunger to learn and her anguished determination to understand the circumstances of her mother’s death. Moore gives us a sardonic, often humorous portrait of Hollywood in the seventies, and of a young woman’s hard-won arrival at selfhood.
Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman, Eighteenth-Century Icon
by Angelica GooddenA word was coined to describe the condition of people stricken with a new kind of fever when the Swiss-born artist Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) came to London in 1766. 'The whole world', it was said, 'is Angelicamad.' One of the most successful women artists in history - a painter who possessed what her friend Goethe called an 'unbelievable' and 'massive' talent - Kauffman became the toast of Georgian England, captivating society with her portraits, mythological scenes and decorative compositions. She knew and painted poets, novelists and playwrights, collaborating with them and illustrating their work; her designs adorned the houses of the Grand Tourists she had met and painted in Italy; actors, statesmen, philosophers, kings and queen sat to her; and she was the force that launched a thousand engravings. Despite rumours of relationships with other artists (including Sir Joshua Reynolds), and an apparently bigamous and annulled first marriage to a pseudo Count, Kauffman was adopted by royalty in England and abroad as a model of social and artistic decorum. A profoundly learned artist, but one who is loved, above all, for her tender adaptations from classical antiquity and sentimental literature; a commercially successful celebrity yet also a founding member of The Royal Academy of arts; the virginal creator of sexually ambivalent beings who was one of the hardest-headed businesswomen of her age, Kauffman's life and work is full of apparent contradictions explored in this first biography in over 80 years.
Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance
by Carla KaplanCelebrated scholar Carla Kaplan’s cultural biography, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, focuses on white women, collectively called “Miss Anne,” who became Harlem Renaissance insiders. The 1920s in New York City was a time of freedom, experimentation, and passion—with Harlem at the epicenter. White men could go uptown to see jazz and modern dance, but women who embraced black culture too enthusiastically could be ostracized. Miss Anne in Harlem focuses on six of the unconventional, free-thinking women, some from Manhattan high society, many Jewish, who crossed race lines and defied social conventions to become a part of the culture and heartbeat of Harlem. Ethnic and gender studies professor Carla Kaplan brings the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance to life with vivid prose, extensive research, and period photographs.
Miss Austen: A Novel of the Austen Sisters
by Gill HornbyA #1 International Bestseller "A deeply imagined and deeply moving novel. Reading it made me happy and weepy in equally copious amounts.” —Karen Joy Fowler "You can’t help feeling that Jane would have approved.” —The Guardian For fans of Jo Baker’s Longbourn, a witty, wonderfully original novel about Cassandra Austen and her famous sister, Jane.Whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the young heroine she once was?England, 1840. Two decades after the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury and the home of her family friends, the Fowles. In a dusty corner of the vicarage, there is a cache of Jane’s letters that Cassandra is desperate to find. Dodging her hostess and a meddlesome housemaid, Cassandra eventually hunts down the letters and confronts the secrets they hold, secrets not only about Jane but about Cassandra herself. Will Cassandra bare the most private details of her life to the world, or commit her sister’s legacy to the flames? Moving back and forth between the vicarage and Cassandra’s vibrant memories of her years with Jane, interwoven with Jane’s brilliantly reimagined lost letters, Miss Austen is the untold story of the most important person in Jane’s life. With extraordinary empathy, emotional complexity, and wit, Gill Hornby finally gives Cassandra her due, bringing to life a woman as captivating as any Austen heroine.
Miss Brenda and the Loveladies
by Irene Zutell Brenda SpahnOne woman's fight to provide hope for the hopeless... Seven ex-cons who changed her heart forever... For Brenda Spahn, entrepreneur and businesswoman, wealth was a lifestyle--until a brush with the law threatened to send her to prison. In those dark moments, Brenda made a promise to God. Spared incarceration, a renewed Brenda glimpsed into the lives of women serving time in one of the worst places in America--the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama. What she saw prompted a God-inspired vision. With a heart to help and a will that couldn't be crushed, Brenda fought the system and overcame tremendous obstacles to take ex-cons into her own home and help them navigate the alien world of life on the outside. This is the story of Brenda's journey from rags to riches to redemption. It's the story of the first unlikely year of her "Whole Way House" and of the extraordinary lives of the first seven women who came to call her "Miss Brenda." It's a story that testifies to the power of faith and how God changes hearts every day.
Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison
by A. J. Verdelle“Passionate, personal, insightful, testy, and unique.” —Kirkus (starred review)"Verdelle offers us testimony in praise and consideration of life as a literary citizen and Black woman alongside the guiding light of Toni Morrison. This is a holy testimony, indeed, one that deserves to be amen'd forever.” —Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author"Verdelle gives us the greatest gift—our beloved ancestor returned to us—generous and alive, remembered and revered. So grateful for this book in the world.” —Jacqueline Woodson, author of Another Brooklyn"If you let a black girl loose in a library, you may not recognize the woman who emerges."—from Miss ChloeToni Morrison, born Chloe A Wofford, was a towering figure in the world of literature when she entered A.J. Verdelle’s life. Their literary friendship was a young writer’s dream—simultaneously exhilarating, intimidating, fulfilling, and challenging. The relationship crossed generations, spanned several cycles in life, exhibited high and low notes, reached and dipped and found its way. Like many women friends, these two writers imagined and built a relationship that was responsive, inventive, and engaged.Miss Chloe powerfully situates the risks writers face and the freedom they find when they put Black women’s lives into words. Verdelle chronicles her grief at Morrison’s passing, and finds comfort in Morrison’s astute advice—wisdom Verdelle didn’t always recognize at the time. In this pensive and intricately lyrical book, Verdelle honors Morrison among the cultural greats, while illuminating and celebrating the power of language, legacy, and genius.A. J. Verdelle is the award-winning author of the novel, The Good Negress. She teaches Creative Writing at Morgan State University and at the MFA program at Lesley University.
Miss Confederation: The Diary of Mercy Anne Coles
by Anne Mcdonald Christopher MooreHistory without the stiffness and polish time creates. Canada’s journey to Confederation kicked off with a bang — or rather, a circus, a civil war (the American one), a small fortune’s worth of champagne, and a lot of making love — in the old-fashioned sense. Miss Confederation offers a rare look back, through a woman’s eyes, at the men and events at the centre of this pivotal time in Canada’s history. Mercy Anne Coles, the daughter of PEI delegate George Coles, kept a diary of the social happenings and political manoeuvrings as they affected her and her desires. A unique historical document, her diary is now being published for the first time, offering a window into the events that led to Canada’s creation, from a point of view that has long been neglected.
Miss D and Me: Life with the Invincible Bette Davis
by Danelle Morton Kathryn SermakFor ten years Kathryn Sermak was at Bette Davis's side--first as an employee, and then as her closest friend--and in Miss D and Me she tells the story of the great star's harrowing but inspiring final years, a story fans have been waiting decades to hear. Miss D and Me is a story of two powerful women, one at the end of her life and the other at the beginning. As Bette Davis aged she was looking for an assistant, but she found something more than that in Kathryn: a loyal and loving buddy, a co-conspirator in her jokes and schemes, and a competent assistant whom she trained never to miss a detail. But Miss D had strict rules for Kathryn about everything from how to eat a salad to how to wear her hair...even the spelling of Kathryn's name was changed (adding the "y") per Miss D's request. Throughout their time together, the two grew incredibly close, and Kathryn had a front-row seat to the larger-than-life Davis's career renaissance in her later years, as well as to the humiliating public betrayal that nearly killed Miss D. The frame of this story is a four-day road trip Kathryn and Davis took from Biarritz to Paris, during which they disentangled their ferocious dependency. Miss D and Me is a window into the world of the unique and formidable Bette Davis, told by the person who perhaps knew her best of all.
Miss del Río: A Novel of Dolores del Río, the First Major Latina Star in Hollywood
by Bárbara Mujica&“Dolores del Río bursts to life in this vivid, well-researched portrayal. Her iconic feline elegance and brash spirit dominates every page, but it&’s her defiance to live life on her own terms that sets her apart—and what an extraordinary life she led.&”—C.W. Gortner, bestselling author of Marlene1910, Mexico. As the country&’s revolution spreads, Dolores, the daughter of a wealthy banker, must flee her comfortable life in Durango or risk death. Her family settles in Mexico City, where, at sixteen, she marries the worldly Jaime del Río. But in a twist of fate, at a party she meets an influential American director who recognizes in her a natural performer. He invites her to Hollywood, and practically overnight, the famous Miss del Río is born.Dolores&’s star quickly rises, and her days become a whirlwind of moviemaking and glamorous events. Swept up in L.A.'s glitzy inner circle, she takes her place among film royalty such as Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles. But as her career soars, her personal life becomes increasingly complicated, with family tragedy, divorce, and real heartache. And when she&’s labeled box office poison amid growing prejudice before WWII, Dolores must decide what price she&’s willing to pay to achieve her dreams and if her heart and future instead lie where it all began…in Mexico.Spanning half a century and narrated by Dolores&’s fictional hairdresser and longtime friend, Miss del Río traces the life of a trailblazing woman whose legacy in Hollywood and in Mexico still shines bright today.&“Bárbara Mujica dazzles us.... She takes us on a journey through an era of wars and movies, and unforgettable characters that made Hollywood what it is today.&” —María Amparo Escandón, New York Times bestselling author of L.A. Weather
Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture
by Justine Picardie“Remarkable” —Hamish Bowles, Vogue The overdue restoration of Catherine Dior's extraordinary life, from her brother's muse to Holocaust survivor When the French designer Christian Dior presented his first collection in Paris in 1947, he changed fashion forever. Dior’s “New Look” created a striking, romantic vision of femininity, luxury, and grace, making him—and his last name—famous overnight. One woman informed Dior’s vision more than any other: his sister, Catherine, a Resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, and cultivator of rose gardens who inspired Dior’s most beloved fragrance, Miss Dior. Yet the story of Catherine’s remarkable life—so different from her famous brother’s—has never been told, until now. Drawing on the Dior archives and extensive research, Justine Picardie’s Miss Dior is the long-overdue restoration of Catherine Dior’s life. The siblings’ stories are profoundly intertwined: in Occupied France, as Christian honed his couture skills, Catherine dedicated herself to the Resistance, ultimately being captured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck, the only Nazi camp solely for women. Seeking to trace Catherine’s story as well as her influence on her brother, Picardie traveled to the significant places of Catherine’s life, including Les Rhumbs, the Dior family villa with its magnificent gardens; the House of Dior in Paris; and La Colle Noire, Christian’s chateâu that he bequeathed to his sister. Inventive and captivating, and shaped by Picardie’s own journey, Miss Dior examines the legacy of Christian Dior, the secrets of postwar France, and the unbreakable bond between two remarkable siblings. Most important, it shines overdue recognition on a previously overlooked life, one that epitomized courage and also embodied the astonishing capacity of the human spirit to remain undimmed, even in the darkest circumstances. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
by Annabel AbbsGood Housekeeping Book Club Pick for November!A Country Living Best Book of Fall!In a novel perfect for fans of Hazel Gaynor’s A Memory of Violets and upstairs-downstairs stories, Annabel Abbs, the award-winning author of The Joyce Girl, returns with the brilliant real-life story of Eliza Acton and her assistant as they revolutionized British cooking and cookbooks around the world.Before Mrs. Beeton and well before Julia Child, there was Eliza Acton, who changed the course of cookery writing forever.England, 1835. London is awash with thrilling new ingredients, from rare spices to exotic fruits. But no one knows how to use them. When Eliza Acton is told by her publisher to write a cookery book instead of the poetry she loves, she refuses—until her bankrupt father is forced to flee the country. As a woman, Eliza has few options. Although she’s never set foot in a kitchen, she begins collecting recipes and teaching herself to cook. Much to her surprise she discovers a talent – and a passion – for the culinary arts.Eliza hires young, destitute Ann Kirby to assist her. As they cook together, Ann learns about poetry, love and ambition. The two develop a radical friendship, breaking the boundaries of class while creating new ways of writing recipes. But when Ann discovers a secret in Eliza’s past, and finds a voice of her own, their friendship starts to fray.Based on the true story of the first modern cookery writer, Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen is a spellbinding novel about female friendship, the struggle for independence, and the transcendent pleasures and solace of food.
Miss Ella of Commander's Palace: I Don't Want A Restaurant Where A Jazz Band Can't Come Marching Through
by Ella Brennan Ti MartinIn this culinary memoir, readers get a personal tour of the storied New Orleans restaurant with the woman who put it—and Creole cuisine—on the map. Meet Ella Brennan: mother, mentor, blunt-talking fireball, and matriarch of a New Orleans restaurant empire. Ella is famous for bringing national attention to Creole cuisine, and her unique vision is best summed up in her own words: "I don&’t want a restaurant where a jazz band can&’t come marching through." In this candid autobiography, Ella shares her life story from childhood in the Great Depression to opening acclaimed eateries. When the Brennans launched Commander&’s Palace, it became the city&’s most popular restaurant. Many of the city&’s most famous chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Troy McPhail, and many others, got their start there. Miss Ella of Commander&’s Palace describes the drama, the disasters, and the abundance of love, sweat, and grit it takes to become the matriarch of New Orleans&’ finest restaurant empire.
Miss Emily: A Novel
by Nuala O'ConnorEighteen-year-old Ada Concannon has just been hired by the respected but eccentric Dickinson family of Amherst, Massachusetts. Despite their difference in age and the upstairs-downstairs divide, Ada strikes up a deep friendship with Miss Emily, the gifted elder daughter living a spinster's life at home. But Emily's passion for words begins to dominate her life. She will wear only white and avoids the world outside the Dickinson homestead. <P><P> When Ada's safety and reputation are threatened, however, Emily must face down her own demons in order to help her friend, with shocking consequences.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia: A Memoir
by Sofija Stefanovic“Sofija Stefanovic’s beautiful memoir Miss Ex-Yugoslavia depicts the elegant transit of a girl becoming an artist. This is a story we yearn to know: How does a girl lose her childhood, family, and nation, yet nurture her memories, dreams, and art? Stefanovic hits all her marks, and she keeps us in her thrall.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist “Funny and tragic and beautiful in all the right places. I loved it.” —Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy A funny, dark, and tender memoir about the immigrant experience and life as a perpetual fish-out-of-water, from the acclaimed Serbian-Australian storyteller.Sofija Stefanovic makes the first of many awkward entrances in 1982, when she is born in Belgrade, the capital of socialist Yugoslavia. The circumstances of her birth (a blackout, gasoline shortages, bickering parents) don’t exactly get her off to a running start. While around her, ethnic tensions are stoked by totalitarian leaders with violent agendas, Stefanovic's early life is filled with Yugo rock, inadvisable crushes, and the quirky ups and downs of life in a socialist state. As the political situation grows more dire, the Stefanovics travel back and forth between faraway, peaceful Australia, where they can’t seem to fit in, and their turbulent homeland, which they can’t seem to shake. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia collapses into the bloodiest European conflict in recent history. Featuring warlords and beauty queens, tiger cubs and Baby-Sitters Clubs, Sofija Stefanovic’s memoir is a window to a complicated culture that she both cherishes and resents. Revealing war and immigration from the crucial viewpoint of women and children, Stefanovic chronicles her own coming-of-age, both as a woman and as an artist who yearns to take control of her own story. Refreshingly candid, poignant, and illuminating, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia introduces a vital new voice to the immigrant narrative.
Miss Jane: A Novel
by Brad WatsonAstonishing prose brings to life a forgotten woman and a lost world in a strange and bittersweet Southern pastoral. Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog- Men, Brad Watson has been expanding the literary traditions of the South, in work as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early-twentieth-century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central "uses" for a woman in that time and place--namely, sex and marriage. From the country doctor who adopts Jane to the hard tactile labor of farm life, from the highly erotic world of nature around her to the boy who loved but was forced to leave her, the world of Miss Jane Chisolm is anything but barren. Free to satisfy only herself, she mesmerizes those around her, exerting an unearthly fascination that lives beyond her still.
Miss Jessie's
by Miko BranchMiss Jessie's is a memoir and business guide rich with inspirational life lessons and unique business advice from Miko Branch, the Chief Executive Officer of the dynamic Miss Jessie's--the company that revolutionized the hair-care industry.When Miko and her sister, Titi, were children, their grandmother Miss Jessie taught them independence and showed them the value of being "do it yourself" women, all while whipping up homemade hair concoctions at her kitchen table. As a co-founder of Miss Jessie's, Miko reveals how she and Titi applied their grandmother's lessons to create a successful business from scratch. Miss Jessie's chronicles the Branch sisters' remarkable story. When they were children, their stern father encouraged them to become self-reliant and not to depend on their looks to get ahead. Taking this message to heart, they blossomed into business owners and leaders in their field, using ingenuity and without borrowing a dime. They soaked up the entrepreneurial and creative culture of the early hip-hop era on the streets of Brooklyn in the late 1990s, and in the high-end salons of Manhattan. They blended these inspirations to establish a business that has gone from their kitchen table to the shelves of major retailers around the globe, revolutionizing the hair-care industry. A charming and enlightening look at the women behind the brand, Miss Jessie's is chock-full of entertaining stories and invaluable instruction that can be applied to any business: an authentic expression that the American Dream is possible.
Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit (A Kopp Sisters Novel #4)
by Amy StewartTrailblazing Constance’s hard-won job as deputy sheriff is on the line in Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit, the fourth installment of Amy Stewart’s Kopp Sisters series. After a year on the job, New Jersey’s first female deputy sheriff has collared criminals, demanded justice for wronged women, and gained notoriety nationwide for her exploits. But on one stormy night, everything falls apart. While transporting a woman to an insane asylum, Deputy Kopp discovers something deeply troubling about her story. Before she can investigate, another inmate bound for the asylum breaks free and tries to escape. In both cases, Constance runs instinctively toward justice. But the fall of 1916 is a high-stakes election year, and any move she makes could jeopardize Sheriff Heath’s future—and her own. Although Constance is not on the ballot, her controversial career makes her the target of political attacks.
Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (Great Discoveries)
by George Johnson"A short, excellent account of [Leavitt's] extraordinary life and achievements."--Simon Singh, New York Times Book Review At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists argued over the size of the universe: was it, as the astronomer Harlow Shapley argued, the size of the Milky Way, or was there more truth to Edwin Hubble's claim that our own galaxy is just one among billions? The answer to the controversy--a "yardstick" suitable for measuring the cosmos--was discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was employed by the Harvard Observatory as a number cruncher, at a wage not dissimilar from that of workers in the nearby textile mills. Miss Leavitt's Stars uncovers her neglected history, and brings a fascinating and turbulent period of astronomical history to life.
Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary
by Toshio Meronek Miss Major Griffin-GracyThe future of Black, queer, and trans liberation explored by a legendary transgender elder and activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the HIV/AIDS crisis and a world that white supremacy has built. She has shared tips with other sex workers in the nascent drag ball scene of the late 1960s, and helped found one of America&’s first needle exchange clinics from the back of her van.Miss Major Speaks is both document of her brilliant life–told with intimacy, warmth and an undeniable levity-and a roadmap for the challenges black, brown, queer and trans youth will face on the path to liberation today.Her incredible story of a life lived and a world survived becomes a conduit for larger questions about the riddle of collective liberation. For a younger generation, she warns about the traps of &‘representation,&’ the politics of 'self-care,' and the frequent dead-ends of non-profit organizing; for all of us, she is a strike against those who would erase these histories of struggle.Miss Major offers something that cannot be found elsewhere: an affirmation that our vision for freedom can and must be more expansive than those on offer by mainstream institutions.
Miss Mary Reporting: The True Story of Sportswriter Mary Garber
by Sue Macy C. F. PayneFrom beloved author Sue Macy comes an illustrated biography of Mary Garber, one of the first female sports journalists in American history! <p><p> While sitting in the bleachers of a Soap Box Derby in the 1950s, Mary Garber overheard two African-American boys in the following exchange: “See that lady down there?” asked one boy. “That’s Mary Garber. She doesn’t care who you are, but if you do something good, she’ll write about you.” <p> Mary Garber was a pioneering sports journalist in a time where women were rarely a part of the newspaper business. Women weren’t even allowed to sit in the press boxes at sporting events, so Mary was forced to sit with the coaches’ wives. But that didn’t stop her. <p> In a time when African-American sports were not routinely covered, Mary went to the games and wrote about them. Garber was a sportswriter for fifty-six years and was the first woman to receive the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award, presented for major contributions in sports journalism. And now, every year the Association of Women in Sports Media presents the Mary Garber Pioneer Award in her honor to a role model for women in sports media. <p> Sure to inspire future journalists, athletes, and any child who has a dream, this illustrated biography of Mary Garber captures her feisty and determined spirit and brings her story to life.