Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Women

Smart, sassy, and unapologetically feminine, In Praise of Difficult Women is an ode to the bold and charismatic women of modern history. Karen Karbo spotlights the spirited rule breakers who charted their way with little regard for expectations: Amelia Earhart, Helen Gurley Brown, Edie Sedgwick, and Shonda Rhimes, among others. Their lives provide inspiration and instruction for the new age of feminism we have entered. Karbo distills these lessons with wit and humor, examining the universal themes that connect us to each of these mesmerizing personalities today.

Who was the real George Eliot? In Love with George Eliot is a glorious debut novel which tells the compelling story of England’s greatest woman novelist as you’ve never heard it before.

Anna May Wong remains one of Hollywood’s best-known Chinese American actors. Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro, and Warner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant’s difficult path through the prejudices of American culture. In a narrative that recalls the pathos of life in LA's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood’s pleasure palaces, Graham Russell Gao Hodges recovers the life of a Hollywood legend.

The 1930s was a magical age in Hollywood, with Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney, Bette Davis, and Clark Gable lighting up the silver screen. But Deanna Durbin’s fame surpassed them all. Born in Canada, Deanna was “discovered” by star-maker Eddie Cantor, producer Joe Pasternak, and director Henry Koster, and she quickly became the world’s most celebrated star. She saved Universal Studios from ruin, she was a favorite of Winston Churchill and Anne Frank, and she became the highest-paid woman in America.

Jacqueline Saper, named after Jacqueline Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. At 18 she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran-Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in prerevolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes in her life and community - primarily the disparate religions and cultures.

When Jennifer Risher joined Microsoft in 1991, she met her husband and with him became an extra-lucky beneficiary of the dot-com boom. By their early 30s, they had tens of millions of dollars. Today, there are millions of people like her. Jennifer’s thought-provoking, personal story includes the voices of others in her demographic and explores the hidden impact of wealth on identity, relationships, and sense of place in the world.

Rosie was always told her red hair was a curse, but she never believed it. She often dreamed what it would look like under a white veil with the man of her dreams by her side. However, her life takes a harrowing turn in 1944 when she is forced out of her home and sent to the most gruesome of places: Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Rosie’s head is shaved and along with the loss of her beautiful hair, she loses the life she once cherished.

Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, ideal American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first of the modern First Ladies. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours. Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. But the story of Jackie’s reinvention has been culturally erased. In Finding Jackie, author Oline Eaton pieces it back together.

Warned not to write—and certainly not to bite—these women put pen to paper anyway and wrote themselves into history. From the fourteenth century through to the present day, women who write have been understood as mad, undisciplined, or dangerous. Female writers have always had to find ways to overcome or challenge these beliefs. Some were cautious and discreet, some didn’t give a damn, but all lived complex, eventful, and often controversial lives.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds and on men was legendary. Yet beneath her studied act, all was not well.

A powerful collection of stories about women who murdered - for revenge, for love, and even for pleasure - rife with historical details that will have any true-crime junkie on the edge of their seat, She Kills Me tells the story of 40 women who murdered out of necessity, fear, revenge, and even for pleasure.

As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents’ toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to. She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world—from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She’s often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene.

The daughter of a Chilean father and a Filipina mother, Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon grew up as a shy, timid child in a small Midwestern town. Targeted by school bullies and dismissed by many of her teachers, she worried that people would find out the truth: that she was INTF. Incompetent. Nerd. Terrified. Failure. Yet in the span of just six years, Cecilia became the first Latina pilot to secure a place on the United States Unlimited Aerobatic Team and earn the right to represent her country at the Olympics of aviation, the World Aerobatic Championships. How did she do it?

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII - in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Consisting of over 20 years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, Frantumaglia is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. Ferrante answers many of her listeners’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives.

Ana Montes had spent seventeen years spying for the Cubans. She had been raised in a patriotic Puerto Rican household: Her father, a psychiatrist, was a former colonel in the US Army. Her sister worked as a translator for the FBI and helped break up a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. Her brother was also a loyal FBI agent. Montes impressed her bosses but in secret spent her breaks memorizing top-secret documents before sending them to the Cuban government. Retired FBI agent Peter J. Lapp explains the clues that led their team to catch one of the United States’ most dangerous spies.

For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.

In 2009, Rachael Cerrotti, a college student pursuing a career in photojournalism, asked her grandmother, Hana, if she could record her story. Rachael knew that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and the only one in her family alive at the end of the war. Hana spoke about her history publicly and regularly. But Rachael wanted to document it as only a granddaughter could. So, that’s what they did: Hana talked, and Rachael wrote. Upon Hana’s passing in 2010, Rachael discovered an incredible archive of her life.

I Am Not Your Slave is the shocking true story of a young African girl, Tupa, who was abducted from southwestern Africa and funneled through an extensive yet almost completely unknown human trafficking network spanning the entire African continent. As she is transported from the point of her abduction on a remote farm near the Namibian‑Angolan border and channeled to her ultimate destination in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, her three‑year odyssey exposes the brutal horrors of a modern-day middle passage.

In her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written.