Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Women

Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays. The first complete collection of Weil's missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences.

The second book by Sunset Strip video vixen Bobbie Brown, Cherry on Top documents Brown's transformation from 1990s sex symbol to comedy queen, revealing the dramatic ups and downs of her biggest reinvention yet. Once the hottest girl on the Sunset Strip, the blonde beauty in the video to Warrant's 1990s hit, "Cherry Pie" is now in her late 40s, and she's letting her mouth run wild as a headliner on the comedy stage a few doors down from the rock clubs she once frequented. She's still smoking hot, but telling jokes about farting on men's balls isn't helping her find The One.

May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it's entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad.

In the annals of legendary Wild West desperadoes, Belle Starr is remembered to this day as the Bandit Queen. Shortly after her murder in 1889, a highly romanticized, sensational book titled Bella Starr . . . The Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James was published—the first in a series of high-profile portraits to brand Starr as a villain. Now, celebrated author Michael Wallis parses over a century of mythmaking to reveal the woman behind the renegade legend.

It's five o'clock in the morning and still dark. Swimming outside the wave break off the Catalina coast, training for her next long-distance swim (she has already crossed the English Channel twice), 17-year-old Lynne Cox senses that something is following her. She worries that it might be a great white shark.

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler's development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena.

In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein examines the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries.

Through exclusive interviews with current and former female CIA officers, many of whom have never spoken publicly, Agents of Change tells an enthralling and, at times, disturbing story set against the backdrop of the evolving women’s movement. It was the 1960s, a “secretarial” era, when women first gained a foothold and pushed against the one-dimensional, pop-culture trope of the sexy Cold War Bond Girl. Underestimated but undaunted, they fought their way, decade-by-decade, through adversity to the top of the spy game.

Over the course of her sixty-five-year career, the longest of any female filmmaker, Agnes Varda (1928-2019) wrote and directed some of the most acclaimed films of her era. She helped to define the French New Wave, inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, and was recognized with major awards at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice Film Festivals, as well as an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards. In this lively biography, Carrie Rickey explores the "complicated passions" that informed Varda's charmed life and indelible work.

The same week her husband of 15 years ditches her for a guy he met on Gay.com, a partially inebriated teenage driver smacks her VW Beetle head-on. Marriage over, body bruised, life upside-down, Rhoda does what any sensible 43-year-old would do: She goes home. But hers is not just any home. It's a Mennonite home, the scene of her painfully uncool childhood and the bosom of her family.

In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome" - a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. Accessed by thousands of listeners around the world, Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine.

In 1932, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend's flight lesson. It changed her life. In less than a year, a girl with a wicked sense of humor, a newfound love of flying, and a tough can-do attitude earned her pilot's license and headed for China to help against invading Japanese forces. In time, Hazel would become the first Asian American to fly with the Women Airforce Service Pilots. As thrilling as it may have been, it wasn't easy.

In the winter of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "1,000 male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education. Or was it?

President Gerald Ford suffered two attempts on his life during his term in office: one by a young woman in Charles Manson's Family, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, and the other by a far more unlikely candidate—an average middle-aged mother of five—Sara Jane Moore. After thirty years in contact with Moore in prison, journalist Geri Spieler deconstructs her life in Housewife Assassin, tracing the path from Moore's small-town upbringing in West Virginia to that fateful moment when she tried to assassinate the president.

When aspiring violinist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman lands a job with a professional ensemble in New York City, she imagines she has achieved her lifelong dream. But the ensemble proves to be a sham. When the group "performs", the microphones are never on. Instead, the music blares from a CD. The mastermind behind this scheme is a peculiar and mysterious figure known as The Composer, who is gaslighting his audiences with music that sounds suspiciously like the Titanic movie soundtrack.

A proudly humanist portrayal of sexual impulse and impropriety in the City of Angels, The First 50 is a chronological recapitulation of 50 erotic encounters that take place between the ages of 13 and 33. Columbine, 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Great Recession set the stage as a young woman navigates the ambient decadence that has long defined Los Angeles.

Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905-1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood's most famous Chinese American actress, a screen siren who captivated global audiences and signed her publicity photos—with a touch of defiance—"Orientally yours." Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong's tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to silent-era Hollywood, and from Weimar Berlin to decadent, prewar Shanghai, and capturing American television in its infancy.

Midnight is a study in the courage of three women - Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc. Jane Austen was poor in 1802, unmarried and homeless. She had outlines, ideas, and first drafts of her future novels but no place to sit and write them. Then she receives an offer of marriage from a rich man. When 16-year-old Mary Godwin elopes to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she scoffs at the cost - life as an outcast. Joan of Arc, imprisoned in chains, kept her faith for a long year.

In Riding, Pardis Mahdavi meditates on the lessons learned over a lifetime of horseback riding and the falling, failing, and joy it brings. At once a history of Caspian horses, an exploration of Mahdavi's Iranian-American identity and family history, and a consideration of the capacity for self-reflection and self-compassion through human-animal relationships, Riding offers a roadmap for learning to live in harmony with the self and the environment around us.

What would you do if you ran the world? If you knew you couldn't fail? Maybe it's time to stop wondering and start putting it into practice. Shelly Rachanow's daily words of encouragement will give you inspiration, hope, and words of courage to help you discover confidence in yourself. Your acts, both big and small, matter. Learn about a teenage girl and CNN hero, kids in Zimbabwe saving their part of the planet, and a busy mom who is not too busy to work every day to help impoverished families live better lives.