Professional Women

Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.

The life story of Jeanie Buss could only have been written in Hollywood. Her father, Jerry Buss, emerged from a childhood of financial struggle to improbably become one of California’s most successful real estate developers. Though her life was not without turmoil - l her parents divorced when she was still a child - Jeanie’s world was forever changed for the better when her father bought the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979. By the time Jeanie was 19, she was already a high-ranking executive with World Team Tennis.

It Began with a Dream is the story of Dr. Gladys B. West, who played an integral role in the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) as a mathematician with navy. Born in 1930, in the poor farming community of Sutherland, Virginia, she rose from poverty despite segregation, The Great Depression, and Jim Crow laws to become one of the first professional black women hired at the Dahlgren Naval Proving Grounds in Virginia (now Dahlgren Surface Naval Warfare Center). Dr. West takes us on her incredible life journey in this heartwarming and unforgettable memoir.

In February 2008 a casual afternoon of ice skating derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a well-earned sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. On Easter Sunday, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was instead lying on the sofa reading Death in Venice, casting her eyes over these words again and again: "He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers." Disaster shifted to possibility and Morris made a decision.

Teva Harrison was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at the age of 37. In this brilliant and inspiring graphic memoir, she documents through comic illustration and short personal essays what it means to live with the disease.

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned wartime hospital and setting for the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded.

What happens when a person's reputation has been forever damaged? This riveting biography of Mary Mallon by the Sibert medalist and Newbery Honor winner Susan Bartoletti looks beyond the tabloid scandal of Mary's controversial life. How she was treated by medical and legal officials reveals a lesser-known story of human and constitutional rights, entangled with the science of pathology and enduring questions about who Mary Mallon really was. How did her name become synonymous with deadly disease?

In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a 17 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 50th 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.

A pause-resisitng narrative about Marissa Mayer's efforts to remake Yahoo as well as her own rise from Stanford University undergrad to CEO of a $30 billion corporation by the age of 38. When Yahoo hired star Google executive Mayer to be its CEO in 2012 employees rejoiced. They put posters on the walls throughout Yahoo's California headquarters. On them there was Mayer's face and one word: Hope. But one year later, Mayer sat in front of those same employees in a huge cafeteria on Yahoo's campus and took the beating of her life.

On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree - becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people.

Joyce Roche rose from humble circumstances to earn an Ivy League MBA and become the first female African-American vice president of Avon, president of a leading hair care company, and CEO of the national nonprofit Girls Inc. But despite these accomplishments, she felt like a fraud. She worked more and more, had less and less of a personal life, and was never able to enjoy her success.

Called the “Queen of Beauty” and the most influential lone woman to impact the beauty industry since Estée Lauder by The New York Times, Leslie Blodgett’s story is anything but ordinary. As the CEO of BareMinerals, she reinvented how beauty was sold by tapping into the power of community before the idea of social media existed. In 2006, Blodgett took the company public in one of the largest cosmetic IPOs of the decade, and in 2010, the company was acquired for $1.8 billion. Pretty Good Advice is her next chapter.

Play It Forward details the remarkable journey of Joan Barnes, founder and former CEO of Gymboree, and how she learned to align her inner life with outward success. Forty years ago Joan Barnes founded a play center in a church basement with $3,000. Determined to enable women to achieve personal and entrepreneurial success, Barnes led Gymboree to become an innovative leader in a new industry: activity-based early childhood development.

In 2003, Cindy Monroe founded Thirty-One Gifts in the basement of her home in Chattanooga, TN, with one goal: to help women by giving them the opportunity to run their own successful businesses. Today, she continues to lead Thirty-One Gifts and build relationships with her consultants all over the country.

Food writer Hannah Howard is at a pivotal moment in her life when she begins searching out her fellow food people - women who’ve carved a place for themselves in a punishing, male-dominated industry. Women whose journeys have inspired and informed Hannah’s own foodie quests. On trips that take her from Milan to Bordeaux to Oslo and then always back again to her home in New York City, Hannah spends time with these influential women, learning about the intimate paths that led them each toward fulfilling careers.

In 2000, Chris Cicchinelli was 25 and at a crossroads. He had just been forced to leave a promising position at a large retail franchise when his mother, Patty Brisben, called. She wanted her son’s help in growing her women-only, in-home and virtual party business featuring relationship enhancement products.

As a girl in New York City in the 1940s, Mildred "Millie" Dresselhaus was taught that there were only three career options open to women: secretary, nurse, or teacher. In Carbon Queen, science writer Maia Weinstock describes how, with curiosity and drive, Dresselhaus defied expectations and forged a career as a pioneering scientist and engineer. Dresselhaus made highly influential discoveries about the properties of carbon and other materials and helped reshape our world in countless ways—from electronics to aviation to medicine to energy.

We all have a lot to learn from the diary of a teacher named Esmé Raji Codell, an educator who has struggled to maintain individuality in the face of bureaucracy and whose defiant stand against mediocrity will reverberate in companies as well as classrooms everywhere.

Author Leslie Lehr wants to talk about boobs. She’s gone from size AA to DDD and everything between, from puberty to motherhood, enhancement to cancer, and beyond. And she’s not alone - these are classic life stages for women today. At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob’s Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman’s body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women’s liberation movement and moving to the current feminist dialogue and what it means to be a woman.

In this audiobook, Dr. Olayiwola, a world-renowned expert and leader in medicine and motivation, draws on her personal experiences and those of many successful minority women professionals (MWPs) and outlines the 10 essential ingredients of their secret sauce.