Professional Women

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Half Baked Idea by Olivia Potts. At the moment her mother died, Olivia Potts was baking a cake. She was trying to impress the man who would later become her husband. Meanwhile, 275 miles away, her mother was dying. In the grief-stricken months that followed, Olivia came home from her job as a criminal barrister miserable and tired, and baked soda bread, pizza, and chocolate banana cake. Even when it went badly (which was often), cooking brought her comfort.

In 1961, Wally Funk was among the Mercury 13, the first group of American pilots to pass the ‘Women in Space’ programme. Wally sailed through a series of rigorous physical and mental tests, her scores beating many of the male candidates, including those of John Glenn, the first American in orbit. But just one week before she was due to enter the final phase of training, the programme was abruptly cancelled. A combination of politics and prejudice meant that none of the women ever flew into space.

Fresh out of medical school, Linda D. Dahl was nervous to begin her surgical residency in the Bronx. Compounding the long hours and overwhelming workload, Dahl felt like a perpetual fish out of water. One night, at her husband’s urging, Dahl watched a boxing match between Shane Mosley and Oscar De La Hoya. Watching Mosley survive against the odds gave Dahl hope that she, too, could find her footing. Later, when she was in practice on the Upper East Side, Dahl received a phone call from the New York State Athletic Commission. They were looking for a fight doctor. Dahl accepted.

An emotionally honest account, Far Outside the Ordinary has been described by some as Steel Magnolias meets The Help. It chronicles the period in Prissy Elrod's life, when during a routine physical, her fifty-year-old husband is diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer and given less than a year to live. Never one to take no for an answer, and driven by hope and her strong faith, Prissy is determined to save her beloved husband and the father of their two daughters. She is a strong, tenacious woman who doesn't accept the diagnosis.

It’s the summer of 2005, and Mardi Jo Link’s dream of living the simple life has unraveled into debt, heartbreak, and perpetually ragged cuticles. She and her husband of nineteen years have just called it quits, leaving her with serious cash-flow problems and a looming divorce. More broke than ever, Link makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to hang on to her century-old farmhouse in northern Michigan and continue to raise her three boys on well water and wood chopping and dirt. Armed with an unfailing sense of humor and three resolute accomplices, Link confronts blizzards and foxes, learns about Zen divorce and the best way to butcher a hog, dominates a zucchini-growing contest and wins a year’s supply of local bread, masters the art of bargain cooking, wrangles rampaging poultry, and withstands any blow to her pride in order to preserve the life she wants.

Anna was living a normal life. She was ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. But then she started to develop worrying symptoms: her face felt like it was burning whenever she was in front of the computer. Soon this progressed to an intolerance of fluorescent light, then of sunlight itself. The reaction soon spread to her entire body.

Jennifer Ridha was enlisted to defend Cameron Douglas, the son of film actor Michael Douglas, in a federal drug-trafficking case. Beyond his celebrity, Cameron's case was complicated by the fact that he suffered from anxiety. As media scrutiny and the pressures of his case mounted, Cameron's anxiety worsened. When Jennifer's efforts to alleviate his condition through the proper channels fell flat, she agreed to illicitly smuggle in the antianxiety medication that the prison refused to dispense.

The powerful yet touching memoir of a Chinese-American woman and her grandmother by an extraordinarily talented author who has been compared to Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Leslie Li belongs to the illustrious Li family of Guilin, China. Her paternal grandfather, Li Zongren, was China's first elected vice president, to whom Chiang Kai-shek left control of the country when he fled to Formosa. Leslie's father was studying in the US when he met and married her American-born mother.

Full of hilarious observations about food, family, unemployment, romance, and the extremes of modern L.A., and featuring recipes as basic as Toasted Cheerios and as advanced as gâteau de crêpes, Bon Appétempt is sure to resonate with anyone who has tried and failed, and been all the better for it.

This is Nadina LaSpina's story - from her early years in her native Sicily, where she contracts polio as a baby, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness, to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her, and to her rebellion and her activism in the disability-rights movement.

Poche donne nella storia ebbero la possibilità di distinguersi nelle discipline scientifiche, considerate appannaggio maschile. La più nota, nella tarda antichità, fu senza dubbio Ipazia, scienziata e filosofa, nata ad Alessandria d'Egitto nel 370 d.C., inventrice di strumenti come il planisfero e l'astrolabio. Figlia del matematico Teone, e lei stessa primo matematico donna della storia, fu la più nota esponente alessandrina della scuola neoplatonica, circondata dal rispetto di allievi giunti da ogni angolo del mondo.

Growing up in a vegetarian family, Tara Austen Weaver never thought she’d stray. But as an adult, she found herself in poor health and, after trying cures of every kind, a doctor finally ordered her to eat meat. Warily, she ventured into the butcher shop, and as the man behind the counter wrapped up her first-ever chicken, she found herself intrigued. Eventually, he dared her to cook her way through his meat counter.

Dr. Catherine "Cathy" DeAngelis has shattered numerous glass ceilings in medicine for herself and generations of women she's mentored. Raised in 1940s hardscrabble Pennsylvania coal mining country, Cathy's unyielding determination and indomitable self-belief steamrolled medicine's entrenched sexism. In a life filled with "firsts," she was named the first woman editor-in-chief of JAMA - the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A lot happened while I was trying to get my Master's degree in Mathematics. I thought to share some of it with you, it will inspire you.

Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.

He Called Me Tin is a story of triumph and perseverance. From childhood distress to an attempt at suicide to being scarred by religion to being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis to the strife of racism and discrimination as a government employee to being assaulted and nearly kidnapped abroad, she has overcome in peace....

When 16-year-old Jessica Wragg applied for a job at her local farm shop in Derbyshire, England, she never expected to land a position behind the butchery counter. Wragg was younger than many of her colleagues by decades, and she was one of the few women on staff, struggling to earn her keep among colleagues who were reluctant to share the tricks of their trade with a novice. Breaking down carcasses by day, and studying animal anatomy by night, Wragg was soon hooked and determined to establish herself in an industry that is steeped in tradition, and often resistant to change.

BBC Breakfast's Dr Rosemary Leonard shares more incredible stories from her career as a GP. 'I'm in the wrong job,' I said to our practice nurse, 'I should definitely have been a detective.' For Dr Rosemary Leonard, a day in her GP's surgery is full of unexplained ailments and mysteries to be solved. From questions of paternity to apparently drug-resistant symptoms, these mysteries can sometimes take a while to get to the bottom of, especially when they are of a more intimate nature.

In The Accidental Entrepreneur, author Janine Allis shares the secrets and skills that took her from housewife to entrepreneur to head of a multinational corporation. As the founder of Boost Juice, Janine has journeyed from zero formal business training to leading a company with over 400 stores in 12 countries. This audiobook takes you down the long road that she travelled, including some quirky stops along the way, and gives you valuable insight into taking the alternative road to business success.

An outsider within her Jersey Shore family, Chef Rossi finds a home for her punk sensibilities inside the kitchen. When their high-school-age, punk, runaway daughter is found hosting a Jersey Shore hotel party, Rossi's parents feel they have no other choice: They ship her off to live with a Hasidic rabbi in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Within the confines of this restrictive culture, Rossi's big-city dreams take root.