Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Women

My Disappearing Mother: A Memoir of Magic and Loss is far more than a memoir on the devastation that comes with dementia, a cognitive impairment that affects fifty-five million people worldwide. Finnamore beautifully chronicles her mother's rich and varied life journey, from her birth in Puerto Rico during the height of the Depression to ferrying to the United States, in hopes of a better life. On U.S. soil, her mother, Bunny, started working as a performer for enlisted men, then became a secretary, and eventually a professional clairvoyant.

Using Szold's copious letters, diaries, and essays, along with other archival documents, Francine Klagsbrun traces Szold's life and legacy with an eye to uncovering the person behind the Zionist icon. She reveals Szold as a complex human being who had to cope with controversy and criticism, a workaholic with an outsized sense of duty, and an idealist who fought for her beliefs even as she questioned her own abilities. With deep insight, Klagsbrun introduces listeners to this extraordinary woman, whose impact on women's lives as well as on education and health systems still resonates.

The Orchard is a poignant memoir of a young woman's single-handed struggle to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression. Discovered by the author's daughter after the author's death, it tells the story of Adele "Kitty" Robertson, young and energetic, but unprepared by her Radcliffe education for the rigors of apple farming in those bitter years of the early 1930s. Alone at the end of a country road, with only a Great Dane for company, plagued by debts, broken machinery, and killing frosts, Kitty revives the old orchard after years of neglect.

In the pantheon of American modernists, few figures loom larger than Martha Graham. One of the greatest choreographers ever to live, Graham pioneered a revolutionary dance technique—primal, dynamic, and rooted in the emotional life of the body—that upended traditional vocabulary and shaped generations of dancers and choreographers across the globe. Over her sweeping career, she founded what is now the oldest dance company in the country and produced nearly two hundred ballets, many of them masterpieces.

All fans of Jane Austen everywhere believe themselves to be best friends with the beloved author and this book shines a light on what it meant to be exactly that. Jane Austen's Best Friend: The Life and Influence of Martha Lloyd offers a unique insight into Jane's private inner circle. Through this heartwarming examination of an important and often overlooked person in Jane's world, we uncover the life-changing force of their friendship.

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905-1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a "sex and race discriminating world." Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.

Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama's governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she became increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her.

The Second Half explores how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world to interview women about their lives. She asked them what they learned in the first half that was helpful in the second, and what advice they would give to younger women. Their revealing and inspiring stories are enlightening for all listeners.

Born into one of Britain's most famous activist families, Sylvia Pankhurst was a natural rebel. A free spirit and radical visionary, history placed her in the shadow of her famous mother, Emmeline, and elder sister, Christabel. Yet artist Sylvia Pankhurst was the most revolutionary of them all. Sylvia found her voice fighting for votes for women, imprisoned and tortured in Holloway prison more than any other suffragette. But the vote was just the beginning of her lifelong defense of human rights.

In the late 1960s, Patsy Channing, a stunningly beautiful young woman, was suspended from the venerable Mississippi State College for Women for breach of conduct. The resulting scandal reached all the way to the Columbus courthouse, and the press ate it up. But Patsy's story starts long before that, living with a preoccupied and troubled mother in Memphis, Tennessee. Music becomes her ticket out and a vehicle for the one thing she covets most—a chance to be crowned Miss America. In Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen, Julie Hines Mabus provides a peek into that world.

Margaret Kennedy was an acclaimed novelist and playwright best-known for The Constant Nymph. In this autobiographical account, taken from her war diaries, she conveys the tension, frustration, and bewilderment of the progression of the war, and the terror of knowing that the worst is to come, but not yet knowing what the worst will be. English bravery, confusion, stubbornness, and dark humor provide the more hopeful side of her experiences, in which she and her children move from Surrey to Cornwall, to sit out the war amidst a quietly efficient Home Guard and the most scandalous rumors.

Women of the American Revolution explores the trials of war and daily life for women in the United States during the War of Independence. What challenges were caused by the division within communities as some stayed loyal to the king and others became patriots? How much choice did women have as their loyalties were assumed to be that of their husbands or fathers? The lives of women of the American Revolution will be examined through an intimate look at some significant women of the era.

Bernardine Szold Fritz arrived in Shanghai in 1929 to marry her fourth husband. Only thirty-three years old, she found herself in a time and place like no other. Political intrigue and scandal lurked on every street corner. Art Deco cinemas showed the latest Hollywood flicks, while dancehall owners and jazz musicians turned Shanghai into Asia's top nightlife destination. Yet from the night of their wedding, Bernardine's new husband did not live up to his promises. Instead of feeling sorry for herself or leaving Shanghai, Bernardine decided to make a place for herself.

In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy's writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.

When some of America's military men are captured or go missing during the Vietnam War, a small group of military wives become their champions. Never had families taken on diplomatic roles during wartime, nor had the fate of our POWs and missing men been a nationwide concern. In cinematic detail, authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray plunge you directly into the political maneuvering the women navigated, onto the international stage they shared with world leaders, and through the landmark legacy they created.

Imagine sitting with an esteemed writer on his or her front porch somewhere in the world and swapping life stories. Dr. Wayne Flynt got the opportunity to do just this with Nelle Harper Lee. In a friendship that blossomed over a dozen years starting when Lee relocated back to Alabama after having had a stroke, Flynt and his wife Dartie became regular visitors at the assisted living facility that was Lee's new home. And there the conversation began, with an invitation to "Come in, sit down, and stay a while."

Anya Liftig grew up with a foot in two very different worlds: While her mother's upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her "holler rat," her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. Anya spent school years in affluent Connecticut and summers in the holler. Shaped by the experience, she would go on to win a scholarship to Yale and become an acclaimed artist, using provocative performances to explore the contradictions and unanswered questions of her life.

In 1993, U.S. women earned the right to fly in combat, but the full story of how it happened is largely unknown. The Fly Girls Revolt chronicles the actions of a band of women who overcame decades of discrimination and prevailed against bureaucrats, chauvinists, anti-feminists, and even other military women. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with women who served in the 1970s and 1980s, and her personal experiences in the Air Force, Eileen Bjorkman weaves together a tale of the women who fought for the right to enter combat and be treated as equal partners in the U.S. military.

In August 1939, Alice Marble graced the cover of Life magazine, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt. She was a glamorous worldwide celebrity, having that year won singles, women's doubles, and mixed doubles tennis titles at both Wimbledon and the US Open, then an unprecedented feat. Yet today one of America's greatest female athletes and most charismatic characters is largely forgotten. Queen of the Court places her back on center stage.

With the success of the Wonder Woman movies and the results following the outcry of the #MeToo movement, now is the time to highlight the female influences in film history previously left unheard!