A random smattering of some hot titles having to do with women for the first week of Women’s History Month! There are a couple non-fiction titles and couple fiction titles; we think there’s a little something for everyone in this list! These titles are flying off the shelves, so make sure to request your copy today!
Half the sky : turning oppression to opportunity for women worldwide / Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
New York Times columnist Kristof and his wife, WuDunn, a former Times reporter, make a brilliantly argued case for investing in the health and autonomy of women worldwide. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century, they write, detailing the rampant gendercide in the developing world, particularly in India and Pakistan. Far from merely making moral appeals, the authors posit that it is impossible for countries to climb out of poverty if only a fraction of women (9% in Pakistan, for example) participate in the labor force. China’s meteoric rise was due to women’s economic empowerment: 80% of the factory workers in the Guangdong province are female; six of the 10 richest self-made women in the world are Chinese. The authors reveal local women to be the most effective change agents: The best role for Americans isn’t holding the microphone at the front of the rally but, rather, behind the scenes writing checks.
What French women know : about love, sex, and other matters of the heart and mind / Debra Ollivier.
Ollivier goes beyond familiar ooh-la-la stereotypes about French women, challenging cherished notions about sex, love, dating, marriage, motherhood, raising children, body politics, seduction, and flirtation. Less a how-to and more a how-not-to, What French Women Know offers a refreshing counterpoint to the stale love dogma of our times. Peppered with anecdotes from its Franco-American author and filled with provocative ideas from French sexperts, mistresses and maidens alike, it debunks longstanding myths, presenting savvy new thinking from an old sexy culture and more realistic, life-affirming alternatives from the land that knows how to love.
The women : a novel / T. Coraghessan Boyle.
The genius of Frank Lloyd Wright was both magnetic and cruel, as evidenced by the succession of failed marriages and hot-blooded affairs depicted in this biographic reimagining that drills into Wright mythology and the dark shadows of the American dream. The narrative moves backwards in time through the accounts of four women in Wrights life: Olgivanna, the steely, grounded dancer from Montenegro; Miriam, the drug-addled narcissist from the South; Kitty, the devoted first wife; and Mamah, the beloved and murdered soul mate and intellectual companion. But the novels centerpiece is Taliesin, Wrights Oz-like Wisconsin home. The tragedies that befall Taliesin—fires, brutality—serve as proxy for Wrights inner turmoil; his deeper stirrings surface only occasionally from behind Boyles oft-overbearing depiction of Wrights women. Its a lush, dense and hyperliterate book—in other words, vintage Boyle.
A short history of women : a novel / Kate Walbert.
Walbert—2004 National Book Award nominee for Our Kind—offers a beautiful and kaleidoscopic view of the 20th century through the eyes of several generations of women in the Townsend family. The story begins with Dorothy Townsend, a turn-of-the-century British suffragist who dies in a hunger strike. From Dorothy’s death, Walbert travels back and forth across time and continents to chronicle other acts of self-assertion by Dorothy’s female descendants. Dorothy’s daughter, Evelyn, travels to America after WWI to make her name in the world of science—and escape from her mother’s infamy. Decades later, her niece, also named Dorothy, has a late-life crisis and gets arrested in 2003 for taking photos of an off-limits military base in Delaware. The lives of these women reveal that although oppression of women has grown more subtle, Dorothy’s self-sacrifice reverberates through generations. Walbert’s look at the 20th century and the Townsend family is perfectly calibrated, intricately structured and gripping from page one.
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