Showing results by publisher "She Writes Press" in All Categories

With females making up just five percent of the world's pilots, this memoir crosses genres to combine aviation history, the author's journey from unwanted child to successful pilot, and the feminist experience, and will appeal to multiple aviation communities.

In the not-so-distant future, organs can be re-grown from a handful of stem cells. Even the most complex organ of all can be reproduced in the lab with nearly perfect accuracy. Nearly. Spurred by personal tragedy, scientist William Dalal works feverishly to improve the lives of brain regeneration patients. For every success however, there is a consequence, and the question arises in his mind: Are they worth it?

It's 1942. Cynical young gossip columnist Jane Benjamin joins FDR’s Office of War Information propaganda unit, aiming to replace big league gossip queen Hedda Hopper and get syndicated across the country. Jane scours the shipyard for a picture perfect Wendy-the-Welder poster girl to boost ship production by coaxing women into the workforce and to get her own name on newspapers everywhere. But when two top candidates die on the job, Jane’s got to choose between personal ambition and service, before the murderer kills another woman welder and America’s best chance of winning the war.

With sisterhood providing the moxie, Denise took on leadership positions not common for women at the time: playwright, stage director, producer, and administrative/artistic director. But, in the end, the most important thing her time with Les Nickelettes taught her was the power of female friendship.

At the age of four, a little girl stands on a cold, windy railroad platform in Wichita, Kansas, watching a train take her mother away. For the rest of her life, her mother will be an only occasional—and always troubled—visitor who denies her the love she longs for. Linda Joy Myers’s compassionate, gripping, and soul-searching memoir tells the story of three generations of daughters who, though determined to be different from their absent mothers, ultimately follow in their footsteps, recreating a pattern that they yearn to break.

It’s the summer of 2017 in Wellington Beach, California, a suburban coastal town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices—divisions that change the lives of five neighbors as they search for home and community in a neighborhood where no one can agree who belongs.

In 1957, when Amy Turner was four-years-old, her father had to be talked down from a hotel ledge by a priest. The story of his attempted suicide received nationwide press coverage, and he spent months in a psychiatric facility before returning home. From then on, Amy constantly worried about him for reasons she didn't yet fully understand, triggering a pattern of hypervigilance that would plague her into adulthood.

Part culinary memoir and part travelogue, Carole Bumpus gathered this compilation of intimate interviews, conversations, stories, and traditional family recipes (cuisine pauvre) in the kitchens of French families as she traveled throughout the countryside. Travel with her through Champagne caves/wineries and historic cathedrals, local farmers’ markets, ancient potters’ guilds, and restaurant kitchens with wood-fire ovens.

When Terry Repak and her husband moved to West Africa with two small children at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, she seized the opportunity to connect with people of other cultures and bear witness to the ravages of the disease. Circling Home chronicles the adventures and challenges of raising children overseas and trying to find home in countries as diverse as Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Switzerland. Her memoir spotlights the complexity, struggles, and profound lessons at the heart of the expat journey.

In 1660, Amsterdam is the trading and map-printing capital of the world. Anneke van Brug is one of the colorists paid to enhance black-and-white maps for a growing number of collectors. Her artistic talent brings her to the attention of the Blaeu printing house, and she begins to color for a rich merchant, Willem de Groot. But Anneke is not content to simply embellish the work of others; she longs to create maps of her own. Cartography, however, is the domain of men - so it is in secret that she borrows the notes her father made on a trip to Africa in 1642 and sets about designing a new map.

As a lonely girl coming of age in the 1970s, Liz has every reason to believe her eighth-grade teacher is in love with her. Because the sex isn’t physically violent and is wrapped in a message of love, she learns to exchange sex for attention. But years later, as an adult, emotional closeness eludes Liz. Even after marrying a sensitive, caring man, she is walled off. Struggling through confusing years, she believes something is deeply wrong with her.

Perfect for listeners moved by Between Two Kingdoms, this life-affirming memoir of a young woman's sudden autoimmune kidney failure reveals a resilient journey of chronic illness, unfailing love, and moving forward with joy.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil, choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors.

Covering seven decades of living, traveling, and growing, Does My Voice Matter? follows James’ journey of self-discovery and authenticity as she gradually recognizes that she has a voice—and learns how to use it. She uses her own life experiences as a backdrop for her exploration of how the voice is used as a tool of engagement.

In 1998, fiery Eleanor “Els” Gordon thought the new century would find her married to her childhood soul mate, rejuvenating her family’s Scottish Highlands estate, and finally earning a managing director title at her investment bank. Maybe she’d even have the courage to discover why her estranged mother ran home to Italy 30 years earlier.

In this unflinching and riveting coming-of-age memoir, Patricia Grayhall battles sexism in a male-dominated profession. She plunges into a life that is never boring—and certainly never without passion. Tossed around in the rough seas of medical training, chronically exhausted and emotionally drained, Patricia chafes at the toxic masculinity of the culture of medicine facing many of the same issues women face in male-dominated fields today.

Andrea Hoffman is an overeducated, underemployed, and unmotivated recent college graduate until a harrowing robbery blasts her out of her funk and into a job in the finance world of early 1980s Chicago. At first, it seems like a bad fit. But the world of finance has its own weird charm, and she grows increasingly fascinated by the strange language of trading, the complexity of the stock market, and her colleagues, who navigate it all with ruthless confidence. Even though she has two strikes against her—Jewish and female—Andrea’s quick wit and strong work ethic propels her.

Leaving home was not easy for Irene Sardanis. Born into a Greek family in the Bronx in the 1940s, she was the youngest child of an unhappy mother and a father who drank, gambled, and enjoyed other women—and then, when Irene was 11, abandoned the family altogether. Irene's older siblings found a way out, but Irene was trapped, held hostage to her mother's rage and despair. When she finally escaped her mother as a young adult, she married a Greek man who controlled and dominated her just like her mother always had. But Irene wasn't ready to let her story end there.

On the brink of World War II, Jane Benjamin wants to have it all. By day she hustles as a tomboy cub reporter. By night, she struggles to raise her toddler sister, Elsie, and protect her from their mother. But Jane’s got a plan: she’ll become the San Francisco Prospect’s first gossip columnist and make enough money to care for Elsie. Jane finagles her way to the women’s championship at Wimbledon, starring tennis phenom Tommie O’Rourke. But then she witnesses Edith “Coach” Carlson, Tommie’s closest companion, drop dead in the stands of apparent heart attack.

Years later, Willa Goodfellow revisits this account of her antidepressant-induced hypomania that hijacked a Costa Rican vacation and tells the rest of the story: the wrong medications, an overlooked diagnosis of bipolar 2, and finally a path to recovery. Prozac Monologues: A Voice from the Edge is a book within a book, part memoir of misdiagnosis and part self-help guide about the bipolar spectrum. This edgy and comedic collection of essays offers information about a mood disorder frequently mistaken for major depression as well as resources for recovery. Plus, Costa Rica.