A Good Woman


Book Description

From the glittering ballrooms of Manhattan to the fires of World War I, #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel takes us on an unforgettable journey in this spellbinding tale of war, loss, history, and one woman’s unbreakable spirit. . . . Nineteen-year-old Annabelle Worthington was born into a life of privilege, raised amid the glamour of New York society, with glorious homes on Fifth Avenue and in Newport, Rhode Island. But everything changed on a cold April day in 1912, when the sinking of the Titanic shattered her family and her privileged world forever. Finding strength within her grief, Annabelle pours herself into volunteer work, nursing the poor, igniting a passion for medicine that would shape the course of her life. But for Annabelle, first love, and a seemingly idyllic marriage, will soon bring more grief—this time caused by the secrets of the human heart. Betrayed, and pursued by a scandal she does not deserve, Annabelle flees New York for war-ravaged France, hoping to lose herself in a life of service. There, in the heart of the First World War, in a groundbreaking field hospital run by women, Annabelle finds her true calling, working as an ambulance medic on the front lines, studying medicine, saving lives. And when the war ends, Annabelle begins a new life in Paris—now a doctor, a mother, her past almost forgotten . . . until a fateful meeting opens her heart to the world she had left behind. Finding strength in the most unlikely of friendships, pulling together the broken fragments of her life, Annabelle will return to New York one more time—this time as a changed woman, a woman of substance, infused with life’s experience, building a future filled with hope . . . out of the rich soil of the past. Filled with breathtaking images and historical detail, Danielle Steel’s novel introduces one of her most unique and fascinating characters: Annabelle Worthington, a remarkable woman, a good woman, a true survivor who triumphs against overwhelming odds. For Annabelle’s story is more than compelling fiction, it is a powerful celebration of life, dignity, and courage—and a testament to the human will to survive.




A Decent Woman


Book Description

Ponce, Puerto Rico, at the turn of the century: Ana Belen Opaku, an Afro-Cuban born into slavery, is a proud midwife with a tempestuous past. After testifying at an infanticide trial, Ana is forced to reveal a dark secret from her past, but continues to hide an even more sinister one. Pitted against the parish priest, Padre Vicente, and young Doctor Hector Rivera, Ana must battle to preserve her twenty-five year career as the only midwife in La Playa. Serafina is a respectable young widow with two small children, who marries an older, wealthy merchant from a distinguished family. A crime against Serafina during her last pregnancy forever bonds her to Ana in an ill-conceived plan to avoid a scandal and preserve Serafina's honor. Set against the combustive backdrop of a chauvinistic society, where women are treated as possessions, A Decent Woman is the provocative story of these two women as they battle for their dignity and for love against the pain of betrayal and social change.




The Love of a Good Woman


Book Description

In eight stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes—the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met—the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her—she must count on herself. Some choices are made—in a will, in a decision to leave home—with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus—from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.




The Tactical Guide to Women


Book Description

The Tactical Guide to Women delivers a solid plan for allowing the right women into your life, and keeping the wrong ones at a safe distance.




The Good Women of China


Book Description

When Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to “open up” China took root in the late 1980s, Xinran recognized an invaluable opportunity. As an employee for the state radio system, she had long wanted to help improve the lives of Chinese women. But when she was given clearance to host a radio call-in show, she barely anticipated the enthusiasm it would quickly generate. Operating within the constraints imposed by government censors, “Words on the Night Breeze” sparked a tremendous outpouring, and the hours of tape on her answering machines were soon filled every night. Whether angry or muted, posing questions or simply relating experiences, these anonymous women bore witness to decades of civil strife, and of halting attempts at self-understanding in a painfully restrictive society. In this collection, by turns heartrending and inspiring, Xinran brings us the stories that affected her most, and offers a graphically detailed, altogether unprecedented work of oral history.




Landscape for a Good Woman


Book Description

This book is about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don't quite work. It has a childhood at its centre - my childhood, a personal past - and it is about the disruption of that fifties childhood by the one my mother had lived out before me, and the stories she told about it.' Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and her daughter and two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism. 'Provocative and quite dazzling in its ambitions. . . Beautifully written, intellectually compelling'.' Judith Walkowitz 'Carolyn Steedman's 1950s South London childhood was shaped by her mother's longing: "What she actually wanted were real things, real entities, things she materially lacked, things that a culture and a social system withheld from her... When the world didn't deliver the goods, she held the world to blame." When Carolyn Steedman grows up and begins to look for reflections of her and her mother's lives in history, theory, and literature, she finds that "the tradition of cultural criticism that has employed working-class lives, and their rare expression in literature, has made solid and concrete the absence of psychological individuality - of subjectivity." Through an in-depth comparison of personal experience and prevailing political and social science theory on the psychology and attitudes of working-class people, Landscape for a Good Woman challenges an intellectual tradition that denies "its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis." In this poignantly written and thoroughly researched work, the common theoretical conclusion that the survival struggles of working-class people precludes the time necessary for more genteel "elaboration of relationships" is shot full of delightfully life-affirming holes.' - --From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen.




Cat Power


Book Description

How Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, Survived Herself–and Became the Indie Rock Queen. Chan Marshall’s stark lyrics, minimal arrangements,and wounded, smoky vocals, were an instant indie hit in the nineties–but her mental instability nearly derailed her career. How this sensitive but headstrong Georgian daughter of an unstable mother and a relatively unknown musician father–managed to make it big, burn out, and rise up again to become not only the darling of the indie music scene but also a fashion and Hollywood icon is the fabric of this irresistible story. Covering her musical beginnings in the south and her booze-soaked rise to fame in New York City to her eventual breakdown and subsequent reclamation of herself and her music, Cat Power delves into the soul of this fragile but ferociously gifted young talent. With seven albums behind her, the hottest designers clamoring to dress her, and perpetually sold-out venues, Marshall is at the height of her career–a perfect vantage point from which to look at her notorious and intriguing history. From interviews with her family, musicians such as Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Dave Grohl, and Jack White, past loves like Bill Callahan and Vincent Gallo, and current friends such as Karl Lagerfeld and Wong Kar-Wai, Elizabeth Goodman gives us the real Chan Marshall–the little girl, the woman, the artist.




How to be a Woman


Book Description

1913 - Suffragette throws herself under the King's horse. 1969 - Feminists storm Miss World. NOW - Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool and demands to know why pants are getting smaller. There's never been a better time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven't been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain... Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should you get Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina? Why does your bra hurt? And why does everyone ask you when you're going to have a baby? Part memoir, part rant, Caitlin Moran answers these questions and more in How To Be A Woman - following her from her terrible 13th birthday ('I am 13 stone, have no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me') through adolescence, the workplace, strip-clubs, love, fat, abortion, TopShop, motherhood and beyond.




A Devil and a Good Woman, Too


Book Description

The first full-scale biography of the South Carolina writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize follows her pioneering work as a chronicler of the collapse of Southern plantation life and its effect on African Americans. UP.




Good Woman


Book Description

Finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry A landmark collection by National Book Award-winning poet Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 includes the four poetry collections that launched Clifton’s career—Good Times, Good News About the Earth, An Ordinary Woman, and Two-Headed Woman—as well as her haunting prose memoir, Generations. In honor of the 30th anniversary of Lucille Clifton's Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection and memoir, Good Woman is now available for the first time as a deluxe eBook edition. Enhanced with previously unpublished photographs from the Lucille Clifton Estate and a special foreword by Aracelis Girmay, this eBook is a must-have for longtime Clifton fans and newcomers alike.