Download or read book A Singular Woman written by Janny Scott and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune and the Story of My Father comes a major publishing event: an unprecedented look into the life of the woman who most singularly shaped Barack Obama-his mother. Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, "what is best in me." Here is the missing piece of the story. Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham's friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman's inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today. Dunham's story moves from Kansas and Washington state to Hawaii and Indonesia. It begins in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and culminates in the present, with her son as our president- something she never got to see. It is a poignant look at how character is passed from parent to child, and offers insight into how Obama's destiny was created early, by his mother's extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering. Finally, it is a heartbreaking story of a woman who died at age fifty-two, before her son would go on to his greatest accomplishments and reflections of what she taught him.
Download or read book Singular Women written by Kristen Frederickson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-03-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary art historians - all of them women - probe the dilemmas and complexities of writing about the woman artist, past and present. These 13 essays address the work and history of specific artists, beginning with the Renaissance and ending with the present day.
Download or read book Women of Singular Beauty written by and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of Chanel haute couture photographed by one of fashion's most acclaimed hotographers. As the fashion cognoscenti would say, there's magic in true haute couture--the creations that entail thousands of hours of handwork, crafting, embellishing. In an exclusive shoot with the house of Chanel, photographer Cathleen Naundorf gained rare access to their physical archives to photograph couture gowns against theatrical backdrops. The result: a book of ethereal, cinematic photographs that capture the exquisiteness of the ensembles and the magical allure of haute couture. This is what sartorial dreams are made of. For more than two decades, Naundorf has used her expert photographic skills to pay homage to the haute couture aesthetic. Combining her experiences in travel, art, and photojournalism, Naundorf elaborately arranges each detail of her photographs, using storyboards and extensively researching the lighting, setting, backdrops, props, hairpieces, makeup, and design for every image. Each photograph is a singular vision suggesting romance, surrealism, exoticism, and above all else, fantasy.
Download or read book Barack Obama written by David Maraniss and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him, from Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, political commentator, and acclaimed biographer David Maraniss. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future. Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author’s classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.
Download or read book The Beneficiary written by Janny Scott and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR "[A] poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay…like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh."—The New Yorker A parable for the new age of inequality: part family history, part detective story, part history of a vanishing class, and a vividly compelling exploration of the degree to which an inheritance—financial, cultural, genetic—conspired in one person's self-destruction. Land, houses, and money tumbled from one generation to the next on the eight-hundred-acre estate built by Scott's investment banker great-grandfather on Philadelphia's Main Line. There was an obligation to protect it, a license to enjoy it, a duty to pass it on—but it was impossible to know in advance how all that extraordinary good fortune might influence the choices made over a lifetime. In this warmly felt tale of an American family's fortunes, journalist Janny Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming, unknowable father, Robert Montgomery Scott, and provides an incisive look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets. Some beneficiaries flourished, like Scott's grandmother, Helen Hope Scott, a socialite and celebrated horsewoman said to have inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in the play and Academy Award-winning film The Philadelphia Story. For others, including the author's father, she concludes, the impact was more complex. Bringing her journalistic talents, light touch, and crystalline prose to this powerful story of a child's search to understand a parent's puzzling end, Scott also raises questions about our new Gilded Age. New fortunes are being amassed, new estates are being born. Does anyone wonder how it will all play out, one hundred years hence?
Download or read book The Other Barack written by Sally H Jacobs and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barack Obama Sr., father of the American president, was part of Africa's "independence generation" and in 1959 it seemed his star would shine brightly. He came to the U.S. from Kenya and was given a university scholarship. While in the Hawaii, he met Ann Dunham in 1961, and his son Barack was born. He left his young family to gain a master's degree from Harvard. After that, Obama's life became progressively more complicated. He was a brilliant economist, yet never held the coveted government job he felt should have been his. He was a polygamist, an alcoholic, and an ardent African nationalist unafraid to tell truth to power at a time when that could get you killed. Father of eight, nurturer of none, he was an unlikely person to father the first African American president of the United States. Yet he was, like that son, a man moved by the dream of a better world. Now, thanks to dozens of exclusive new interviews, prodigious research, and determined investigation, Sally Jacobs tells his full story.
Download or read book Women on the Margins written by Natalie Zemon Davis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.
Download or read book Women Doing Life written by Lora Bex Lempert and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Women Doing Life, Lora Bex Lempert examines the carceral experiences of women serving life sentences, presenting a typology of the ways that life-sentenced women grow and self-actualize, resist prison definitions, reflect on and own their criminal acts, and ultimately create meaningful lives behind prison walls. Looking beyond the explosive headlines that often characterize these women as monsters, Lempert offers rare insight into this vulnerable, little studied population. Her gendered analysis considers the ways that women do crime differently than men and how they have qualitatively different experiences of imprisonment than their male counterparts."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Singular Existence written by Leslie Talbot and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Full of wise, witty and sardonic observations from the beloved blog SingularExistence.com - the definitive single person's rebuttal to the popular notion that a relationship is the only means to happiness. Drawing on personal experience, Leslie Talbot uses her own contrarian perspective to eviscerate the media fads, self-help quackery, chick lit formulae and bogus social science that plague the unpaired. Redefining the difference between alone and lonely, Talbot will appeal to smart women everywhere.
Download or read book The Woman Who Borrowed Memories written by Tove Jansson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NYRB Classics Original Tove Jansson was a master of brevity, unfolding worlds at a touch. Her art flourished in small settings, as can be seen in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and in her internationally celebrated cartoon strips and books about the Moomins. It is only natural, then, that throughout her life she turned again and again to the short story. The Woman Who Borrowed Memories is the first extensive selection of Jansson’s stories to appear in English. Many of the stories collected here are pure Jansson, touching on island solitude and the dangerous pull of the artistic impulse: in “The Squirrel” the equanimity of the only inhabitant of a remote island is thrown by a visitor, in “The Summer Child” an unlovable boy is marooned along with his lively host family, in “The Cartoonist” an artist takes over a comic strip that has run for decades, and in “The Doll’s House” a man’s hobby threatens to overwhelm his life. Others explore unexpected territory: “Shopping” has a post-apocalyptic setting, “The Locomotive” centers on a railway-obsessed loner with murderous fantasies, and “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories” presents a case of disturbing transference. Unsentimental, yet always humane, Jansson’s stories complement and enlarge our understanding of a singular figure in world literature.
Download or read book The Singular Pilgrim written by Rosemary Mahoney and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2004-05 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "enlightening but also very funny" (Paul Theroux) account of one woman's personal quest to find the roots of belief among modern religious pilgrims.
Download or read book Malina written by Ingeborg Bachmann and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (New York Times Book Review) In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion.
Download or read book Woman on the Edge of Time written by Marge Piercy and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1997-06-23 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow. Praise for Woman on the Edge of Time “This is one of those rare novels that leave us different people at the end than we were at the beginning. Whether you are reading Marge Piercy’s great work again or for the first time, it will remind you that we are creating the future with every choice we make.”—Gloria Steinem “An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral courage in contemporary society.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A stunning, even astonishing novel . . . marvelous and compelling.”—Publishers Weekly “Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”—Newsweek “Absorbing and exciting.”—The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Fierce and Fearless written by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book explores the life and politics of Patsy Takemoto Mink (1927-2002), a third generation Japanese American from Hawai'i, the first woman of color in Congress and the legislative champion of Title IX. Co-authored by her daughter, political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, and historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, this work discusses Mink's decades-long work for women's equality, civil rights, environmental humanism, and peace. The book considers Mink's policy and political commitments and contributions and explores how Mink's Pacific World view shaped her politics as a feminist, a civil rights advocate, an environmentalist, and a critic of U.S. militarism. From the late 19th century immigration story of Mink's forbears through Mink's early 21st century advocacy for social justice, this book offers new insights regarding intersectional legislative feminism and Pacific feminism, makes visible one woman's policy activism in the mainstream of U.S. politics, and brings much needed attention to a woman of color who profoundly shaped the politics of race, class, and gender in the second half of the 20th century"--
Download or read book The Great Believers written by Rebecca Makkai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by Amy Poehler “A page turner . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” —The New York Times Book Review A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. Named a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, The Seattle Times, Bustle, Newsday, AM New York, BookPage, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library and Chicago Public Library
Download or read book Do It Like a Woman written by Caroline Criado-Perez and published by Portobello Books. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doing anything 'like a woman' used to be an insult. Now, as the women in this book show, it means being brave, speaking out, and taking risks, changing the world one step at a time. Here, campaigner and journalist Caroline Criado-Perez introduces us to a host of pioneers, including a female fighter pilot in Afghanistan; a Chilean revolutionary; the Russian punks who rocked against Putin; and the Iranian journalist who uncovered her hair.
Download or read book Diana Vreeland The Modern Woman written by Alexander Vreeland and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first Vreeland book to focus on her three decades at Harper’s Bazaar, where the legendary editor honed her singular take on fashion. In 1936, Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Carmel Snow made a decision that changed fashion forever when she invited a stylish London transplant named Diana Vreeland to join her magazine. Vreeland created “Why Don’t You?”—an illustrated column of irreverent advice for chic living. Soon she was named the magazine’s fashion editor—a position that Richard Avedon later famously credited Vreeland with inventing. The troika of Snow, legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, and Vreeland formed a creative collaboration that continued Harper’s Bazaar’s dominance as America’s leading fashion magazine. As World War II changed women’s role in society, Vreeland’s love for fashion and endless imagination provided exciting, modern imagery for this new paradigm. This book covers Vreeland’s three-decade tenure at Bazaar, revealing how Vreeland reshaped the role of the fashion editor by introducing styling, creative direction, and visual storytelling. Her innovative perspective and creative working relationships with photographers such as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman, and Hoyningen-Huene brought the American woman into a modern world. Through more than 300 images from the magazine, this book shows how Vreeland’s work not only influenced her readership, but also forged the path for modern fashion storytelling that endures today.
