Download or read book JELL O Girls written by Allie Rowbottom and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "gorgeous" (New York Times) memoir that braids the evolution of one of America's most iconic branding campaigns with the stirring tales of the women who lived behind its facade - told by the inheritor of their stories. In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years after that deal was struck, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same incurable cancer, a disease that had also claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse" and her looming mortality, Mary began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. Jell-O Girls is the liberation of that story. A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, Jell-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love and loss. In crystalline prose Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.
Download or read book Jell O written by Carolyn Wyman and published by Harvest Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a close-up look at the history of this popular fruit-flavored dessert, describing its marketing and sales strategies, detailing such offbeat uses for the product as JELL-O shots and JELL-O wrestling, and presenting a variety of common and unusual recipes.
Download or read book Aesthetica written by Allie Rowbottom and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a debut novel as radiant as it is caustic, a former influencer confronts her past—and takes inventory of the damages that underpin the surface-glamour of social media. At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity. Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the “black and white store,” peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She too is seeking rebirth. She’s about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica™, a procedure that will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self. Provided she survives the knife. But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of “woke” masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid. Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of “Instagram face,” delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #MeToo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities.
Download or read book The Book of Mormon Girl written by Joanna Brooks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From her days of feeling like “a root beer among the Cokes”—Coca-Cola being a forbidden fruit for Mormon girls like her—Joanna Brooks always understood that being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints set her apart from others. But, in her eyes, that made her special; the devout LDS home she grew up in was filled with love, spirituality, and an emphasis on service. With Marie Osmond as her celebrity role model and plenty of Sunday School teachers to fill in the rest of the details, Joanna felt warmly embraced by the community that was such an integral part of her family. But as she grew older, Joanna began to wrestle with some tenets of her religion, including the Church’s stance on women’s rights and homosexuality. In 1993, when the Church excommunicated a group of feminists for speaking out about an LDS controversy, Joanna found herself searching for a way to live by the leadings of her heart and the faith she loved. The Book of Mormon Girl is a story about leaving behind the innocence of childhood belief and embracing the complications and heartbreaks that come to every adult life of faith. Joanna’s journey through her faith explores a side of the religion that is rarely put on display: its humanity, its tenderness, its humor, its internal struggles. In Joanna’s hands, the everyday experience of being a Mormon—without polygamy, without fundamentalism—unfolds in fascinating detail. With its revelations about a faith so often misunderstood and characterized by secrecy, The Book of Mormon Girl is a welcome advocate and necessary guide.
Download or read book Low Country written by J. Nicole Jones and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From horse thieves to hurricanes, from shattered Southern myths to fractured family ties, from Nashville to Myrtle Beach to Miami, Low Country is a lyrical, devastating, fiercely original memoir" of one family's changing fortunes in the Low Country of South Carolina (Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost). J. Nicole Jones is the only daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, a family that grew rich building the hotels and seafood restaurants that draw tourists to Myrtle Beach. But at home, she is surrounded by violence and capriciousness: a grandfather who beats his wife, a barman father who dreams of being a country music star. At one time, Jones's parents can barely afford groceries; at another, her volatile grandfather presents her with a fur coat. After a girlhood of extreme wealth and deep debt, of ghosts and folklore, of cruel men and unwanted spectacle, Jones finds herself face to face with an explosive possibility concerning her long-abused grandmother that she can neither speak nor shake. And through the lens of her own family's catastrophes and triumphs, Jones pays homage to the landscapes and legends of her childhood home, a region haunted by its history: Eliza Pinckney cultivates indigo, Blackbeard ransacks the coast, and the Gray Man paces the beach, warning of Hurricane Hazel.
Download or read book Cooking Lessons written by Sherrie A. Inness and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meatloaf, fried chicken, Jell-O, cake--because foods are so very common, we rarely think about them much in depth. The authors of Cooking Lessons however, believe that food is deserving of our critical scrutiny and that such analysis yields many important lessons about American society and its values. This book explores the relationship between food and gender. Contributors draw from diverse sources, both contemporary and historical, and look at women from various cultural backgrounds, including Hispanic, traditional southern White, and African American. Each chapter focuses on a certain food, teasing out its cultural meanings and showing its effect on women's identity and lives. For example, food has often offered women a traditional way to gain power and influence in their households and larger communities. For women without access to other forms of creative expression, preparing a superior cake or batch of fried chicken was a traditional way to display their talent in an acceptable venue. On the other hand, foods and the stereotypes attached to them have also been used to keep women (and men, too) from different races, ethnicities, and social classes in their place.
Download or read book Cold Hands Warm Heart written by Jill Wolfson and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dani was born with her heart on the wrong side of her body. In her fifteen years of life, she's had more doctor's appointments, X-rays, and tests, and eaten more green hospital Jell-O than she cares to think about. Fourteen-year-old Amanda is a competitive gymnast, her body a small package of sleek muscles, in perfect health. The two girls don't know each other, don't go to the same school, don't have any friends in common. But their lives are about to collide. Acclaimed author Jill Wolfson tackles this fascinating story with her trademark honesty and wit.
Download or read book Playing with Boys written by Alisa Valdes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Latin-American women in their late twenties, including an actress, a suburban mother, and a music manager, take Los Angeles by storm in their shared quest to find healthy relationships and success in a cutthroat city.
Download or read book The Gallery of Regrettable Food written by James Lileks and published by Crown. This book was released on 2001 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipes and food photography from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s assembled with humorous commentary.
Download or read book Big Girl A Novel written by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award A Phenomenal Book Club Pick TIME • Best Books of the Month New York Times • Editors’ Choice Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year by Vulture, Goodreads, Essence, Ms. Magazine, and SheReads.com An extraordinary debut novel shot through with remarkable nuance and tenderness, Big Girl traces the intergenerational hungers of the profoundly lovable Malaya Clondon. “Alive with delicious prose and the cacophony of ’90s Harlem, Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas, who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame.” —Janet Mock Malaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church’s stuffy basement community center. A quietly inquisitive eight-year-old struggling to suppress her insatiable longing, she would much rather paint alone in her bedroom, or sneak out with her father for a sampling of Harlem’s forbidden street foods. For Malaya, the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are compounded by the high expectations passed down over generations from her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a painfully proper professor struggling to earn tenure at a prestigious university. But their relentless prescriptions—fad diets of cottage-cheese and sugar-free Jell-O, high-cardio African dance classes, endless doctors’ appointments—don’t work on Malaya. As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit neatly within the suffocating confines of a so-called “femininity” that holds no room for her body. She finds solace in the lyrical riffs of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, and in the support of her sensitive father, Percy; still, tensions at home mount as rapidly as Malaya’s weight. Nothing seems to help—until a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms. Exquisitely compassionate and clever, Big Girl is “filled with everyday people who, in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s gifted hands, show us the love and struggle of what it means to be inside bodies that don’t always fit with the outside world” (Jacqueline Woodson). In tracing the perils and pleasures of the inheritance that comes with being born, Sullivan pushes boundaries and creates an unforgettable portrait of Black womanhood in America.
Download or read book Anatomy of a Single Girl written by Daria Snadowsky and published by Ember. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sequel to Anatomy of a Boyfriend, in which college pre-med Dominique explores love and lust.
Download or read book What She Ate written by Laura Shapiro and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2017 One of NPR Fresh Air's "Books to Close Out a Chaotic 2017" NPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2017’s Great Reads “How lucky for us readers that Shapiro has been listening so perceptively for decades to the language of food.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air Six “mouthwatering” (Eater.com) short takes on six famous women through the lens of food and cooking, probing how their attitudes toward food can offer surprising new insights into their lives, and our own. Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives—social and cultural, personal and political. Yet most biographers pay little attention to people’s attitudes toward food, as if the great and notable never bothered to think about what was on the plate in front of them. Once we ask how somebody relates to food, we find a whole world of different and provocative ways to understand her. Food stories can be as intimate and revealing as stories of love, work, or coming-of-age. Each of the six women in this entertaining group portrait was famous in her time, and most are still famous in ours; but until now, nobody has told their lives from the point of view of the kitchen and the table. What She Ate is a lively and unpredictable array of women; what they have in common with one another (and us) is a powerful relationship with food. They include Dorothy Wordsworth, whose food story transforms our picture of the life she shared with her famous poet brother; Rosa Lewis, the Edwardian-era Cockney caterer who cooked her way up the social ladder; Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady and rigorous protector of the worst cook in White House history; Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, who challenges our warm associations of food, family, and table; Barbara Pym, whose witty books upend a host of stereotypes about postwar British cuisine; and Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan, whose commitment to “having it all” meant having almost nothing on the plate except a supersized portion of diet gelatin.
Download or read book Thousand Words written by Jennifer Brown and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: !--StartFragment-- Ashleigh's boyfriend, Kaleb, is about to leave for college, and Ashleigh is worried that he'll forget about her while he's away. So at a legendary end-of-summer pool party, Ashleigh's friends suggest she text him a picture of herself -- sans swimsuit -- to take with him. Before she can talk herself out of it, Ashleigh strides off to the bathroom, snaps a photo in the full-length mirror, and hits "send." But when Kaleb and Ashleigh go through a bad breakup, Kaleb takes revenge by forwarding the text to his baseball team. Soon the photo has gone viral, attracting the attention of the school board, the local police, and the media. As her friends and family try to distance themselves from the scandal, Ashleigh feels completely alone -- until she meets Mack while serving her court-ordered community service. Not only does Mack offer a fresh chance at friendship, but he's the one person in town who received the text of Ashleigh's photo -- and didn't look. Acclaimed author Jennifer Brown brings readers a gripping novel about honesty and betrayal, redemption and friendship, attraction and integrity, as Ashleigh finds that while a picture may be worth a thousand words . . . it doesn't always tell the whole story. !--EndFragment--
Download or read book Tastes Like War written by Grace M. Cho and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature A TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021 This evocative memoir of food and family history is "somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking... [and] a potent personal history" (Shelf Awareness). Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive. “An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation.” —Booklist (starred review) “A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Happy Like This written by Ashley Wurzbacher and published by Iowa Short Fiction Award. This book was released on 2019 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women--social scientists, linguists, speech therapists, plant physiologists, dancers--who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. Spanning a wide range of distinct perspectives, voices, styles, and settings, the ten shimmering stories in Happy Like This offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.
Download or read book Jell O Girls written by Allie Rowbottom and published by Large Print Press. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1899, the author's uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generation that followed enjoyed privilege--but were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years later, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with incurable cancer, the disease that claimed her own mother's life. Mary began researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed."--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Dinner Roles written by Sherrie A. Inness and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who cooks dinner in American homes? It's no surprise that “Mom” remains the overwhelming answer. Cooking and all it entails, from grocery shopping to chopping vegetables to clearing the table, is to this day primarily a woman's responsibility. How this relationship between women and food developed through the twentieth century and why it has endured are the questions Sherrie Inness seeks to answer in Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. By exploring a wide range of popular media from the first half of the twentieth century, including cookbooks, women's magazines, and advertisements, Dinner Roles sheds light on the network of sources that helped perpetuate the notion that cooking is women's work. Cookbooks and advertisements provided valuable information about the ideals that American society upheld. A woman who could prepare the perfect Jell-O mold, whip up a cake with her new electric mixer, and still maintain a spotless kitchen and a sunny disposition was the envy of other housewives across the nation. Inness begins her exploration not with women but with men-those individuals often missing from the kitchen who were taught their own set of culinary values. She continues with the study of juvenile cookbooks, which provided children with their first cooking lessons. Chapters on the rise of electronic appliances, ethnic foods, and the 1950s housewife all add to our greater understanding of women's evolving roles in American culinary culture.
