Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

By the author of  The Glass Castle, Half Broke Horses is the story of her maternal grandmother, told as a novel for lack of detailed historical documents. It’s a wild story of a girl born in a dugout on the Texan prairie to poor and well-intentioned but not very effective parents, a girl who is [...]

When Everything Changed by Gail Collins

When Everything Changed tells the story of women in the US from 1960 to the present (including Hillary Clinton’s and Sarah Palin’s presidential campaigns. It’s a rather messy book that combines historical narratives and individual women’s stories, some puzzlingly mundane, but it reads very well, like the story of our moms, older sisters, and daughters. [...]

Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn

The sad book series continues: Half the Sky describes the many ways women, half the sky per our friend Mao Tse-Tung, are abused, exploited, and who die needlessly just because they are women. The book starts with a quote by Mark Twain that I loved (can Mark Twain have written all the bons mots he’s [...]

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

A Short History of Women tells the stories of five generations of women who share just a couple of first names, to the great confusion of the hapless reader (me). Note to self: do not name your daughter after your mother or worse, after yourself!
In any case some of the stories are quite captivating, and [...]

The Woman behind the New Deal by Kirstin Downey

How come nobody knows about Frances Perkins? The subject of  The Woman Behind the New Deal was FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the mastermind behind massive social programs including Social Security and Medicaid — and she came very, very close to pushing through a comprehensive health care insurance program, which only failed because of massive [...]

Herland by Charlotte Gilman

Herland’s subtitle is “A lost Feminist Utopian Novel” and the story is indeed contrived: three would-be explorers, men, find a small country hidden away in the mountains that is populated only by women (who apparently reproduce through parthenogenesis, one of the many unbelievable feature of the story.) they are welcome but keep imprisoned by the [...]

Getting to 50/50 by Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober

Getting to 50/50 makes the impassioned argument that marriages in which parents share work and family responsibilities equally work better for everyone involved. The authors only consider heterosexual marriages – it would have been quite interesting to contrast how gay couples approach this dilemma. They also write from the perspective of upper middle-class, even upper [...]

Emily Post by Laura Claridge

Emily Post is not an etiquette book: it’s the biography of the etiquette book author, from her birth in an upper class East Coast family through her unsuccessful marriage to a womanizing husband, against a backdrop of eerily familiar stock market crashes, and her final transformation into etiquette maven. The story is long and includes such [...]

Tears of the Desert by Halima Bashir

Halima Bashir grew up in Darfur, a very smart girl with a relatively well-to-do and forward-thinking father who believed his daughter should be educated and become a physician — even if it meant sending her away from the village for months at a time and even if her brothers would not be educated in the [...]

Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg

Fun book! Alex & Me is the story of the first scientifically-studied talking and thinking parrot, told by his geeky and passionate owner and chief scientist. The first chapter is strange: it’s a compendium of condolences she received after Alex’s death in 2007 and contains such gems as “My child died a few years ago and [...]