Tag Archives: women
** The Favored Daughter by Fawzia Koofi
The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future is a memoir by the best-known Afghani woman politician, not so ably assisted by her co-author who seems to supply an awkward style and frequent syntax errors — … Continue reading
Filed under True story
* The Good Daughter by Jasmin Darznik
The Good Daughter is the story of the author’s family, centered on her mother and her maternal grandmother who both led sad driven by abusive marriages in a country, Iran, where there was little they could do to divorce and … Continue reading
Filed under True story
*** Art and Madness by Anne Roiphe
Art and Madness is a terrifying book. How can a memoir of a Smith College student who went on to marry, have a child, divorce, then remarry be terrifying? Because said woman lived in the late fifties and sixties where … Continue reading
Filed under True story
Slow Love by Dominique Browning
In Slow Love the author gets fired (strictly speaking, laid off, but the distinction doesn’t remove the sting) and finds herself at a loss to reconstruct a new life that does not revolve around her all-absorbing job, her now-grown sons, … Continue reading
Filed under True story
The Lonely Soldier by Helen Benedict
The Lonely Soldier tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq, a topic that could be very interesting. But right from the start the author hammers out statistics that are had to believe, such as 90% of female … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Catherine Schine
The Three Weissmanns of Westport is the lightweight and enjoyable story of an aging mother and her two daughters who find a home together when the father unexpectedly dumps her after a long marriage and turns her out of her … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples by Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy
Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples looks at how mothers with professional jobs accommodate jobs and children, a topic close to my heart — and indeed some of the stories were eerily close to home, as when a woman (and I … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow
I hesitate to recommend a book I had to struggle to read but here it is: The Dollmaker is Germinal or The Grapes of Wrath set in the war factories of WWII, and told from the point of view of … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
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 … Continue reading
Filed under True story
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, … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
