In 1914 Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya with her husband to run a coffee-farm. Instantly drawn to the land, she spent her happiest years there until the plantation failed. Karen Blixen was forced to return to Denmark in 1931 and it was there that she wrote this classic account of her experiences. A poignant farewell to her beloved farm, Out of Africa describes her strong friendships with the people of the area, her affection for the landscape and animals, and great love for the adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton. Written with astonishing clarity and an unsentimental intelligence, Out of Africa portrays a way of life that has disappeared for ever.

A poignant autobiography describes growing up in Carson City, Nevada, during the 1970s, the shattering effects of tragedy--loss, loneliness, mistreatment--on her family, and her own indomitable will to survive.

A memoir of a year in a large industrial Chinese city recounts the secret traditional bonding of Chinese women and presents individual stories about such women as one so desperate to leave China she will do so as a mail-order bride. 20,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo.

An internationally acclaimed novelist and journalist movingly chronicles her childhood in Rome during World War II, providing a rare account by a Catholic of Jewish persecution and Papal responsibility In 1937, Rosetta Loy was a privileged five-year-old growing up in the heart of the well-to-do Catholic intelligentsia of Rome. But her childhood world of velvet and lace, airy apartments, indulgent nannies, and summers in the mountains was also the world of Mussolini's fascist regime and the increasing oppression of Italian Jews. Loy interweaves the two Italys of her early years, shifting with powerful effect from a lyrical evocation of the many comforts of her class to the accumulation of laws stipulating where Jews were forbidden to travel and what they were not allowed to buy, eat, wear, and read. She reveals the willful ignorance of her own family as one by one their neighbors disappeared, and indicts journalists and intellectuals for their blindness and passivity. And with hard-won clarity, she presents a dispassionate record of the role of the Vatican and the Catholic leadership in the devastation of Italy's Jews. Written in crystalline prose, First Words offers an uncommon perspective on the Holocaust. In the process, Loy reveals one writer's struggle to reconcile her memories of a happy childhood with her adult knowledge that, hidden from her young eyes, one of the world's most horrifying tragedies was unfolding.

Erschütternder Tatsachenbericht der Autorin, die, aus einer persischen, politisch engagierten Familie stammend, 1981 von Islamisten verhaftet wurde, 9 Jahre im Gefängnis sass und dort menschliche Wärme und unmenschliche Grausamkeit erfuhr.

Vijf vrouwen trekken uit bevrijdingsdrang uit hun arme geboortestreek weg om het ergens anders niet veel beter te krijgen.

In the 1980s, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a small city in northern Italy that has existed since Roman times. Her search for a place for herself in a society that often seems closed to outsiders led Wilde-Menozzi to explore the pull between individualism and community, the role of women in both Parma's culture and her own Midwestern upbringing, and the powers and limits of language in the service of self knowledge, self expression, and artistic and political freedom. In doing so, she unearthed the extraordinary stories of remarkable Italians and remarkable women, including the Renaissance badessa Giovanna Piacenza, the fighting Donella Rossi Sanvitale, and her own indefatigable mother-in-law. No other book evokes so poignantly and profoundly the role of food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life and, by reflection, our own.

A victim of incest recounts her childhood and her attempts as an adult to lead a normal life