A major new biography of the politically powerful forerunner of Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton. Deeply researched and richly told, Florence Harding reveals the never-before-told story of First Lady Florence Harding's phenomenal rise to power. The daughter of an abusive father in small-town Ohio, mother at a young age to an illegitimate child, Florence Harding saw her escape in Warren Harding, and became the driving force behind his ascent to one of the most scandal-ridden presidencies in United States history.Preeminent First Ladies biographer Carl Sferrazza Anthony not only captures the drama of Florence Harding's personality, but he uses the White House to bring to life Jazz Age America -- a world of speakeasies and Miss America, Babe Ruth, Al Jolson, and the rise of Hollywood. He shows how Florence's friendship with Evalyn McLean, the morphine-addicted owner of the Hope Diamond and The Washington Post was one of the defining bonds in her public life. With newly unsealed medical information, Florence Harding finally unfolds the mystery of whether the First Lady poisoned the President, whose death occurred seventy-five years ago. Florence Harding is a fascinating and informative look at a lost chapter in American history.

In She Always Knew How, her wonderful new biography of legendary actress Mae West, acclaimed biographer Charlotte Chandler draws on a series of interviews she conducted with the star just months before her death in 1980. From their first meeting, where West held out a diamond-covered hand in greeting and lamented her interviewer's lack of jewels, to their farewell, where the star was still gamely offering advice on how to attract men, Mae West and Charlotte Chandler developed a warm rapport that glows on every page of this biography. Actress, playwright, screenwriter, and iconic sex symbol Mae West was born in New York in 1893. She created a scandal -- and a sensation -- on Broadway with her play Sex in 1926. Convicted of obscenity, she was sentenced to ten days in prison. She went to jail a convict and emerged a star. Her next play, Diamond Lil, was a smash, and she would play the role of Diamond Lil in different variations for virtually her entire film career. In Hollywood she played opposite George Raft, Cary Grant (in one of his first starring roles), and W. C. Fields, among others. She was the number one box-office attraction during the 1930s and saved Paramount Studios from bankruptcy. Her films included some notorious one-liners -- which she wrote herself -- that have become part of Hollywood lore: from "too much of a good thing can be wonderful" to "When I'm good, I'm very good. When I'm bad, I'm better." Her risqué remarks got her banned from radio for a dozen years, but behind the clever quips was Mae's deep desire, decades before the word "feminism" was in the news, to see women treated equally with men. She saw through the double standard of the time that permitted men to do things that women would be ruined for doing. Her cause was sexual equality, and she was shrewd enough to know that it was perhaps the ultimate battleground, the most difficult cause of all. In addition to her extensive interviews of Mae West, Chandler also spoke with actors and directors who worked with and knew the star, the man with whom she lived for the last twenty-seven years of her life, as well as her closest assistant at the end of her life. Their comments and insights enrich this fascinating book. She Always Knew How captures the voice and spirit of this unique actress as no other biography ever has.

Rosa Raisa (1893-1963) was legendary for her imposing, powerful, and wide-ranging voice as well as for her highly dramatic and emotionally stirring stage presence. A renowned star of the Chicago Opera, Raisa sang over 1,000 opera performances and concerts around the world. Held in high esteem by composers, conductors, and colleagues, she was Puccini's choice to create the lead roles in La rondine and Turandot. In this first biography of Raisa, Charles Mintzer provides a captivating and revealing portrait of a warm-hearted, generous artist whose career and complex personality were shaped by a life that crossed Jewish, Italian, and American cultural boundaries. Mintzer masterfully blends together his narrative with selections from Raisa's unpublished memoir and excerpts from contemporary critical reviews to present a well-rounded picture of this extraordinary woman and to trace her incredible journey to operatic fame. Born Raitza Burchstein in the Polish ghetto of Bialystok, she fled the 1906 pogroms and settled in Italy, where she studied under Barbara Marchisio at the Conservatory of Naples. After her operatic debut in 1913 as Leonora in Oberto during the Verdi centenary celebrations at Parma, she immediately joined Cleofonte Campanini's Chicago Opera and, renamed Rosa Raisa, achieved instant acclaim. Mintzer recounts her great successes in Chicago and on the company's national tours, as well as several seasons in South America, Mexico, and Italy. He discusses Raisa's most famous roles, describes the La Scala premiere of Turandot with Arturo Toscanini conducting, and offers fresh insights into her controversial Berlin engagement in a Tosca performance with Adolf Hitler in the audience. Mintzer also chronicles her marriage to baritone Giacomo Rimini, her illnesses and miscarriages, her financial collapse, her lifelong commitment to Jewish organizations and causes, and her puzzling burial in a Catholic cemetery. Lavishly illustrated with over fifty photographs, many of them previously unpublished, the book includes an authoritative chronology of all of Raisa's performances, her concert repertoire, and an annotated discography.

'Women Of Our Time' is published in association with the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. It features 75 portraits and biographies of women who have helped to define the twentieth century.

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.

"Fanny`s sister Adelaide, five years her junior, ranks among the finest of English-born opera singers. Making her debut in Venice in the exacting role of Norma - and singing nothing but a leading role thereafter - she won acclaim across Italy and at two brilliant seasons at London's Covent Garden before marrying the rich Edward Sartoris. The real love of her life, however, was Count Francis Thun, son of one of the great families of the Austrian Empire. Her love for Francis hovered over her marriage like a cloud." "Fanny never quite forgave Adelaide her success. As Fanny's own marriage disintegrated, her jealousy surged, and her biased appraisals of her sister's singing have unfairly tarnished Adelaide's opera reputation. In many ways, however, as Ms. Blainey shows, the sisters loved each other fiercely. Their complex and fascinating relationship is one of the major themes of this grand biography, based on extensive research and exclusive access to hundreds of family letters."--BOOK JACKET.

Told with honesty and sensitivity, a moving memoir by the daughter of Anne Morrow Lindbergh follows the last year in her mother's life as she describes Anne's battle following a series of debilitating strokes and her own feelings about having to care for an elderly parent.

"Lindbergh could hardly have found a more generous biographer."-The Los Angeles Times Book Review.

The female pilot who has won more than 125 air races and has been inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame describes her childhood dreams of flight, her struggles with sexism, her career as a trainer of flight students, and more.

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

"This beautifully crafted book is a landmark in literary and cultural studies. Kate Phillips brings together in this definitive life of Helen Hunt Jackson a variety of challenging issues-feminism, literary history, psychology, social history, biography, intellectual history, anthropology-and the result is a brilliant contribution to the entire field of American studies. "Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life" will have a broad and lasting impact on our understanding of American culture."--Sacvan Bercovitch, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature, Harvard University

The author shares the story of her youth and young adulthood in France prior to and following World War II, describing how she was sent to the French countryside pretending to be Catholic

A new Afterword by the author now accompanies the bestselling political memoir of all time, written by a wife, mother and one of the most formidable figures in the history of American politics.