“I hate wars and violence, but if they come then I don’t see why we women should just wave a proud good-bye and then knit them balaclavas.” —Nancy Wake, SOE agent
“I discovered how easy it was to make highly trained, professionally closemouthed patriots give away their secrets in bed.” —Betty Pack, agent with the British Secret Intelligence Service and the Office of Strategic Services
In a dramatically different tale of espionage and conspiracy in World War II, Shadow Warriors of World War II unveils the history of the courageous women who volunteered to work behind enemy lines.
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Winner of the 2016 Wellcome Prize, a neurologist’s insightful and compassionate look into the misunderstood world of psychosomatic disorders, told through individual case histories
It’s happened to all of us: our cheeks flush red when we say the wrong thing, or our hearts skip a beat when a certain someone walks by. But few of us realize how much more dramatic and extreme our bodies’ reactions to emotions can be. Many people who see their doctor have medically unexplained symptoms, and in the vast majority of these cases, a psychosomatic cause is suspected. And yet, the diagnosis of a psychosomatic disorder can make a patient feel dismissed as a hypochondriac,
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Born into the beautiful bedlam of downtown New York in the eighties, iO Tillett Wright came of age at the intersection of punk, poverty, heroin, and art. Darling Days is a provocative examination of culture and identity, of the instincts that shape us and the norms that deform us, and of the courage and resilience it takes to listen closely to your deepest self. When a group of boys refuse to let six-year-old, female-born iO play ball, iO instantly adopts a new persona, becoming a boy named Ricky. It is the start of a profound exploration of gender and identity through the tenderest years.
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Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions—poetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can’t go, it’s all paid for, just book a flight to Miami.
Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Bonefish are prized for their elusiveness and their tenacity. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose accuracy and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think,
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A brilliant cultural and personal exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility.
In The Art of Waiting, Belle Boggs eloquently recounts her realization that she might never be able to conceive. She searches the apparently fertile world around her—the emergence of thirteen-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo—for signs that she is not alone. Boggs also explores other aspects of fertility and infertility: the way longing for a child plays out in the classic Coen brothers film Raising Arizona;
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Smart women have always been able to achieve amazing things, even when the odds have been stacked against them. In Wonder Women, author Sam Maggs tells the stories of the brilliant, brainy, and totally rad women who broke barriers as scientists, engineers, mathematicians, doctors, inventors, spies, and more. She also includes interviews with modern-day women in STEM careers, an extensive bibliography, and a guide to women-centric science and technology organizations—all to show the many ways the geeky girls of today can help build the future.
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