The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster—and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together.
In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis—the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark.
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An immersive, unforgettable, and eye-opening perspective on swimming—and on human behavior itself.
We swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. We swim for pleasure, for exercise, for healing. But humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not natural-born swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; now, in the twenty-first century, swimming is one of the most popular activities in the world.
Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool,
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Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt’s sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.
It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman’s Card Club;
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In the summer of 1969, Yale University, the Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating “one thousand male leaders” each year finally decided to open its doors to the nation’s top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women’s equality in education.
Or was it?
The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale’s imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer,
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A compelling reconstruction of the life of a black suffragist.
Born during the Civil War into a slave-holding family that included black, white, and Cherokee forebears, Adella Hunt Logan dedicated herself to advancing political and educational opportunities for the African American community. She taught at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, but also joined the segregated woman suffrage movement, passing for white in order to fight for the rights of people of color. As a wife, mother, scholar, and activist, Adella’s determination to challenge the draconian restraints of race and gender generated conflicts that precipitated her tragic demise.
Historian Adele Logan Alexander—Adella’s granddaughter—bridges the chasms that frustrate efforts to document the lives of those who traditionally have been silenced,
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From Heather Dune Macadam, the untold story of the 999 young, unmarried Jewish women who were tricked on March 25, 1942 into boarding the train that became the first official transport to Auschwitz. Timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and drawing on extensive interviews with survivors, historians, witnesses, and relatives of those first deportees, 999 is an important addition to Holocaust literature and women’s history.
On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months,
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