They were four women whom destiny threw together over a decade ago. Collectively, they experienced the extreme joys and deep sorrows that life offers up. From mundane moments to the dramatic and surreal, the authors have a history of six marriages, ten children, four stepchildren, six dogs, two miscarriages, two cats, a failed adoption, widowhood, and foster parenthood. They have built companies, lost companies, and sold companies. One of them was shot and left for dead on a tarmac in South America, and two lived through the deaths of spouses. Raising babies and teenagers together, they have known celebrity and success along with loneliness and self-doubt.
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Born in a rural village in 1940, Wangari Maathai left at a young age to be educated in a school run by Catholic missionaries, and went on to receive her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States. Returning to Kenya, she became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in East and Central Africa and to head the department of veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi. In Unbowed, she recounts the political and personal beliefs that led her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa, helping to restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages.
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In the latter half of the eleventh century, the renowned scholar Salomon ben Isaac (or Rashi) breaks with tradition by teaching each of his three daughters, Joheved, Miriam, and Rachel, the intricacies of the Talmud. When Miriam loses her betrothed and childhood study partner, Benjamin, she feels as if her life has come to an end. And yet familial and societal pressures demand that she move past his death and choose a husband. So when handsome Judah ben Natan appears in the French city of Troyes, seeking a wife who is both modest and a scholar, it appears as if fate,
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Through more than 100 personal experiences, this anthology illuminates how the practice of Nichiren Buddhism has changed people’s lives for the better. These first-person narratives—representing folks from all across the country of various ages and ethnic backgrounds—examine the challenges of daily life associated with health, relationships, career, and aging, and the ensuing experiences of hope, success, inspiration, and personal enlightenment that come about as a result of living as Nichiren Buddhists.
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In this enchanting story of love, marriage, and mutual understanding, few readers have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. Her early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy—who is quite the most handsome and eligible bachelor in the whole of English literature—is a misjudgment only matched in folly by Darcy’s arrogant pride. In Pride and Prejudice, first impressions give way to truer feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved.
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“At about three thirty a.m on June 22, 1986, someone entered, through an unlocked sliding-glass door, my father’s house on the outskirts of the central California farming town where he had grown up. The intruder took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed my father as he lay sleeping next to his third wife.”
So begins Rachel Howard’s memoir about her father’s unsolved murder, which happened when she was just ten years old. But from the start The Lost Night is about something much deeper and more complex than justice. Writing more than 15 years after her father’s bizarre death,
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