Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged biography

American Women Leaders: 1,560 Current Biographies

American Women Leaders is an ultimate resource of all things women. If you consider yourself a feminist or are interested in women’s empowerment, this is a great coffee table book to own. American Women Leaders features biographies of over 1,500 women who are positively impacting others.

Searching for Tamsen Donner

Westward expansion meets the women’s movement in Gabrielle Burton’s Searching for Tamsen Donner, a memoir about a mother’s journey West in the path of the doomed Donner Party pioneers of 1846-7. Most people associate the Donner Party legacy with cannibalism.

Personal Moments in the Lives of Victorian Women: Selections From Their Autobiographies (Book 2)

In her biography of May Duignan—better known as the notorious "Chicago May"—the late Irish writer Nuala O'Faolain notes that cemeteries are full of women whose life stories died with them, and that women's autobiographies are a critical part of lost history.

Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster

Mistress of the Monarchy is a biography of Katherine Swynford, the Duchess of Lancaster. Swynford was the long-time mistress and eventual third wife of John of Gaunt.

Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC

Sometimes when I read autobiographies and biographies of revered artists, pioneers, and notables, I often become absorbed in their beginnings as if they were happening in the present moment and their endings as if they had just passed. This is done easily when the writer blends eloquence with knowledge as is the case with Karen Chilton.

Lucky Billy: A Novel about Billy The Kid

Anything that the imagination can concoct in the way of murders and desperate deeds may be heard upon the streets now in regard to Billy The Kid, but getting at the truth of the many rumors is another thing altogether. -- The Daily New Mexican, May 5, 1881 Billy they don’t want you to be so free. -- Bob Dylan I: Backstory Billy The Kid earned his renown in the Lincoln County War (1878-1881), a mercantile conflict that tore apart New Mexico.

Gwethalyn Graham: A Liberated Woman in a Conventional Age

Barbara Meadowcroft promises in her introduction to Gwethalyn Graham: A Liberated Woman in a Conventional Age that this book is no definitive biography. How refreshing! Can there really be such a thing anyway? She argues that no one is ever truly known “even, or especially, to those closest to them,” and I would agree.

Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess

Almost everyone in America has heard of Anna, the famous upper class English lady who held her own with the King of Siam. What most people haven’t heard is the real story behind the better-known, fictionalized character. Susan Morgan has devoted over a decade to fleshing out the life of Anna Leonowens in Bombay Anna.

When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided By Race

It would be hard to find a story more inherently dramatic than that of Sandra Laing, one that can show in a more complete and complex manner the ramifications of South Africa’s apartheid regime. With coloring distinctly different from that of her white family, Sandra Laing was expelled from her white school in 1965 and reclassified as “coloured” (of mixed-race descent), then, after her family engaged in legal battle, was made ‘white” once again; in the throes of this conflict, at the age of fifteen, Laing fell in love and ran away with a black man, with whom she had several children.

Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics

Nineteenth century New England was a virtual breeding ground for progressive ideas. During the period, a host of feminist philosophers, jurists, and scholars emerged onto American society. Among the heroines associated with the era, you’ve probably examined those such as Dorthea Dix and Margaret Fuller in your high school U.S. History class. Many women, however, still remain relatively unacknowledged, despite their critical roles in scholarly debates of the era.

Belva Lockwood, The Woman Who Would Be President

In a moment of autobiographical reflection, Belva Lockwood once stated that while her work as an equal rights activist had failed to raise the dead, it had “awakened the living.” Jill Norgren’s biography of Lockwood, a little known but extremely important historical figure should and could awaken all of us to live a life of conviction and activism. At 232 pages long, Norgren eloquently and succinctly educates the reader on the story of the first woman to ever