Professional Women

During the 1970s, Alice Combs, undeterred by a former employer's snobbish pronouncement, "You're not corporate material", transformed herself from divorced mother on food stamps to successful entrepreneur. Resolute, Alice overcame her initial ignorance of the recycling trade and recovered from the many novice mistakes she inevitably made while teaching herself to operate Vulcan Wire, which would slowly become a thriving business despite an embezzling partner and cutthroat competitors....

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Half Baked Idea by Olivia Potts. At the moment her mother died, Olivia Potts was baking a cake. She was trying to impress the man who would later become her husband. Meanwhile, 275 miles away, her mother was dying. In the grief-stricken months that followed, Olivia came home from her job as a criminal barrister miserable and tired, and baked soda bread, pizza, and chocolate banana cake. Even when it went badly (which was often), cooking brought her comfort.

In 1961, Wally Funk was among the Mercury 13, the first group of American pilots to pass the ‘Women in Space’ programme. Wally sailed through a series of rigorous physical and mental tests, her scores beating many of the male candidates, including those of John Glenn, the first American in orbit. But just one week before she was due to enter the final phase of training, the programme was abruptly cancelled. A combination of politics and prejudice meant that none of the women ever flew into space.

An emotionally honest account, Far Outside the Ordinary has been described by some as Steel Magnolias meets The Help. It chronicles the period in Prissy Elrod's life, when during a routine physical, her fifty-year-old husband is diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer and given less than a year to live. Never one to take no for an answer, and driven by hope and her strong faith, Prissy is determined to save her beloved husband and the father of their two daughters. She is a strong, tenacious woman who doesn't accept the diagnosis.

Jennifer Ridha was enlisted to defend Cameron Douglas, the son of film actor Michael Douglas, in a federal drug-trafficking case. Beyond his celebrity, Cameron's case was complicated by the fact that he suffered from anxiety. As media scrutiny and the pressures of his case mounted, Cameron's anxiety worsened. When Jennifer's efforts to alleviate his condition through the proper channels fell flat, she agreed to illicitly smuggle in the antianxiety medication that the prison refused to dispense.

Carolyn Jourdan spent many years as a congressional lawyer in Washington, D.C. Then she was called home to fill in for her mother as receptionist at her father's rural Tennessee doctor's office - assured it would only be for a few days.

The powerful yet touching memoir of a Chinese-American woman and her grandmother by an extraordinarily talented author who has been compared to Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Leslie Li belongs to the illustrious Li family of Guilin, China. Her paternal grandfather, Li Zongren, was China's first elected vice president, to whom Chiang Kai-shek left control of the country when he fled to Formosa. Leslie's father was studying in the US when he met and married her American-born mother.

This is Nadina LaSpina's story - from her early years in her native Sicily, where she contracts polio as a baby, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness, to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her, and to her rebellion and her activism in the disability-rights movement.

Die Schweizerin Ann Amann schreibt in ihrem Buch über die zwei intensivsten Jahre ihres Lebens. Es ist die Lebensgeschichte einer starken Frau, die, selbst aus kleinbürgerlichen Verhältnissen stammend, nach ihrer Heirat an die "Goldküste" von Zürich zieht, zwei Kinder bekommt und immer alles erfüllt, was von ihr erwartet wird. Nach der Scheidung von ihrem ersten Mann baut sie sich ein Business im Bereich Tourismus auf und lernt mit Ende vierzig ihre große Liebe Martin kennen. Bei der Hochzeit versprechen sie sich, für immer füreinander zu sorgen. Ann Amann hält ihr Wort.

After escaping war-torn France, where 18 members of her family were murdered in the Holocaust, Gisèle Huff arrived in the US with her mother. It was 1947, and they had $400 to their name. Gisèle quickly found her footing in America, eventually earning a PhD at Columbia University, running for Congress, and launching a spectacular career in K–12 education.

Spiritual Ink is a collection of personal essays highlighting examples of strength, hope, and inspiration and drawing on the author's experiences as a Child Life Specialist working with hospitalized children and their families.

Standing splendidly in the intersection of two genres – business memoir and gritty personal tell-all - Finding the Exit is a courageous tale of a woman who, against harrowing odds that began in childhood, successfully started and sold a medtech company to a Fortune 100 in less than five years.

When British-born Elizabeth Blackwell earned her medical degree in America in 1849, there was an international outcry. Few at the time would have disagreed with the actress Fanny Kemble's remark - "What, trust a woman doctor - never!"

In this one-of-a-kind memoir, Jack Clemons - a former lead engineer in support of NASA - takes listeners behind the scenes and into the inner workings of the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs during their most exciting years. Discover the people, the events, and the risks involved in one of the most important parts of space missions: bringing the astronauts back home to Earth. Clemons joined Project Apollo in 1968, a young engineer inspired by science fiction and electrified by John F. Kennedy's challenge to the nation to put a man on the moon.

Growing up in a vegetarian family, Tara Austen Weaver never thought she’d stray. But as an adult, she found herself in poor health and, after trying cures of every kind, a doctor finally ordered her to eat meat. Warily, she ventured into the butcher shop, and as the man behind the counter wrapped up her first-ever chicken, she found herself intrigued. Eventually, he dared her to cook her way through his meat counter.

Dr. Catherine "Cathy" DeAngelis has shattered numerous glass ceilings in medicine for herself and generations of women she's mentored. Raised in 1940s hardscrabble Pennsylvania coal mining country, Cathy's unyielding determination and indomitable self-belief steamrolled medicine's entrenched sexism. In a life filled with "firsts," she was named the first woman editor-in-chief of JAMA - the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Seduced by the Light is the first and only biography of Mina Miller Edison, the wife of Thomas Edison, the woman who created and shaped the myth of one of the most seminal figures in America’s history. The Thomas Edison we think we know was essentially created by Mina Miller Edison. Exhaustively researched by author Alexandra Rimer, this account draws on unprecedented access to Edison family diaries, memoirs, and letters to look below the surface of the Edison family during the Gilded Age from the little-known perspective of this female protagonist.

Six weeks before her eighth birthday in May of 2024, my granddaughter Paige Schilling was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Paige underwent a 14-hour brain surgery at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The tumor was successfully removed and Paige began a lengthy period of rehabilitation. During this time, Paige received so many gifts from friends and family that her father considered renting a storage unit. Instead of giving her another stuffed toy, I decided to write letters to Paige. The letters describe real events from my own life beginning from a time before television existed.

El fascinante libro de Selenny Espinal, RAÍCES Y ALAS, relata sus luchas desde una infancia difícil en República Dominicana hasta una "mejor" vida en los Estados Unidos. Selenny luchó contra el acoso escolar, la discriminación y una vida familiar problemática debido a la pobreza y las expectativas sociales.

Nivritti is a Program Lead at Teach For India. She empowers her young fellows to create change in the low income neighbourhoods that they work in. She strongly believes that education is an inalienable right and she is motivated to work towards maximizing the impact of her cause through incremental change.