Professional Women

Renowned as a BBC journalist, Victoria Derbyshire has spent 20 years finding the human story behind the headlines. In 2015 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. With honesty and openness, she decided to live out her treatment and recovery in the spotlight in a series of video diaries. Victoria has kept a diary since she was nine years old, and in Dear Cancer, Love Victoria she shares her day-to-day experiences of life following diagnosis and coming to terms with a future that wasn't planned.

Play It Forward details the remarkable journey of Joan Barnes, founder and former CEO of Gymboree, and how she learned to align her inner life with outward success. Forty years ago Joan Barnes founded a play center in a church basement with $3,000. Determined to enable women to achieve personal and entrepreneurial success, Barnes led Gymboree to become an innovative leader in a new industry: activity-based early childhood development.

Wondering Who You Are braids the story of Sonya and Richard's relationship and those memories he could no longer conjure together with his fateful days in the hospital and through a marriage no longer grounded on decades of shared experience.

In this wildly funny and charming memoir, Patricia Volk entertains with a unique perspective of New York in the mid- to late-twentieth century and of a bigger-than-life family that owned fourteen restaurants, including Morgen's in the garment district....

Impossible Motherhood is a heartrending and ultimately triumphant testimonial told by a writer looking back on her history of addiction. Abortion has never offered any honest person easy answers. Vilar's dark journey through self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and historical hauntings is a powerful story of loss and mourning that bravely delves into selfhood, national identity, reproductive freedom, family responsibility, and finally motherhood itself - today, Vilar is the mother of two beautiful children.

Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group - those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother.

On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree - becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people.

In Cooking as Fast as I Can, Cat Cora reveals, for the first time, coming-of-age experiences from early childhood sexual abuse to the realities of life as a lesbian in the Deep South. She shares how she found her passion in the kitchen and went on to attend the prestigious Culinary Institute of America and apprentice under Michelin-star chefs in France. After her big break as a cohost on the Food Network's Melting Pot, Cat broke barriers by becoming the first-ever female Iron Chef.

Poche donne nella storia ebbero la possibilità di distinguersi nelle discipline scientifiche, considerate appannaggio maschile. La più nota, nella tarda antichità, fu senza dubbio Ipazia, scienziata e filosofa, nata ad Alessandria d'Egitto nel 370 d.C., inventrice di strumenti come il planisfero e l'astrolabio. Figlia del matematico Teone, e lei stessa primo matematico donna della storia, fu la più nota esponente alessandrina della scuola neoplatonica, circondata dal rispetto di allievi giunti da ogni angolo del mondo.

In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

In the summer of 2008 Kimberley Motley quit her job as a Criminal Defence Attorney in Milwaukee to join a program to help train lawyers in war-torn Afghanistan. She was 32 years old at the time, a former Mrs Wisconsin (she'd entered the contest on a dare) and a mother of three who had never travelled outside the United States.

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman—as Virginia Woolf suggested when, in A Room of One's Own, she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens. This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image.

In 2003, Cindy Monroe founded Thirty-One Gifts in the basement of her home in Chattanooga, TN, with one goal: to help women by giving them the opportunity to run their own successful businesses. Today, she continues to lead Thirty-One Gifts and build relationships with her consultants all over the country.

Nina Godiwalla offers a behind-the-scenes look at the recklessness that ruled Wall Street during the dot-com boom days. But Suits is also a story of the family that Nina left behind: a story of fathers and daughters, the pursuit of honor, swapping your grandmother's shrimp curry for takeout sushi and cocktails. A vibrant snapshot of an immigrant family with big dreams, Suits reveals how much we've been conditioned to trade for success.

Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, An Atomic Love Story unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the twentieth century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history.

At 32, Amy Boesky thought she had it all figured out: a wonderful new man in her life, a great job, and the (nearly) perfect home. For once, she was almost able to shake the terrible fear that had gripped her for as long as she could remember. All of the women in her family had died before the age of 45 - from cancer - and she and her sisters had grown up in time's shadow.

Some might wonder how Martha could have clung to hope at all. In 1948, on the day of the funeral of her adored older brother, Gaston, a quick victim of the great polio epidemic, Martha was struck with the same dreaded disease. After a year in polio hospitals, she was sent back to her home in the village of Lattimore in the cotton-growing hills of western North Carolina. She was completely paralyzed, with only her head protruding from an 800-pound yellow metal cylinder that breathed for her.

On a sunny spring day, in an ordinary kitchen, Rosemary answers an unexpected phone call. A car has hit her husband, Hugh. Rosemary arrives at the hospital just in time to see him before he's rushed into surgery. Thinking of their twin daughters, Rosemary pleads with her unconscious husband as he lies on a gurney. "Don't you leave me Hugh Rawlins. Anna and Mary need you. I love you." Overwhelmed, but determined to bring Hugh back home, Rosemary leans on family and friends as Hugh endures two emergency brain surgeries, a coma, and a confused awakening.

Today, the world is in the midst of the transformative and ever-developing Digital Age, otherwise referred to as the “Age of Information.” It has been an unprecedented, remarkable, and explosive era marked by social media and computer-generated imagery (and with it, deep fakes), among other novel, previously unimaginable concepts. The bulky monitors and blocky towers of personal computers and laptops, which were once upon a time considered fashionable, futuristic contraptions, have since been replaced with a sleek and stylish array.