Recommended for you
A newspaper barrier-breaker, a city chronicler, a humanitarian crusader. The three women who wrote or who are the subjects in these new nonfiction releases have stories just as compelling as the ones they brought to national attention. The books in this week’s book club are profiles of both the personal lives of these writers and examples of their work. Read all about it!
<em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Trailblazer-Pioneering-Journalists-Fight-America/dp/1546083448" target="_blank">Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to make the Media Look More Like America</a></em>
“When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, the city, the entire country, and the African continent were all on the threshold of change. The dashing, young John F. Kennedy had just begun his presidency promising ‘a new frontier.’ The Civil Rights Movement was kicking into high gear with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now urging young people like me to pursue professions we’d been excluded from and to excel. It was thrilling to be in the nation’s capital to begin my career as a daily newspaper journalist in the white papers… The place of Blacks in American society was undergoing radical change when I started working at The Washington Post, and I wanted to be part of telling that story of trials, trauma and, I hoped, transformation.”
<em>Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.</em>
“Hollywood’s Eve isn’t a biography – at least not in the traditional sense. It won’t attempt to impose narrative structure and logic on life, which is (mostly) incoherent and irrational, lived moment-by-moment and instinctively rather than by grand design and purposefully; or to reach conclusions which are (mostly) hollow and false. In other words, it doesn’t believe, or expect you to, that facts, dates, timelines, firsthand accounts, verifiable sources tell the tale. Here’s what Hollywood’s Eve is: a biography in the nontraditional sense; a case history as well as a cultural [history]; a critical appreciation; a sociological study; a psychological commentary; a noir-style mystery; a memoir in disguise; and a philosophical investigation as contrary, speculative, and unresolved as its subject. Here’s what Hollywood’s Eve is above all else: a love story.”
<em>We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World</em>
You probably know Malala as the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner for her courageously feminist, pro-education stance against the Taliban. She’s also a bestselling author, winning accolades for telling her inspiring story. As part of her Malala Fund work, she meets many girls and young women like her, who have fought against poverty and discrimination. Many have been displaced, forced to leave their homes and to seek a better and a more equal life elsewhere. In this book, she chronicles their stories of survival.
