August Recommendations Roundup
I’m back from the beach and back from my annual visit to my favorite Little Free Library, that sits just a short walk from our door! I did make sure to fill it with all my vacation reads before I left!
And I got to visit the number one stop on my On the Road with the Badass Women’s Book Club -> Beaches+Books stop! There’s still time to add some of these bookstores to your travel list – you can check it out here! And I’m already starting work on the fall guide – college towns! Stay tuned!
So what are all the badass women reading, watching, and listening to this month? The Women’s World Cup seems like an excellent time to consider this new release…
Women’s sports receive a fraction of the airtime allotted for men’s sports, as well as a fraction of the marketing dollars, media coverage, and training resources. For every dollar that the NBA’s highest-paid player brings home, the WNBA’s highest-paid player earns just half a cent. But while misogyny in sports is particularly visible, it’s not unique. Women athletes face the same sexist barriers found in all career fields: the motherhood penalty, transphobia and misogynoir, underpromotion, and more. But women in sports are fighting back, debunking myths that women aren’t as skilled, competitive, or capable of generating revenue as men. Drawing on exclusive interviews with prominent athletes—including Allyson Felix, Megan Rapinoe, and Billie Jean King—journalist Macaela Mackenzie shows how women are using sports as a platform for change. As women athletes push for the same things all women want in their careers—money, power, and respect—their wins are showing the rest of us what’s possible in the fight for equality. You can read more and get your copy here.
Thrillers are my vacation go-to and this is a great one from a favorite author…
Catherine Sterling thinks she knows her mother. Ruth Sterling is quiet, hardworking, and lives for her daughter. All her life, it's been just the two of them against the world. But now, Catherine is ready to spread her wings, move from home, and begin a new career. And Ruth Sterling will do anything to prevent that from happening. Ruth Sterling thinks she knows her daughter. Catherine would never rebel, would never question anything about her mother's past or background. But when Ruth's desperate quest to keep her daughter by her side begins to reveal cracks in Ruth's carefully-constructed world, both mother and daughter begin a dance of deception. You can read more and get your copy here.
When Tara Connelly is released from prison after serving eighteen months on a drug charge, she knows rebuilding her life at thirty years old won’t be easy. With no money and no prospects, she returns home to live with her siblings, who are both busy with their own problems. While she works to build a new career and hold her family together, Tara finds a chance at love in a most unlikely place. But when the Connellys’ secrets start to unravel and threaten her future, they all must face their worst fears and come clean, or risk losing each other forever. You can read more and get your copy here.
Early in the Great War, men left Britain’s factories in droves to enlist. Struggling to keep up production, arsenals hired women to build the weapons the military urgently needed. “Be the Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun,” the recruitment posters beckoned. Thousands of women—cooks, maids, shopgirls, and housewives—answered their nation’s call. Among them is nineteen-year-old former housemaid April Tipton. Impressed by her friend Marjorie’s descriptions of higher wages, plentiful meals, and comfortable lodgings, she takes a job. Joining them is Lucy Dempsey, wife of Daniel Dempsey, Olympic gold medalist and star forward of Tottenham Hotspur. With Daniel away serving in the Footballers’ Battalion, Lucy resolves to do her bit to hasten the end of the war. When her coworkers learn she is a footballer’s wife, they invite her to join the arsenal ladies’ football club, the Thornshire Canaries. The Canaries soon acquire an unexpected fan in the boss’s wife, Helen Purcell, who is deeply troubled by reports that Danger Building workers suffer from serious, unexplained illnesses. One common symptom, the lurid yellow hue of their skin, earns them the nickname “canary girls.” Suspecting a connection between the canary girls’ maladies and the chemicals they handle, Helen joins the arsenal administration as their staunchest, though often unappreciated, advocate. The football pitch is the one place where class distinctions and fears for their men fall away. As the war grinds on and tragedy takes its toll, the Canary Girls persist despite the dangers, proud to serve, determined to outlive the war and rejoice in victory and peace. You can read more and get your copy here.
Over the course of seven years and 180 episodes, The Golden Girls altered the television landscape. For the first time in history, Americans (and, later, the rest of the world) were watching sexagenarians—and one octogenarian—leading active, vital lives. These were older women who had careers, families, lovers, and adventures, far from the matronly television characters of the past. In The Golden Girls: A Cultural History, Bernadette Giacomazzo shows why this iconic sitcom is more than just comedy gold. She examines how these women tackled tough issues of the time—issues that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. From sexual harassment, ageism, and PTSD to AIDS, inter-racial relationships, and homosexuality, Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia weren’t afraid to take on topics which were once considered taboo. This first-ever cultural history of The Golden Girls explores how the show forever changed the world’s perception of what it means to grow older, and showed us the healing power of friendship, community, and sisterhood. You can read more and get your copy here.
When they first meet, John, a dashing European, a Latvian refugee, a physics PhD, is hoping to settle down. Michaele, a fast-talking American college student, is hungry for an independent life as a writer and historian. When they meet again some years later, Michaele is ready. Or so she thinks. And opposites attract, right?
The life Michaele and John build together intermingles sweetness—their love of good food, entertaining, and family—with complications, including their ethnic and religious differences (Michaele is Jewish; John is not), the trauma John endured as a child during WWII, Michaele’s thwarted ambitions, and even John’s preoccupation with Latvian rye. When he opens a successful company marketing rye bread, Michaele embarks on a European journey in search of her husband’s origins, excavating poignant stories of war, privation, and resilience. She realizes at last that rye bread represents everything about John’s homeland that he loved and lost. Eventually Michaele comes to love rye bread, too. The Rye Bread Marriage asks, how do the stories we live and the stories we inherit play out in our relationships? After forty years of marriage, Michaele Weissman has a few answers. You can read more and get your copy here.
This month’s book, Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, really takes a hard look at the publishing industry. I enjoyed this article about the women who are revolutionizing the publishing industry and, consequently, the way we read.
There’s no way you’ve had enough Barbie, right? Check out this article where 15 women unpack their feelings about the famous doll.
And if you want to know about Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, check out this episode of the Unladylike podcast.
It’s 1995 and Carole Fisher is a high-flying divorcee looking for love in Las Vegas. It’s slim pickings in the medical community she works in. But then Bob comes to town. Bob Bierenbaum is a plastic surgeon who flies planes and speaks several languages. He’s perfect on paper but he’s quick to anger and he never talks about his ex-wife. Who, it turns out, is missing and presumed dead. Check out The Girlfriends – a nine-part series where Carole Fisher uncovers the truth of Gail Katz’s death, the systems that failed her and all the girlfriends that brought her justice. You can listen here.
