How to be a woman

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Caitlin Moran

This is Caitlin Moran's engaging and amusing rallying call for our times. Combining the best of her recent columns with lots of new writing unique to this book, Caitlin deals with topics as pressing and diverse as 1980s swearing, benefits, boarding schools and why the internet is like a drunken toddler.

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Jeffrey B. Ferguson

This is a focus on the life and early career of George Schuyler one of the important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. The text presents an understanding of Schuyler as public intellectual while offering insights into the relations between race and satire during a formative period in African-American cultural history.

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Okey Ndibe

"Okey Ndibe's funny, charming, and penetrating memoir tells of his move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the influential--but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency--African Commentary magazine. It recounts stories of Ndibe's relationships with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and other literary figures; examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial profiling just 13 days after he arrived in the US, in which he was mistaken for a bank robber; considers American stereotypes about Africa (and vice-versa); and juxtaposes African folk tales with Wall Street trickery. All these stories and more come together in a generous, encompassing book about the making of a writer and a new American"--

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Antoinette May

A Mexican love song called her "La Peregrina"--The Pilgrim - for Alma Reed's adventures as a journalist and explorer drew her around the globe, to the fabled and mysterious sites of lost civilizations. But her heart remained in the Yucatan, where she would be buried alongside her celebrated murdered lover, the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico. This is the first biography ever to recount Reed's remarkable story - as dramatic and romantic as the chronicles of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham. Born in the gold-rush boomtown of San Francisco in 1889, Reed shocked her family by determining to become a writer. In an era when most women's vocation was marriage, she got a job at the San Francisco Call. It was a "woman's beat" - writing feature stories on the poor under the byline Mrs. Goodfellow - but Reed used it to jog the public conscience, forcing the state to spare a Mexican boy and to reform its laws on capital punishment. That campaign won her a tour of Mexico, where she would meet a lifelong friend, the famed muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, and a lifelong love, the Yucatan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto. In Mexico she also found a new passion - archaeology - while breaking the story of the discovery of the Mayan treasures at Chichen Itza for the New York Times. Later, she would cover the excavation of Carthage, the home of Hannibal and Dido, the tragic queen of the Aeneid; the search for the River Styx, the portal of death in classical mythology; and other major expeditions. She lived her stories - even setting a deep-sea diving record on the quest for the lost continent of Atlantis. In 1925, the New York Times documented her adventures in a profile calling her "the only archaeological reporter in the world." In the years between the world wars, Reed's Greenwich Village apartment, nicknamed The Ashram in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, became one of New York's most glittering salons, the gathering place for an international mix of artists and intellectuals devoted to the cause of world peace. But Reed longed to return to Mexico and in 1950 finally realized her dream. There she would join in the exploration of Cozumel, the equivalent of Mecca or Jerusalem, sacred to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess/oracle. Passionate Pilgrim is a biography as vivid and dramatic as fiction, the inspiring account of a life magnificently lived. It should assign Alma Reed her rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century heroines.