Minor re/visions

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Amy L. Wink

"Virginia Woolf's story "The Legacy" describes a self-absorbed widower's all-too-typical response to the fifteen-volume diary left by his wife: he dismisses it as "nothing in particular." In contrast to that character's trivializing, contemporary feminist scholars have found diaries to be a rich resource for investigating the lives of "ordinary" women. No other documents reveal so completely what one scholar has called "life lived as a process."". "In this book, Amy L. Wink offers a probing examination of diaries kept by nineteenth-century American women. Her sources include accounts by women who chronicled their lives on the Overland Trail, the journals of two women married sequentially to the same psychologically abusive man, and the diaries of Confederate women who used their writings to comprehend their emotional and spiritual responses to the turmoil of the Civil War. As Wink notes, such writings demonstrate not only what these women experienced but also how they dealt with and understood that experience."--BOOK JACKET.

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Rob Stewart

Documentary filmmaker Rob Stewart tells the story of his life so far, from a person whose focus was saving sharks to one on a mission to save humanity.

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Lala Fishman and Steven Weingartner

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1922, Lala Weintraub grew up in Lvov, Poland. Her parents were assimilated Jews, and the family lived in a religiously and ethnically mixed neighborhood. When the Nazis came, Lala - who had blond hair and blue eyes - survived by convincing them she was a Christian. This book tells her remarkable story. Lala's Story begins with the 1945 liberation of Katowice, the Polish town where she was living. In the days that followed, Lala's mood swung between euphoria and despair. Believing her entire family to be dead, and having lived under an assumed identity for so long, she had no idea who she was or what to do next. Lala recalls preparing for the Nazi arrival by obtaining forged papers and memorizing Catholic prayers and rituals; she relates how, fiercely determined and greatly aided by her Aryan looks, she managed to convince everyone - German soldiers, interrogators, fellow Poles - that she was a Polish Gentile girl named Urszula Krzyanowska. Within a year after Lvov was captured by the German forces, many of Lala's family members were missing and presumed dead; Lala's Story follows Fishman as she moves from town to town in an effort to avoid the same fate, driven by her fear of being discovered. The book ends by bringing her story up to the present day.

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Gail Sheehy

"This is the compelling story of a girl who is more than a survivor. Her struggle from despair to victory demonstrates the power of the human spirit to prevail over life's accidents"--Jacket subtitle.