Female Books

What I want to tell you is this:

Your information page on this book lists a review in Library Journal of August 1, 1997. I have searched my copy of that issue and do not find the review, or a reference to it in the index. Would you please check on this? If there is a LJ review, I would like to know the correct date. Thank you.

Hanny Lightfoot Klein is a pioneer of the FGM movement. She trekked across Africa alone at age 50 and uncovered the secret wound of Female Genital Mutilation. She interviewed many people, witnessed girls being circumcised and women dying during birth due to their circumcisions.

The shocker was, to her, that very well educated people practiced, defended and promoted the practice. Customs and superstitions die hard. She also discusses FGM in the USA -- not of African Americans, but of WASPs -- and male circumcision in the USA.

Hanny Lightfoot Klein has authored three books total and they are all worth reading. This book is beautifully written and full of compassion. A newly revised, updatead edition of "Secret Wounds" is coming in early 2007 with a new title: "Children's Genitals under The Knife".

This is not the entire Female Spectator (which would be very long indeed, and much more pricey). Instead, it is an affordable, carefully chosen selection from Eliza Haywood's _Female Spectator_ (a magazine-like publication that ran for several years). The introduction is top-notch. I own this book and refer to it often. This is a great book to read a little at a time. It gives wonderful insight into issues of 18th-century life for women (marriage, manners, and morals). I highly recommend it.

I got this book for my daughter -- and ended up reading it for myself. It helped me to realize that when she comes home from school with what used to seem like meaningless dramas with her friends, they are really the center of her social life at school. And helping her deal with this has made us closer! Thank you Amy Fishbein!

An amazing look into the heart and mind of an everyday woman experiencing menopause. Thea Smith has a way of getting to the heart of the matter; the main character's thoughts and feelings about her husband, friends, marriage, and life in general are so characteristic of every woman that the reader finds an "aha" or two on nearly every page. A wonderful first novel from a fine author.

...of a fascinating woman.

Belle Boyd was an active spy for the Confederates during the Civil War. Motivated by love for her homeland and a fierce indignation at, not to say hatred of, the invaders (the Union Army), Belle at 17 became a spy and devoted herself to driving the invaders from the South. Most young women of her day and age devoted themselves to enhancing their looks in order to catch husbands, even with the War on. Most young women of that era practiced the alluring arts they learned at finishing schools to attract men.

Belle did, too, but in a greater cause -- freedom as she saw it.

In creating this character, author Francis Hamit has broken relatively new ground. First he has written about a nineteenth-century Southern woman, whom most writers dismiss as confined to the parlor and the bedchamber. Second, he has dared to present the Confederate side of the Civil War, when most writers dismiss the Confederacy as an evil conspiracy to prolong slavery. It may have been determined to prolong slavery, but many Southerners also viewed the Union Army as an illegal invader of their territory. In presenting Belle's opinions and feelings sympathetically, Hamit has shown the courage of a committed writer.

"Shenandoah Spy" is a book worth reading.

With 20 years of classical voice training under my belt, I was never able to recreate the studio experience ....until now. Lis Lewis expertly guides the female voice through a series of warm-up exercises that help female vocalists perform at their best. With Ms. Lewis' First Aid Kit, I can enjoy the benefit of a private voice lesson anytime, anywhere.

This is a great book for people who don't like to (or can't) transpose music. Each song (with one exception) has a separate page for a standard key, suggested female key, and suggested male key.

A nice selection of standards, the songs included are: Angel Eyes, But Beautiful, Close Your Eyes, Darn That Dream, Deep Purple, Early Autumn, Everything Happens to Me, Everthing I Have is Yours, For All We Know, Forbidden City, Here's That Rainy Day, I Fall in Love Too Easily, I Hadn't Anyone Till You, I'll Take Romance, Ill Wind, Imagination, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You, In a Sentimental Mood, Into Spring, Invitation, It Could Happen to You, Just Friends, La Jolla Nights, The Lamp is Low, Laura, Like Someone in Love, Lullaby of the Leaves, Mean to Me, Moonlight Mood, The Moon Was Yellow, More Than You Know, My One and Only Love, My Reverie, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, The Night We Called it a Day, (You Came Along From) Out of Nowhere, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Prelude to Kiss, The Shadow of Your Smile, Something To Live For, Spring is Here, Stairway To the Stars, Star Dust, Star Eyes, Stella By Starlight, Stormy Weather, Street of Dreams, That Old Feeling, These Foolish Things, Unforgettable, You're My Everything, You Stepped Out of a Dream.

Following the typical format of a "Fake Book", just the melody line and chords are provided - an accomopaniment needs to be "faked" from there. Each song is on one to two pages (no page turns!), so there may only be one or two verses and the chorus.

This book is comb bound, making it easy to lay flat on a music stand or piano.

It is not that often that academics uncover a whole new area of research, and more rarely still do they show us it was right under our noses. Melanie Mauthner, whose study of sistering relationships is both scrupulous and passionate, does just that.
Despite some fashionable representations of sisters in the media, despite the rhetorical use of 'Sisterhood' as a symbol in feminism, research and theorising about actual instances of this family tie have been scarce. The strength of Mauthner's approach is that she doesn't conceive of sistering as a purely 'family tie'. Rather than boxing her subjects into tired Freudian patterns of sibling rivalry, she deploys a range of theoretical approaches, both sociological and literary, to open up the concept of sistering and render it radically dynamic. Much of her analysis is a transposition of sociological studies of 'friendship' onto the kinship tie. It is a liberating move, for it reveals how much sistering can be a matter of altering and going beyond inherited family structures. Not that this is always the case. This is an honest book, based on 37 interviews with sisters of varying backgrounds, not all of whom have close or 'sisterly' feelings for each other (though many do.) A key question raised by the study is precisely how the degree of closeness or distance between sisters affects the power-balance, the happiness and above all the dynamism of their relationships. Broadly speaking, it was the closer relationhips that were the least 'entangling', the least rigid, whereas distant sisters were far more likely to remain in fixed postions determined by traditional family roles - eg, the big sister as surrogate mother. Any woman reading this who has sisters will be drawn into a kind of 'mapping' game, trying to work out where she would figure in the patterns the book reveals. One hopes there is more to come. Mauthner is clear about the focus and limit of her study, but one can easily imagine an expansion of it into questions of sistering and class, sistering within racial and cultural identity. One hopes that she and other academics will expand on the new body of knowledge created here.
Currently in hardback, "Sistering" balances analysis with "slices of life" from the anonymous interviews. The latter make utterly addictive reading, almost as of one has come across a soap opera that is real and thorny, rather than manufactured to appeal. Perhaps I have yet to suppress my Inner Gossip, but I can't help wishing that a paperback version might cater to it, and present the interviews in full.

For it is above all a moving book. Mauthner identifies a hidden 'economy' of caring and nurture, 'emotional work' that is necessary for survival in hard times, and which one cannot simplify either as 'reward in itself' or 'unpaid, unrecognised labour'. It is both, and you find yourself caught between celebration and lament.

i read this book a few weeks ago and i thought it was excellent. i couldn't put it down. a must read for anyone who doesnt like reading. i hate reading but i read both of julia's books (obsession is the other one her first book) i read skating the edge first then i read obsession. i think you should read obsession first than skating the edge. have a go at it if u dont like ti dont read it but me personally.. I LOVED IT!!