Praise for My Songs of Now and Then

""This is a smart, moving and unpretentious memoir of a long life lived with vigor and strength. The biographical narrative touches on important 20th century events in Europe but the real story is the author's humanity, her womanhood, and her connection to others as she made a life in America.

At a number of points, I stopped reading to shed a tear. When I was done, I wished, most of all, to have the same kind of equanimity and grace in old age."" Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Prof. emerita, Cornell University Author of the award winning books: Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, and The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls.

The essays in this book are fragments of my truth, to share with loved ones, perhaps to make you laugh, or cry, to let you glimpse into my life, my family, my memories, my dreams and my accomplishments. I write of how it all got started, of belonging and not belonging; the journeys of my life, journeys in space and in personal development, growing up and growing old and older yet. I explore my Jewish identity as it evolves through the seasons of life, beginning with family wanderings in pre-war Western Europe, becoming an American Jewish mother and grandmother, embracing a mid-life career in psychotherapy, and examining the joys and challenges of late life, all leading to my Ethical Will.

Family recollections and photographs are interspersed with brief poems.

Farrago, from the Latin farragin, is a word that means a confused mixture. This memoir, sharing the story of the relationship between author Diana B. Roberts and her mother, Markie, is just that-a farrago, containing neither positive nor negative judgment.

Markie Byron Roberts was eighty-five years old when she passed away-a long life for anyone, but particularly for a woman who'd been institutionalized for mental illness six times, beginning at age sixteen, and who had been unwillingly subjected to thirty-six shock therapy treatments. Through mental and physical illness, on her death bed and throughout her life, she maintained a personal sense of style reminiscent of her long bygone life. In the end she went quietly, politely, and silently to the other side, leaving her children to wonder what her life, and their lives, might have been like if she had been with them all along.

A victim of mental illness and the wounding loss of her family's place in society, Markie became incapable of raising her three children. For many years the lingering effects of the brief years she spent with Markie Created shadow over Diana's life, a kind of aura of both the presence and absence of her mother.

Finally healed after a lifetime of uncertainty and ready to help shed light on the needs of survivors of parental mental illness, author Diana B. Roberts details life with and without-her mother. This is their story.

When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming a grown up, journalist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, wrestling with self-sabotage, finding a job, throwing a socially disastrous Rod-Stewart themed house party, getting drunk, getting dumped, realising that Ivan from the corner shop is the only man you've ever been able to rely on, and finding that that your mates are always there at the end of every messy night out. Glittering, with wit and insight, heart and humour, this is a book about the struggles of early adulthood in all its grubby, hopeful uncertainty.

Much more has been written about Charles Warren Fairbanks than about his wife, Cornelia Cole Fairbanks. Documents in archives and libraries, historical records, newspapers of the time, and personal letters from Mrs. Fairbanks to her husband have made it possible to learn more about this fascinating woman. Writings of historians about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries put her story in the context of her times. She had been among one of the early generations of women to graduate from college. She married an ambitious young lawyer and read law to help and advise him as he built his practice as a railroad lawyer in the Gilded Age. Throughout his life, he read his speeches to her for her comments before he delivered them. She raised their five children as he was investing in business and becoming involved in politics and was an important advisor to him as he campaigned successfully to become Senator from Indiana and later, Vice President with President Theodore Roosevelt. She became one of the most popular hostesses in the nation's capital and was the only woman who could enter a drawing room without immediately seeking out the most influential persons in the room. Gracious and charming, she treated all with equal respect.

The day Jessica Hamel-Akré discovered the ideas of George C heyne - an eighteenthcentury polymath and London society figure known as 'Dr Diet' - it sparked an intellectual obsession, a ten-year study of women's appetite and a personal unravelling.

In this bold and radical book, Hamel-Akré follows C heyne through the pages of medical studies, novels and historical scandals, meeting ash-eating mystics, wasting society girls, impoverished female fasters and early feminist philosophers, all of whom were once
grappling with nascent ideas around food, longing and the body. In doing so, she uncovers the eighteenth-century origins of both today's diet culture and her own troubled relationship with wanting.

Blending history and memoir, The Art of Not Eating will change the way we look at appetite, desire, rationality and oppression, and show how it all got tangled up with what we eat.

Women's Voices in Ireland examines the letters and problems sent in by women to two Irish women's magazines in the 1950s and 60s, discussing them within their wider social and historical context. In doing so, it provides a unique insight into one of the few forums for female expression in Ireland during this period. Although in these decades more Irish women than ever before participated in paid work, trade unions and voluntary organizations, their representation in politics and public and their workforce participation remained low. Meanwhile, women who came of age from the late 1950s experienced a freedom which their mothers and aunts - married or single, in the workplace or the home - had never known. Diary and letters pages and problem pages in Irish-produced magazines in the 1950s and 60s enabled women from all walks of life to express their opinions and to seek guidance on the social changes they saw happening around them. This book, by examining these communications, gives a new insight into the history of Irish women, and also contributes to the ongoing debate about what women's magazines mean for women's history.

..".a perfect genius that makes the impossible in expression, possible; the unknowable in experience, knowable"
--Anya Achtenberg, author of "The Stories of Devil-Girl"
"Nickels" follows a biracial girl named "Little Miss So and So," from age 4-1/2 into adulthood. Told in a series of prose poems, "Nickels'" lyrical and inventive language conveys the dissociative states born of a world formed by persistent and brutal incest and homophobia. The dissociative states enable the child's survival and, ultimately, the adult's healing. The story is both heartbreaking and triumphant. Nickels is the groundbreaking debut of Minneapolis-area author and artist Christine Stark.
"Christine Stark has crafted a language and a diction commensurate with the shredding of consciousness that is a consequence of childhood sexual abuse. She brings us a wholly original voice in a riveting novel of desperation and love. Every sentence vibrates with a terrible beauty. Every sentence brings the news."
--Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of "Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery"
"To be taken into the mind of a child can be an enchanting adventure, but to be taken into the mind of a child who is abused, confused, and taken for granted is a lingering, livid journey. I applaud her fortitude to bring an olden--too long ignored-- truth out of the darkness with blazing, innovative light."
--MariJo Moore, author of "The Diamond Doorknob"
"In "Nickels," Christine Stark, powerfully portrays the story of abuse and its impact on our lives. When this beautifully written and compelling story leaves, you are left wanting more. It's riveting; a book that will capture you from the beginning and carry you through the end. Everyone should read this book."
--Olga Trujillo, author of "The Sum of My Parts"
From the Reflections of America Series at Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com
Learn more at www.ChristineStark.com
FIC044000 Fiction: Contemporary Women
FIC018000 Fiction: Lesbian
SOC010000 Social Science: Feminism & Feminist Theory

This book describes southern womanhood and liberal northern education.From the end of Reconstruction and into the New South era, more than one thousand white southern women attended one of the Seven Sister colleges: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard. Joan Marie Johnson looks at how such educations - in the North, at some of the country's best schools - influenced southern women to challenge their traditional gender roles and become active in woman suffrage and other social reforms of the Progressive Era South.Attending one of the Seven Sister colleges, Johnson argues, could transform a southern woman indoctrinated in notions of domesticity and dependence into someone with newfound confidence and leadership skills. Many southern students at northern schools imported the values they imbibed at college, returning home to found schools of their own, women's clubs, and woman suffrage associations. At the same time, during college and after graduation, southern women maintained a complicated relationship to home, nurturing their regional identity and remaining loyal to the Confederacy.Johnson explores why students sought a classical, liberal arts education, how they prepared for entrance examinations, and how they felt as southerners on northern campuses. She draws on personal writings, information gleaned from college publications and records, and data on the women's decisions about marriage, work, children, and other life-altering concerns.In their time, the women studied in this book would eventually make up a disproportionately high percentage of the elite southern female leadership. This collective biography highlights their important role in forging new roles for women, especially in social reform, education, and suffrage.

Cosmetic surgeries are at an all-time high, Ozempic is bringing back 'heroin chic' and TikTok trad-wives are on the rise - after four waves of feminism, what went wrong?

Despite decades of progress, the gains of the feminist movement feel more fragile than ever. But as Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert points out, this is not a unique moment. Feminism felt just as fragmented in the early 2000s, when the momentum of third-wave feminists and riot grrrls was squashed by lad culture and the commodification of Girl Power.

Casting her eye across pop culture of the past thirty years - from Madonna, the Spice Girls and the Kardashians, to MySpace, #GirlBoss and Real Housewives - Sophie Gilbert reveals a toxic pattern of progress and misogynistic backlash. Girl on Girl shows how every form of media, heavily influenced by the rise of porn, has shaped and warped women's relationships with themselves and other women.

We cannot move forward without fully reckoning with the ways pop culture has defined us - this book shows us how.

The book chronicles the life story of a woman pioneer in the electrical trade. It begins with the early childhood experiences that formed her approach to life. The empowerment of feminism was a natural result of her changed life that lead her into teaching, nursing, farming and the formation of her own electrical contracting company. Another aspect in the book is her journey from realism to faith. The dynamic tension between both of these themes and the resolution of them is the substory in this very interesting memoir.

Seguramente, una nueva mama se siente preparada con guias, manuales, conferencias y cursos. Pero quiza aun asi, los cambios que llegaran a su vida la tomaran por sorpresa. Ha cambiado su papel en el mundo, y tambien lo que el mundo espera de ella y eso es lo que no te dicen en los otros libros sobre la maternidad: al convertirse en madre, la mujer pasa de ser hija, hermana, esposa, amiga o companera para volverse la cuidadora del bienestar no solo de un bebe, sino de toda la familia. Que ocurre entonces con la persona que eras antes? Este es un libro de compania, con los testimonios de muchas mujeres que nos cuentan sus experiencias, en un momento en el que probablemente vas a necesitar compania, comprension y por supuesto, reirte un poco.

This edited volume focuses on gender and love as emerging through complex "entanglements and weavings". At a time when constructionist ideas are losing support, we interrogate theoretical paradigms to assess if constructionist notions still hold value or if new approaches are needed to address the effects of materiality and non-human agency. Without claiming any unison or definite answers, we offer situated, agential cuts into gender and love in various discursive-material phenomena, including Biblical and Rabbinic literature, ecosexual performance art, the writings of Ursula Le Guin and Angela Carter, butch identities, Bengali folktales, Ferzan OEzpetek's cinema, Golem literature, sexual pursuits in Danish nightlife, mother-daughter relationships, women warriors in the PKK, and BDSM performances. Artistic photographer Sara Davidmann has contributed to the book with the cover illustration and a creative afterword including seven photographs on the interaction between the photographer, her studio, and LGBTQ+ people.