Jim Bailey, son of millionaire mining magnate Abe Bailey, achieved renown as a WW2 hero, author and proprietor of DRUM magazine. In 1950, Barbara, then a girl of 12, met the dashing 23-year old Jim at his sister's house in Illovo. That night she wrote in her diary: I have met the most beautiful person and I am going to marry him. This is the marriage charted here, in diary entries spanning 50 years. Barbara's story is funny, whimsical and sad in turn. We get to know Barbara intimately, along with her eccentric family (she is artist Beezy and restaurateur Prospero's mother) and her wide coterie of famous and fabulous friends. The cast includes such luminaries as Yehudi Menuhin, Bruce Chatwin, the Oppenheimers, Orson Welles, Helen Suzman, Thomas Packenhan, James Fox, Linda Chalker and Dame Margot Fonteyn. Barbara chronicles the course of her first marriage, to Jeremy Taylor, and her subsequent liaison with her true love, Jim. Jim Baily, who was not above attending SAAN board meetings in his bare feet, was probably one of the only true South African eccentrics. Their life together was not only full of music and laughter and hunting parties; it also contained profound sadness. Their son Bundy was killed in a car crash, and Barbara writes movingly about losing a child. The diary ends with her nursing Jim as he lay dying.

The UWI Gender Journey is a bold volume that carefully documents the visionary commitment and struggles for recognition and respect of a relatively small cohort of dedicated feminist scholars, each of them powerful academics and leaders, as they collaborated to institutionalize gender and development studies at the University of West Indies. We learn about the origins of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies and how it came to provide global academic leadership in the field of gender and development studies. The story of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies and all its preceding phases deserves to be told both because of its significant impact on regional scholarship and also because it exemplifies commitment to the legitimation of a fundamentally interdisciplinary academic undertaking with great importance for Caribbean social well-being. The UWI Gender Journey records a uniquely regional project and its broader momentum, offering powerful lessons for advocates for gender studies internationally. The authors also make clear that gender and development studies is an essential component of the global struggle against gender inequalities. The audience for this work is both regional and global. The detailed descriptive account of how women and gender studies came to be in the University of the West Indies provides much of scholarly interest for academics elsewhere. Historians will find the volume invaluable for its wealth of details about how various Caribbean feminist scholars and their supporters responded to global development initiatives.

This short story, told from a mother's perspective reveals how an ordinary day turned into an unbelievable nightmare. Mary could not express that terrible feeling of helplessness at that particular moment. As James' life flashed before his eyes, he was stuck in an unfamiliar place and forced to question his hope, faith, and self-worth. Is it possible for your life to change in a split-second? Is this a set up or just plain fate? This inspirational book, based on a true story, is a test of faith on lessons learned when there seems to be no way out and all hope is gone.