Joan Rhodes would leave audiences speechless as she bent steel bars with her teeth, ripped large phone books into quarters, and lifted two men at a time. But what she did was real. Joan had a superstrength, forged out of desperation to survive. Born into poverty in 1920s London and abandoned by her parents, Joan endured a spell in the workhouse. Despite the worst possible start, she made it to the top of her profession to rub shoulders with the likes of Fred Astaire, Bob Hope and Sammy Davis Jnr. Joan's crowning glory was to perform for the Queen at Windsor Castle, and along the way she made lifelong friendships with Marlene Dietrich, Quentin Crisp and Dame Laura Knight. Biographer Triona Holden met Joan in her later years. When Joan passed away, Triona set out to secure her friend's place in history. She appeared on the show The Repair Shop to tell the strongwoman's story, and sifted through archives to retrace her journey to stardom. Joan saw herself as a freak, but in truth she was a champion for the so-called fairer sex. At a time when women were still groomed for marriage, An Iron Girl in a Velvet Glove tells the fascinating and tumultuous story of a woman who followed her own unique path.

This book contains information on an increasingly common autoimmune disorder. Also called "sticky blood" and Hughes Syndrome, APS makes one's blood clot too easily, creating high risk of stroke, thrombosis, and premature heart attack. It is also implicated in many other health problems including repeated miscarriages, neurological problems, eary dementia and migraines. It is often associated with lupus, and mimics the symptoms of other diseases, including MS.
Symptoms include; migraines and headaches, recurrent miscarriage, memory loss, slurred speech, blood clots, poor circulation, muscle pain and cramps, blurred vision, extreme fatigue, epilepsy, strokes, thrombosis and a form of angina. Because of lack of knowledge of APS in the medical establishment, sufferers are often misdiagnosed with MS or other more life-threatening conditions.
This book helps the reader identify the symptoms and provides important information on diagnosis and treatment of APS. It contains many moving stories, explaining how people eventually got a diagnosis, their symptoms, the impact of APS on their lives and whether or not treatment has worked.
Written in collaboration with Dr. Graham Hughes, the major researcher of APS in the UK, this book provides a clearly written informative look at an important but little-known disease.

The strike of 1984/5 cut deep into the traditional mining communities yet in the midst of this wholesale destruction something unexpected happened. From the dark corners of obscurity came the voices of the wives, mothers and daughters of miners - previously unheard, inexperienced, unrehearsed. Out of desperation they found the strength and courage to not only stand and fight alongside their men but to become political activists in their own right. Overnight they mastered the media, learnt which journalists to trust and began to appear in the newspapers, and on radio and TV. But when the strike ended in defeat the media lost interest. The women were dumped, allowed to slip back into the shadows. For some the strike brought about a change; they had seen an existence beyond the slagheaps and embraced it. For others the end of the strike meant coming back to earth with a bump. Two decades later Triona Holden, who was one of the BBC correspondents reporting on the strike, takes the reader into the lives of these remarkable women and reveals that what is good and inextinguishable about the mining communities lives on in these women's articulate, funny and frank stories.