Adults

Fashion icon Iris Apfel shares her philosophy for living, unique perspective on design, and the key moments that shaped her life, along with 300 photographs from her personal collection in a beautifully produced legacy book, featuring a bespoke ribbon marker, edges sprayed with a vibrant pink ink, and a debossed, high-gloss cover.



In the summer of 2023, as Iris Apfel welcomed her 102nd birthday, she put pen to paper to write this very special project, which Iris called her legacy book.



"This is not a book of secrets--I have no secrets. Sorry to disappoint if that's what you're looking for. I have some good stories, though. And a few ideas. This book is about living, creating, and color. Because creativity and color matter. I don't want you to dress like me or think like me--that's not the idea of this book. I want you to find the colors, confidence, and creative inspiration that reflect you. My life has been filled with love, wonder, and a very deep, incurable curiosity. This book is my treasure trove of inspiration, influences, and ideas: My source. Be brave. Find your source. What makes you happy? --Much love, Iris x"



With more than 300 personal photos and adorned with beautiful, unseen fabric patterns from Iris's Old World Weaver's collection, Iris Apfel: Colorful has her incredible energy radiating from every page. Here she shares her creative work, life stories, adventures, and unwavering belief in the essential power of color and creativity on a life well lived.

*WINNER OF THE WOMEN WRITING THE WEST 2023 WILLA LITERARY AWARD*

Brave Hearted is not just history, it is an incredibly intense page-turning experience. To read what these women endured is to be transported into another universe of courage, loss, pain, and occasionally victory. This book is a triumph."--Amanda Foreman

"Absolutely compelling."--Christina Lamb, Sunday Times (UK)

The dramatic, untold stories of the diverse array of women who helped transform the American West.

Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route; African-American women in search of freedom from slavery; Chinese sex-workers sold openly on the docks of San Francisco; Native American women brutally displaced by the unstoppable tide of white settlers - these were the women who settled the American West, whose stories until now have remained mostly untold. As the internationally bestselling historian Katie Hickman writes, "Myth and misunderstanding spring from the American frontier as readily as rye grass from sod, and--like the wiry grass--seem as difficult to weed out and discard." But the true-life story of women's experiences in the Wild West is more gripping, heart-rending, and stirring than all the movies, novels, folk-legends, and ballads of popular imagination.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and other extraordinary contemporary accounts, sifting through the legends and the myths, the laws and the treaties, Katie Hickman presents us with a cast of unforgettable women, all forced to draw on huge reserves of resilienceand courage in the face of tumultuous change: the half Cree, Marguerite McLoughlin, the much-admired "First Lady" of Fort Vancouver; the Presbyterian missionary Narcissa Whitman, who in 1837 became the first white woman to make the overland journey west across the Rocky Mountains; Biddy Mason, the Mississippi slave who fought for her freedom through the courts of California; Olive Oatman, adopted by the Mohave, famous for her facial tattoos.

This is the story of the women who participated in the greatest mass migration in American history, transforming their country in the process. This is American history not as it was romanticized but as it was lived.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK • The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood, a legacy erased from history—until now.

“This is the kind of history I wish I learned as a child dreaming of the stage!” —Misty Copeland, author of Black Ballerinas: My Journey to Our Legacy

“Utterly absorbing, flawlessly-researched…Vibrant, propulsive, and inspiring, The Swans of Harlem is a richly drawn portrait of five courageous women whose contributions have been silenced for too long!” —Tia Williams, author of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarca was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company—the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a troupe of women and men who became each other’s chosen family. She was the first Black company ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, an Essence cover star; she was cast in The Wiz and in a Bob Fosse production on Broadway. She performed in some of ballet’s most iconic works with other trailblazing ballerinas, including the young women who became her closest friends—founding Dance Theatre of Harlem members Gayle McKinney-Griffith and Sheila Rohan, as well as first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells.

These Swans of Harlem performed for the Queen of England, Mick Jagger, and Stevie Wonder, on the same bill as Josephine Baker, at the White House, and beyond. But decades later there was almost no record of their groundbreaking history to be found. Out of a sisterhood that had grown even deeper with the years, these Swans joined forces again—to share their story with the world.

Captivating, rich in vivid detail and character, and steeped in the glamour and grit of professional ballet, The Swans of Harlem is a riveting account of five extraordinarily accomplished women, a celebration of both their historic careers and the sustaining, grounding power of female friendship, and a window into the robust history of Black ballet, hidden for too long.

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation

When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey toward a freer and more just nation.

Any serious effort to understand how the Black civil rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn how to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age twenty-nine, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida, school she had founded and which would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency, and she enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause.

Rooks grew up in Florida, in Bethune’s shadow: her grandmother trained to be a teacher at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many community empowerment projects. The story of how Bethune succeeded in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country is, in Rooks’s hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a mind and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the stakes of the long struggle for full Black equality in this country are particularly evident—and centered on the state of Florida—it is a gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune’s journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle.

The first definitive exploration of the changing role of the twenty-first-century First Lady, painting a comprehensive portrait of Jill Biden—from a White House correspondent for The New York Times

“A fascinating and deeply researched exploration into the most public facing and least understood role in Washington.”—Kate Andersen Brower, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Residence and First Women

AN ELLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Since the Clinton era, shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have often remained anachronistic. With sharp insights and dozens of firsthand interviews with major players in the Biden, Obama, Trump, Bush, and Clinton orbits, including Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton, New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers traces the evolution of the role of the twenty-first-century First Lady from a ceremonial figurehead to a powerful political operator, which culminates in the tenure of First Lady Jill Biden.

Dr. Jill Biden began her journey toward public life in 1975 as a twenty-three-year-old who caught the eye of a widowed Senator Joe Biden. Recovering from the heartbreak of her failed first marriage, she found a man who was still grieving. She knitted his life together after unspeakable tragedy and stood by his side through three presidential campaigns.

In some ways, her legacy as First Lady was set before she ever entered the White House: She is the first presidential spouse in history to work in a paid role outside the White House, a decision that blazes the path for future first spouses. But as a prime guardian of one of the most insular operations in modern politics, she is also a central part of her husband’s presidential legacy.

Through deep reporting and newly discovered correspondence, American Woman is the first book to paint a full picture of Jill Biden while exploring how she helps answer the evolving question of what the role of the modern First Lady should be.

From LA Times bestselling author Mallory O'Meara, the story of America's first professional stuntwoman, Helen Gibson, who rose to fame during a time when women ruled Hollywood.



Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as "The Most Daring Actress in Pictures," Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, background actor, stunt double, and eventually one of the era's biggest action stars. Her exploits on motorcycles, train cars, and horseback were as dangerous as they were glamorous, featured in hundreds of films and serials--yet her legacy was quickly overshadowed by the increasingly hypermasculine and male-dominated evolution of cinema in the decades that would follow her.



Award-winning author Mallory O'Meara presents her life and career in exhilarating detail, including:

 

• Helen's rise to fame in The Hazards of Helen, the longest-running serial in history
• How Helen became the first-ever stuntwoman in American film
• The pivotal role of Helen's contemporaries--including female directors, stars, and stuntwomen who shaped the making of cinema as we know it.

Through the page-turning story of Helen's pioneering legacy, Mallory O'Meara gives readers a glimpse of the Golden Age of Hollywood that could have been: an industry where women call the shots.

 

The incredible and inspiring story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the World War II female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo.

During World War II, Elzbieta Zawacka—the WWII female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo—was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the "Silent Unseen.” She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, while being hunted by the Gestapo (who arrested her entire family), she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland.

After the war, she was discharged as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned (and tortured) her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years.

Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Agent Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to brilliant life—while transforming how we value the history of women resistance fighters during World War II.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

"What a woman! And what a fabulous life to unearth. Zelia Nuttall was incredibly smart, determined, a divorced single mother in a man’s world, a great scholar, and an original thinker—yet today she’s completely forgotten. Merilee Grindle has dug deep into the archives and uncovered her fascinating story."—Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature

"Zelia Nuttall comes alive in all her fascinating contradictions in Merilee Grindle’s capable hands...[This] biography challenges our modern smugness and reminds us that our roots as scholars are more complex than we often acknowledge."—Camilla Townsend, author of Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

The gripping story of a pioneering anthropologist whose exploration of Aztec cosmology, rediscovery of ancient texts, and passion for collecting helped shape our understanding of pre-Columbian Mexico.

Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. A child of the San Francisco Gold Rush whose mother was born in Mexico City, Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancient civilizations.

Proud, disciplined, as prickly as she was independent, Zelia Nuttall was the first person to accurately decode the Aztec calendar stone. An intrepid researcher, she found pre-Columbian texts lost in European archives and was skilled at making sense of their pictographic histories. Her work on the terra-cotta heads of Teotihuacán captured the attention of Frederic Putnam, who offered her a job at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Divorced and juggling motherhood and career, Nuttall chose to follow her own star, publishing her discoveries and collecting artifacts for US museums to make ends meet. From her beloved Casa Alvarado in Coyoacán, she became a vital bridge between Mexican and US anthropologists, connecting them against the backdrop of war and revolution.

The first biography of Zelia Nuttall, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl captures the appeal and contradictions that riddled the life of this trailblazing woman, who contributed so much to the new field of anthropology until a newly professionalized generation overshadowed her remarkable achievements and she became, in the end, an artifact in her own museum.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' PICK 
NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024 - A LA TIMES BESTSELLER AND BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH 
TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024 - KIRKUS BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
WASHINGTON POST 50 NOTABLE WORKS OF NONFICTION FOR 2024 - A PEOPLE BOOK PICK AND A BEST CELEBRITY MEMOIR OF 2024 
A TOWN & COUNTRY BEST CELEBRITY MEMOIR OF 2024 
"This delightful memoir is filled with Connie Chung's trademark wit, sharp insights, and deep understanding of people. It's a revealing account of what it's like to be a woman breaking barriers in the world of TV news, filled with colorful tales of rivalry and triumph. But it also has a larger theme: how the line between serious reporting and tabloid journalism became blurred." - Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author

In a sharp, witty, and frank memoir, iconic trailblazer and legendary journalist Connie Chung pulls no punches in detailing her storied career as the first Asian woman to break into an overwhelmingly white, male-dominated television news industry. 
Connie Chung is a pioneer. The youngest of ten children, she was the only one born in the U.S., after her parents escaped war-torn China in a harrowing journey to America, where Connie would one day make history as the first woman (and Asian) to co-anchor the CBS Evening News. Profoundly influenced by her family's cultural traditions, yet growing up completely Americanized, she dealt with overt sexism and racism. Despite this, her tenacity led her to become a household name. 
In Connie: A Memoir, Chung reveals behind-the-scenes details of her singular life. From her close relationship with Maury Povich, her husband and professional confidant; to the horrific memory of being molested by the doctor who had delivered her; to her joy of adopting their son when she was almost fifty, she does not hold back. She talks honestly about the good, bad, and ugly in her personal and professional life--this is Connie Chung like you've never seen her before.

The extraordinary true story of four women pioneers in physics during World War II and their daring escape out of Nazi Germany

In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments.

Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required Herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists. Lise fled to Sweden, where she made a groundbreaking discovery in nuclear physics, and the others fled to the United States, where they brought advanced physics to American universities. No matter their destination, each woman revolutionized the field of physics when all odds were stacked against them, galvanizing young women to do the same.

Well researched and written with cinematic prose, Sisters in Science brings these trailblazing women to life and shows us how sisterhood and scientific curiosity can transcend borders and persist--flourish, even--in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.