Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs, Downstairs Romance

The Astronaut Wives Club

Lily Koppel · 311 pages

"THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB is spectacular, both in its intimacy and its reach. Lily Koppel pulls out delicious behind-the-scenes details of the stresses, formalities, pleasures, and travails of being the women behind the men on the moon." --KAREN ABBOTT, AUTHOR OF *AMERICAN ROSE* AND *SIN IN THE SECOND CITY* **THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB** As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr. · 456 pages

The rich mystery of a reclusive, eccentric heiress Huguette Clark: a true story of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages

The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

Jennifer Worth · 471 pages

An unforgettable story of the joy of motherhood, the bravery of a community, and the hope of one extraordinary womanAt the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in post war London's East End slums. The colorful characters she meets while delivering babies all over London—from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives to th

Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Tourmaline · 306 pages

Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters

Laura Thompson · 480 pages

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages

Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

Kate Clifford Larson · 319 pages

The revelatory, poignant story of Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest and eventually secreted-away Kennedy daughter, and how her life transformed her family, its women especially, and an entire nation.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Laura Hillenbrand · 453 pages

Retraces the journey of Seabiscuit, a horse with crooked legs and a pathetic tail that made racing history in 1938, thanks to the efforts of a trainer, owner, and jockey who transformed a bottom-level racehorse into a legend.

Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel, Nazi Agent

Hal Vaughan

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

Amanda Foreman · 463 pages

Sex, intrigue and adultery in the world of high politics and huge wealth in late eighteenth-century England. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was one of the most flamboyant and influential women of the eighteenth century. The great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, she was variously a compulsive gambler, a political savante and operator of the highest order, a drug addict, an adu

The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family

Laurence Leamer · 946 pages

Monumental in scope and extraordinary in sensitivity, The Kennedy Women chronicles five matrilineal generations in our nation's premier political dynasty. Not merely distinguished cultural history, it is a story of epic sweep, brimming with triumph and tragedy, courage and compliance, self-sacrifice and self-delusion. Moving from steerage on an immigrant vessel to the slums of Boston, from the Co

Coolidge

Amity Shlaes · 565 pages

From the Publisher... Amity Shlaes chronicles a riveting portrait of a great American president, Calvin Coolidge, who served in office in the 1920s. He was known to many as "Silent Cal" and to some as "Scrooge." His personality portrayed a quiet, passive man, old fashioned, but the most modern of all presidents. His discipline represented strength, and he was admired for his courage. From the g

Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness

Joshua Wolf Shenk · 359 pages

Drawing on seven years of his own research and the work of other esteemed Lincoln scholars, Shenk reveals how the sixteenth president harnessed his depression to fuel his astonishing success. Lincoln found the solace and tactics he needed to deal with the nation’s worst crisis in the �coping strategies” he had developed over a lifetime of persevering through depressive episodes and personal tra

Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy · 368 pages

The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters

Charlotte Mosley · 848 pages

Lillian's Story: One Womans Journey through the 20th Century

Sally Patricia Gardner · 314 pages

Born in Suffolk in 1900, Lillian's life spans the twentieth century. The eldest daughter of a farmworker, she is destined for service at the age of twelve, but her life is changed irrevocably, first by World War One, and subsequently even more by World War Two. These dual experiences cast their shadows forward and influence the rest of her life - a long and eventful life. The post-war austerity ye

Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson

Paula Byrne · 470 pages

King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father

Brooke Barbier · 320 pages

The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars

Andrew X. Pham · 256 pages

Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned

Brian Moynahan · 400 pages

Grigory Efimovich Rasputin came to St. Petersburg from his Siberian cabin in 1903 like a projectile from the medieval past, tattered, black-clad, muttering. By the time he was murdered thirteen years later, the peasant was the "beloved Friend" of Tsar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra and the sponsor of the most powerful officials in Russia. He had become, a society lady wrote, "a dusk enveloping all

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

James E. Seaver · 182 pages

The film Dance with Wolves shows how some whites, at the time of the first European contacts with American Indians, chose not to return to their own culture. Mary Jemison was perhaps the most famous white captive who stayed to live among the Indians. Her account of her life with the Senecas--as told to upstate New York doctor James Everett Seaver in 1824--has gone through countless editions, repr

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

John A. Farrell · 588 pages

Clarence Darrow is the lawyer every law school student dreams of being: on the side of right, loved by many women, portrayed by Spencer Tracy. His days-long closing arguments, delivered without notes, won miraculous reprieves. Darrow left a promising career as a railroad lawyer during the tumultuous Gilded Age in order to champion poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts against big

Jonathan Edwards

George M. Marsden · 640 pages

"Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is a towering figure in American history. A controversial theologian and the author of the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he ignited the momentous Great Awakening of the eighteenth century." "In this biography, Jonathan Edwards emerges as both a great American and a brilliant Christian. George M. Marsden evokes the world of colonial New England in