An Afghan Woman's Odyssey is a first-person account of the tragedy that disrupted daily life in Afghanistan after the Communist coup of April 1978, events that eventually contributed to the volatile Taliban rule. This is the tale of a woman desperate to find her missing husband and her painful decision finally to abandon the search and to leave the country with her three children. Her story typifies the kinds of human-rights violations that became common practice after the Soviet invasion and made way for the later abuses of the Taliban.

The reader follows the author's experiences of Russia - experiencing local customs, the St. Petersburg flood and the Decembrist revolt - to her time in Jamaica as a missonary to the newly emancipated blacks.

Politics and passion are spiked with humor and searching in this compelling tale of a modern woman's journey to mid-life. From shooting deer in Texas to shooting pictures in the Himalayas, from boyfriends to babies, from hitchhiking alone in Guatemala to traveling with the Clintons on the pre-election Texas bus tour, Aaker observes and analyses her world with unexpected candor and insight. Although the specific details are only one woman's experiences, the narrative chronicles the win/loss cycles faced by any woman who chooses to have both career and family.

Making My Pitch tells the story of Ila Jane Borders, who despite formidable obstacles became a Little League prodigy, MVP of her otherwise all-male middle school and high school teams, the first woman awarded a college baseball scholarship, and the first to pitch and win a complete men’s collegiate game. After Mike Veeck signed Borders in May 1997 to pitch for his St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League, she accomplished what no woman had done since the Negro Leagues era: play men’s professional baseball. Borders played four professional seasons and in 1998 became the first woman in the modern era to win a professional ball game. Borders had to find ways to fit in with her teammates, reassure their wives and girlfriends, work with the media, and fend off groupies. But these weren’t the toughest challenges. She had a troubled family life, a difficult adolescence as she struggled with her sexual orientation, and an emotionally fraught college experience as a closeted gay athlete at a Christian university. Making My Pitch shows what it’s like to be the only woman on the team bus, in the clubhouse, and on the field. Raw, open, and funny at times, her story encompasses the loneliness of a groundbreaking pioneer who experienced grave personal loss. Borders ultimately relates how she achieved self-acceptance and created a life as a firefighter and paramedic and as a coach and goodwill ambassador for the game of baseball.

From the bestselling author of Tracks: A travel writer’s memoir of her year with the nomadic Rabari tribe on the border between Pakistan and India. India’s Thar Desert has been the home of the Rabari herders for thousands of years. In 1990, Australian Robyn Davidson, “as natural a travel writer as she is an adventurer,” spent a year with the Rabari, whose livelihood is increasingly endangered by India’s rapid development (The New Yorker). Enduring the daily hardships of life in the desert while immersed in the austere beauty of the arid landscape, Davidson subsisted on a diet of goat milk, roti, and parasite-infested water. She collided with India’s rigid caste system and cultural idiosyncrasies, confronted extreme sleep deprivation, and fought feelings of alienation amid the nation’s isolated rural peoples—finding both intense suffering and a renewed sense of beauty and belonging among the Rabari family. Rich with detail and honest in its depictions of cultural differences, Desert Places is an unforgettable story of fortitude in the face of struggle and an ode to the rapidly disappearing way of life of the herders of northwestern India. “Davidson will both disturb and exhilarate readers with the acuity of her observations, the sting of her wit, and the candor of her emotions” (Booklist).

Female Characters play various roles in the Odyssey: patron goddess (Athena), seductress (Kirke, the Sirens, Nausikaa), carnivorous monster (Skylla), maid servant (Eurykleia), and faithful wife (Penelope). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this study examines these different female representations and their significance within the context of the poem and Greek culture. A central theme of the book is the visualization of the Odyssey's female characters by ancient artists, and several essays discuss the visual and iconographic implications of Odysseus' female encounters as depicted in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art. The distinguished contributors--from the fields of classical studies, comparative literature, art history, and archaeology--are A.J. Graham, Seth L. Schein, Diana Buitron-Oliver, Beth Cohen, Sheila Murnaghan, Lillian Eileen Doherty, Helene P. Foley, Froma I. Zeitlin, H.A. Shapiro, Richard Brilliant, Jenifer Neils, and Christine Mitchell Havelock. Feminine in orientation, but not narrowly feminist in approach, this first interdisciplinary work on the Odyssey's female characters will have a broad audience amongst scholars and students working in classical studies, iconography and art history, women's studies, mythology, and ancient history.

Here is the intriguing story of one woman’s mid-life flight from her stultified, middle-class, psychologically crippling, and unfulfilled existence into a world of high adventure, danger, hardship, and endurance, which ultimately leads her to autonomy and recognition. In her new book, A Woman’s Odyssey Into Africa, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein chronicles three year-long solo backpacking treks through remote areas of sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, she discovers the mainsprings of strength within herself as she follows her own drummer, finding the courage to face the darkest and most secret convolutions of her own mind. She weaves the story of her journey through the men, women, and children she meets, and the dangers and adventures she faces as a lone woman traveler--part and parcel of the path she has chosen to take. She infuses readers at any stage of life, especially women, with the courage to do what their individual drummer dictates, as she did, to find fulfillment in life. Lightfoot-Klein assures readers in her book: “Even a life of quiet desperation is not beyond redemption. Change starts with a reassessment of the distortions in self image one has been programmed to accept. It starts with an inner rebellion, a realization that something has been amiss and a desire to set it right, if only to leave a better heritage for one’s children. And then, most important of all, it begins with a single, wild, breathless moment, where one picks up an unaccustomed load and steps off into the unknown . . . ” Her message is truly for everyone.