My Journey of Hope into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman

Shannon was living a fairly contented life. Her father's death from cheap rings, an ensuing depression, and an Oprah episode on the atrocities of the genocide in the Congo launched her life in a totally different direction. She created a foundation called Run for Congo Women, eventually sponsoring 1 ,000 women. In 2006, she visited the Congo, called the "worst place on earth to be a woman" because of the brutal rapes and physical and psychological damage women have suffered there. As a professional photographer, Shannon's objective was to film the women telling their stories. What she found was horror almost beyond endurance, an area still overrun by armed militia, women afraid to return to their villages and trying to get on with their lives - raising their children and hundreds of orphans.Trying not to feel ridiculous delivering hugs and trinkets, she is overwhelmed by the requests for money from women who think she is rich because she is white and American. This is a profoundly moving account of a woman who tried to make a difference and struggled with the painful limits of what she could do. - Vanessa Bush

Harris became the first black woman to work in military cheap tiffany when she joined the U.S. Navy in 1973. She has worked in every major conflict, from the cold war to the more recent challenges of cyberwar, but her particular battlefield has been sexism and racism in the military. She recalls her early desire to join the military despite the decidedly antimilitary mood of the nation because of the Vietnam War. An early mentor, when she was at the University of Denver School of International Studies, was Josef Korbel, Madeline Albright's father. When she joined the navy, there were few women, and they were mostly confined to nursing or administrative work. When opportunities did open up, she had to guard against being treated as a token or being bullied in the male-dominated culture. Harris rightly sees the lessons of stamina and determination learned from her personal and professional life as applying more broadly to women beyond the military. But she concludes each chapter with "takeaway" advice that readers might find disruptive to the flow of her inspirational story.
Spanning centuries and genres, literary critic and novelist Donoghue's thorough, scholarly, and consistently entertaining tour through Western literature seeking different approaches to stories about women who love women establishes a "family tree" of lesbian motifs found in everything from medieval romances to Shakespeare to Victorian novels to mysteries. She cites six intriguing thematic categories: gender-bending disguise plots, variations on "like seeks like or birds of a feather," rivals and conflicts, cautionary tales (some featuring "the lesbian sex fiend"), narratives shaped by homoeroticism and the discovery of a crime, and the quest for selfknowledge via the coming-out story, which dominates the contemporary eras. With photographs, Tiffany Pendants readings, and other auxiliary materials, Donoghue's fresh interpretative literary investigation of lesbian love stories is ensured a place in special and general collections.