Bryn Mawr Alum

A remarkable autobiography of Alice Rothchild's journey from 1950's good girl to irreverent, feisty, feminist obstetrician-gynecologist forging her own direction in the contradictory, sexist world of medicine

A remarkable autobiography--written entirely in free verse--of Alice Rothchild's journey from 1950's good girl to irreverent, feisty, feminist obstetrician-gynecologist forging her own direction in the contradictory, sexist world of medicine. As a child who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, she was compelled to create a path in the often outrageous, male-dominated medical field, repeatedly finding herself to be a first: accepted into an ob-gyn residency, opening an all-woman practice, working with midwives, challenging the status quo, shaped by her early involvement with Our Bodies Ourselves. Rothchild's poems are steeped in the often-shocking history of medicine and the conflicted sexual politics of the second half of the twentieth century.

Ironic Freedom asserts that freedom from governmental interference may make people vulnerable to other sources of coercion; these affects vary by gender, race, and class. Increasing negative freedoms may reinforce existing asymmetrical power relationships within society.

"Wickedly clever, outrageously fun, and bursting with heart." --Rebecca Mix, New York Times bestselling author of The Ones We Burn

A wily young thief must use her wits to survive futuristic, alternate history Beijing in this Les Misérables-inspired young adult cyberpunk "fast-paced heist [that] balances lofty ideals of change with snappy dialogue and pulse-pounding action" (Publishers Weekly).

When Zhong Ning'er takes the job, she expects a smash-and-grab burglary she's doing to make rent and help out a friend. What she doesn't expect: a sad-eyed army boy who dreams of insurrection, a former rebel leader trapped inside a secret lab, a group of aspiring revolutionaries who are first collaborators, then compatriots, and then, perhaps, friends.

But this is Beijing, nearly a hundred and fifty years after General Yuan Shikai successfully declared himself emperor in 1915. His descendants rule the country from their seat in the imperial city, their gendarmerie--the Beiyang Army--run the streets, aided by cyborgs and the Brocade Guard. Walls have risen, dividing the city into districts called Rings--nominally only by geography, but in truth by class. Earthquakes devastate the northern farmlands, crops drown in the southern typhoons, and all over the country people are hooked on a drug they call Complacency.

As a Sixth Ring girl who watched previous uprisings crushed brutally by the court, Ning'er isn't much of an optimist, and she's certainly no revolutionary. But that might not be up to her--as the stakes get higher, the time for passivity is quickly running out, and she must decide if she wants to sit idly in her cynicism, or embrace the breathless, terrible possibility of hope.

In August 1918 a Massachusetts-born woman named Margaret Hall boarded a transport ship in New York City that would take her across the Atlantic to work with the American Red Cross in France, then in the devastating grips of the First World War. Working at a canteen at a railroad junction close to the Western Front, Hall aided both Allied and German soldiers. While there she was regularly forced to seek shelter from German bombardments. After the Armistice, Hall explored the destruction of the surrounding region; her diary entries, letters, and photos reveal a world of ruins and human remains.

After Hall returned to the United States, she wrote a memoir that she shared privately with friends and family. Published here for the first time, Hall's words offer a first-hand account of life on the Western Front in those last months of the war and its immediate aftermath. Balancing her deeply held convictions about the horror of this conflict with both wry humor and a sense of urgency, Hall's narrative gives the reader an unusually immediate and individualized testimony, one that rivals those of similar but better-known war memoirs, such as those by Vera Brittain and Edith Wharton.

The book features dozens of Hall's striking and never-before-published photographs, including of the movement of troops through town, women working just behind the front lines, and the landscape left when the war was "over." The pairing of Hall's remarkable images with her vivid reporting results in an invaluable, and uniquely personal, account of one of the most cataclysmic events in history.

Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society