The Norton Book of Women's Lives

I love anthologies because they are so rich and various. This one, edited by a woman with a clear, strong ear for women's voices, has plenty to offer: 61 substantial selections from the twentieth-century literature of women's autobiographies, journals, and memoirs. "I didn't want to do my duty," Phyllis Rose says of herself growing up. (She wanted to be a cowgirl.) "Nor did I want models...of noble self-sacrifice and altruism. I wanted wild women, women who broke loose, women who lived life to the full, whatever that meant. What did it mean to live life to the full? How fully could a woman live?" In this collection, we hear a chorus of "wild women" who show us in many ways how fully we might live. What stories these are, what fascinating lives, lived on the edge of pain, perception, and truth. These are lives that liberate and enlarge the rest of us. Read them, retell them, and use them as models for telling your own story. by Susan Wittig Albert for Story Circle Book Reviews www.storycirclebookreviews.org reviewing books by, for, and about women

This is by far the best book I've read in the last few years. I picked it at random from the library, but I didn't want to take it back when I was finished with it. As an aspiring anthropologist, being put smack in the middle of so many different women's lives from all over the world at all time periods of the twentieth century was absolutely fascinating. I've made a list of all the selections that have inspired me enough to make me want to read the book it was taken from, and the list is two pages long! The book is an excellent montage of so many different walks of life, I think it should win some kind of award for it's superb editing. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in other women's lives, and to any men wondering how we really think and feel.