Finished 6-4-10, rating 3/5, non fiction, pub. 2000

It had been startling

and disappointing to me

to find out

that story books

had been written by people,

that books were not

natural wonders, coming up of themselves

like grass.

-Eudora Welty

With a title like this how could I not pick it up, especially since I found it at Half-Price Books?  There are seven different groupings of women with short bios of each woman included.  I enjoyed some chapters more than others and there is a large selection of women from every time period and geographic location (although it is clearly Anglo based).  I had heard of maybe a little more than half of these women and enjoyed getting to know some women that I knew of, but had never read.  Betty Friedan, Mary Baker Eddy, and Gertrude Stein were a few that interested me the most, since I knew so little about them.  I didn’t realize that Gertrude Stein was buried at the Cemetery of Pere-Lachaise in Paris or else I would had looked for her when we were there last week. I’ll be talking about that cemetery in my Paris recap on Sunday.

I thought the book was good, but considering the title, a little boring.  I read it in snippets, so it took me a long time to finish.  This would not have happened if I had been truly engaged.  This book is gift sized and I do think it is a fun gift for a book lover, especially those who are interested in biographies of women.

This is from my personal library and was chosen for me by Amanda, Angie, and Mystica.  Here’s what they had to say…

“Partially because I love the title, and also because it sounds like the name of a self-help group that I probably need to join (okay, so there’s actually no probably about it.)”  Angie

“What a really apt title for almost all of us!”  Mystica

“Awesome title!”  Amanda