Women Who Spark

Women Who Spark will help women be on fire about their lives. Women want to stop feeling overwhelmed in the day-to-day whirlwind and start feeling hope about their futures. This book will help women wake up every day feeling happy, confident, and purpose-driven.

In Women Who Spark After 50, Aleta Norris will inspire the spark within you through stories of midlife women who got busy living, and inspire you to go after your dreams.

“An authoritative guide to help women navigate the workplace and their everyday life with greater success and impact” (Forbes). So, you’ve earned a seat at the table. What happens next? We all face hard decisions every day—and the choices we make, and how others perceive them, can be life changing. There are countless books on how to make those tough calls, but How Women Decide is the first to examine a much overlooked truth: Men and women reach verdicts differently, and often in surprising ways. Stress? It makes women more focused. Confidence? Caution can lead to stronger resolutions. And despite popular misconceptions, women are just as decisive as men—though they may pay for it. Pulling from the latest science on decision-making, as well as lively stories of real women and their experiences, cognitive scientist Therese Huston teaches us how we can better shape our habits, perceptions, and strategies, not just to make the most of our own opportunities, but to reform the culture and bring out the best results—regardless of who’s behind them.

Too often, depictions of women's rise in corporate America leave out the first generation of breakthrough women entrepreneurs. Here, Edith Sparks restores the careers of three pioneering businesswomen--Tillie Lewis (founder of Flotill Products), Olive Ann Beech (cofounder of Beech Aircraft), and Margaret Rudkin (founder of Pepperidge Farm)--who started their own manufacturing companies in the 1930s, sold them to major corporations in the 1960s and 1970s, and became members of their corporate boards. These leaders began their ascent to the highest echelons of the business world before women had widespread access to higher education and before there were federal programs to incentivize women entrepreneurs or laws to prohibit credit discrimination. In telling their stories, Sparks demonstrates how these women at once rejected cultural prescriptions and manipulated them to their advantage, leveraged familial connections, and seized government opportunities, all while advocating for themselves in business environments that were not designed for women, let alone for women leaders. By contextualizing the careers of these hugely successful yet largely forgotten entrepreneurs, Sparks adds a vital dimension to the history of twentieth-century corporate America and provides a powerful lesson on what it took for women to succeed in this male-dominated business world.

Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.

Help babies discover astronomy, from the planets of our Solar System to the vast Milky Way.

"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."