I’m currently reading, “Sisters in Science” by Olivia Campbell for review and while doing so, I looked up if Campbell has written other stories. There is a story called, “Women in White Coats” that I’ve heard of and hadn’t paid attention to the fact that Campbell is the author. While, I’m curious about this book, I’m still not sure I will be able to fit it into my reading schedule at present. The story is non-fiction and the premise is something I’m greatly interested in knowing more about. Hopefully, it may be a 2025 read.
I thought I would share the book description and perhaps this story will be a new discovery for someone. Have you heard of this book? Thoughts?
Stephanie
Book Description:
Published March 2, 2021
In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society.
Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women-built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first-time medical care for women by women.
A few years ago now, Atria Books sent me an ARC of The Princess Spy by Larry Loftis to review and I immensely enjoyed the story. Since then I haven’t had a chance to look at Loftis other works and I’ve recently discovered another book by him I would like to read and have added it to my reading wish-list plus, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. I can’t wait to read them! They look so good. I have a feeling I will be shedding quite a few tears reading them. World War II stories do that to me. Let me know in the comment area if you’ve read these stories!
Stephanie Hopkins
The Watchmaker’s Daughter: The True Story of World War II Heroine Corrie ten Boom by Larry Loftis
About the book:
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
New York Times bestselling author and master of nonfiction spy thrillers Larry Loftis writes the first major biography of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch watchmaker who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews during WWII—at the cost of losing her family and being sent to a concentration camp, only to survive, forgive her captors, and live the rest of her life as a Christian missionary.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that readers haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom—a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it.
Corrie stopped at nothing to face down the evils of her time and overcame unbelievable obstacles and odds. She persevered despite the loss of most of her family and relied on her faith to survive the horrors of a notorious concentration camp. But even more remarkable than her heroism and survival was Corrie’s attitude when she was released. Miraculously, she was able to eschew bitterness and embrace forgiveness as she ministered to people in need around the globe. Corrie’s ability to forgive is just one of the myriad lessons that her life story holds for readers today.
Reminiscent of Schindler’s List and featuring a journey of faith and forgiveness not unlike Unbroken, The Watchmaker’s Daughter is destined to become a classic work of World War II nonfiction.
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, Elizabeth Sherrill, and John Sherrill
“Every experience God gives us . . . is the perfect preparation for the future only He can see.”–Corrie ten Boom
About the book:
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler’s concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the twentieth century. In World War II she and her family risked their lives to help Jews and underground workers escape from the Nazis, and for their work they were tested in the infamous Nazi death camps. Only Corrie among her family survived to tell the story of how faith ultimately triumphs over evil.
Here is the riveting account of how Corrie and her family were able to save many of God’s chosen people. For 35 years millions have seen that there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. Now The Hiding Place, repackaged for a new generation of readers, continues to declare that God’s love will overcome, heal, and restore.
This past Sunday, I met a dear friend at a local coffee shop and what a treat it was! We talked about many topics and our mutual love for nonfiction. My friend is currently listening to Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer and she highly recommend it to me. Later on, when I got home, I sent her a picture of the nonfiction book I’m reading. The title is, The Neighborhood Project by David Sloan Wilson. I received the book as an ARC many years ago.
This led me to further explore more nonfiction books to add to my to-read wish-list. Below are five new titles I have added. My wish is for you to be encouraged and inspired to read more and to explore nonfiction in a broader sense-if you haven’t already.
Stephanie Hopkins
The Book-Makers
A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives
by Adam Smyth
Description
The five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them
Books tell all kinds of stories—romances, tragedies, comedies—but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture’s most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.
Books have transformed humankind by enabling authors to create, document, and entertain. Yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence and of those who first experimented in the art of printing, design, and binding. Who were the renegade book-makers who changed the course of history?
From Wynkyn de Worde’s printing of fifteenth-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunard’s avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.
Twenty Years
Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation
by Sune Engel Rasmussen
Description
An intimate history of the Afghan war—and the young Afghans whose dreams it enabled and dashed.
No country was more deeply affected by 9/11 than Afghanistan: an entire generation grew up amid the upheaval that began that day. Young Afghans knew the promise of freedom, democracy, and safety, fought with each other over its meaning—and then witnessed its collapse. In Twenty Years, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen draws on more than a decade of reporting from the country to tell Afghanistan’s story from a new angle. Through the eyes of newly empowered women, skilled entrepreneurs, driven insurgents, and abandoned Western allies, we see the United States and its partners bring new freedoms and wealth, only to preside over the corruption, war-lordism, and social division that led to the Taliban’s return to power.
Rasmussen relates this history via two main characters: Zahra, who returns from abroad with high hopes for her liberated county, where she must fight to escape a brutal marriage and rebuild her life; and Omari, who joins the Taliban to protect the honor of his village and country and winds up wrestling with doubt and the trauma of war after achieving victory. We also meet Parasto, who risks her life running clandestine girls’ schools under the new Taliban regime, and Fahim, a rags-to-riches tycoon who is forced to flee. With intimate access to these and other characters, Rasmussen offers deep insight into a country betrayed by the West and Taliban alike.
Warsaw Testament
by Rokhl Auerbach, Translated by Samuel Kassow
Description
Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and later to join his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach’s wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. Her memoir Warsaw Testament, based on her wartime writings, paints a vivid portrait of the city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
The Great Mosquito Huntand Other Adventures
by Elizabeth Manson-Bahr
Description
This book is the author’s answer to the question Who do you think you are? set in China, Russia, Egypt, Kenya, Fiji and the US during the 18th to 20th centuries. It describes the battle to discover the causes of malaria. Sir Patrick Manson, the author’s great-grandfather, known as Mosquito Manson, was the first scientist to prove that insects were vectors of disease, a discovery which led to the detection of the malarial parasite. He founded the Chinese Medical School in Hong Kong and the London School of Tropical Medicine. Among his pupils was Sun Yat-sen, the first President of modern China.
It is the story too of plagues and pandemics, of Scottish and German merchants who made their fortunes in 19th century Egypt and 18th century Russia. The author’s mother, orphaned by the Spanish flu, made her way to Africa where she served as a FANY in 1942, marrying Clinton, the third in the family line of tropical medical specialists. The chapters are interspersed with the author’s own childhood memories growing up in Fiji and Kenya.
The Demon of Unrest
A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
by Erik Larson
Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a simmering crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two. One of Time’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between them. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous secretary of state, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.
I can’t get over how fast this year is flying and there are still many books to be read! How is your reading going this year? Are you reading more or less books?
This month I’ve read two printed books from my own bookshelf, two NetGalley ebooks and listened to three audio books. Not bad considering how busy have been with other projects. I no longer consider myself an official book reviewer but I am still working on getting through my galley reads. I went a little crazy when I first joined a few years ago. That happens to newbies on NetGalley.
A couple of the books, I’ve read before and wanted to re-visit them. Can you believe I’m still undecided on how I would rate them? I don’t like the five-star rating system we have in place. Not all parts of a story are equal and the system needs to be changed. The two books I re-read are The Blackbird Season by Kate Moretti and Liar, Temptress, Solider, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott. Have you read those two books? I noticed a contradiction in Abbott’s book right off the bat. Even minor details are important not to miss. I’m surprised the editor missed it.
Tomorrow I’m blogging about three books I thinking about reading next! Be sure to check out my 2021 Books Read and follow Layered Pages by email to keep up with the latest. -Stephanie Hopkins
February was an absolute great month for reading. I read eleven books this month! My goal is to read 100 books this year or a minimum of one book a week. Who knows? I might surpass that goal. This is encouraging since I originally set my goal to read a book a week but I knew I could read more than that with the fabulous selection of books that are coming out and what novels I have on my shelf at home.
I am also making a point to read books that I would normally not pick up. I highly recommend getting gout of the comfort zone a bit. A whole new world will open up and you will defiantly expand your critical thinking.
What books did you read this month and what are you looking forward to in March?
I discovered Madam C.J. Walker a few years ago during my in-depth study of 19th Century Post Civil War. I thought at the time that it would be wonderful to watch a movie or read a book based on her life. I wanted to know more about this woman. Her story needs to be told. To my delight, I learned that Author Erica L. Ball wrote about Walker and have added the book to my reading list. I have not read any of Ball’s published works but have learned that she is a professor of History and Black Studies. Very cool. -Stephanie Hopkins
About the book:
Rowman & Littlefield
Biographies & Memoirs | History | Nonfiction (Adult)
Pub Date 15 Jan 2021
Description
Madam C. J. Walker—reputed to be America’s first self-made woman millionaire—has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress, laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor and working-class African American women. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire and a philanthropist wealthy enough to own a country estate near the Rockefellers…
In this biography, Erica Ball places this remarkable and largely forgotten life story in the context of Walker’s times.
I have recently complied a list of non-fiction books I want to eventually read. If you have read any of these, I would love to hear your thoughts. I’ve always been drawn to non-fiction for several reasons including, evidential support on subjects that interest me, and the value it brings to the table of reading, knowledge and looking at sources from different avenues. I’m also interested in reading about people from different walks of life and why they do what they do or what led them to do it in any situation whether it be crime, or making major decisions that impact lives. That is only the beginning of my interest in the genre but it sure does back a punch.
Today I’m sharing three from my list and will be posting more in the coming weeks. -Stephanie Hopkins
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
by Erik Larson
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz
On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—and willing to fight to the end.
In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports—some released only recently—Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” to whom he turns in the hardest moments.
The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when, in the face of unrelenting horror, Churchill’s eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.
For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company’s value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century
by Maureen Callahan
Go deep into the investigation behind one of the most frightening and enigmatic serial killers in modern American history, and into the ranks of a singular American police force: the Alaska PD.
Most of us have never heard of Israel Keyes. But he is one of the most ambitious, meticulous serial killers of modern time. The FBI considered his behavior unprecedented. Described by a prosecutor as “a force of pure evil”, he was a predator who struck all over the United States. He buried ‘kill kits’ – cash, weapons, and body-disposal tools – in remote locations across the country, and over the course of fourteen years, would fly to a city, rent a car, and drive thousands of miles in order to use his kits. He would break into a stranger’s house, abduct his victims in broad daylight, and kill and dispose of them in mere hours. And then he would return home, resuming life as a quiet, reliable construction worker devoted to his only daughter.
When journalist Maureen Callahan first heard about Israel Keyes in 2012, she was captivated by how a killer of this magnitude could go undetected by law enforcement for over a decade. And so began a project that consumed her for the next several years – uncovering the true story behind how the FBI ultimately caught Israel Keyes, and trying to understand what it means for a killer like Keyes to exist. A killer who left a path of monstrous, randomly committed crimes in his wake – many of which remain unsolved to this day.
American Predator is the culmination of years of on-the-ground interviews with key figures in law enforcement, and in Keyes’ life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century
Layered Pages 