‘It’s infuriating and shocking’: how medicine has failed women over time

From The Guardian: In the eye-opening new book Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn uses her own misdiagnosis at the hands of male doctors as a jumping point for an alarming history lesson.

Cleghorn’s new book, Unwell Women, enumerates a litany of ways in which women’s bodies and minds have been misunderstood and misdiagnosed through history. From the wandering womb of ancient Greece (the idea that a displaced uterus caused many of women’s illnesses) and the witch trials in medieval Europe, through the dawn of hysteria, to modern myths around menstruation, she lays bare the unbelievable and sometimes horrific treatment of women for millennia in the name of medicine.

read more here @ The Guardian

Richard III & His Women

Hard on the heels of the discovery of Richard II in the carpark over the medieval location of Grey Friars, we have the following interesting articles - here is a small snippet from all three.

The Princess and the Gene Pool: The Plantagenet rebel who held the secret to Richard III’s DNA - post by author Sarah Gristwood in Medievalist dot net (February 2013)

Here Sarah talks about the fascinating life of Richard's eldest sister, Anne, and how it was her descedents that provided the important mitochondrial DNA for the identification of Richard.

Richard III is perhaps the most controversial figure in British history and historians will long be discussing what new light the finds cast on his story. But the long-forgotten Anne was herself a creature of scandal – a woman who openly took a lover; divorced her husband; and kept his family lands anyway. A Plantagenet princess who acted with all the freedom of a Manhattanite on the make today.

Even if Richard himself had been survived by children, they wouldn’t have carried this particular gene strand. Nor would the present royal family, descended from another of Cecily’s sons. The mitochondrial DNA concerned can be passed only through the female line. So the identification goes back to Anne, who was born in 1439, the first surviving child of Richard, Duke of York and his wife Cecily, the beautiful ‘Rose of Raby’. She was only seven years old when in 1447 she was married – presumably at first in name only – to Henry Holland, fifteen year old heir to the Duke of Exeter, a great nobleman descended from John of Gaunt and thus in the line of succession to the throne.

 Read more here @ Medievalist

Our second items comes from author Elizabeth Ashworth, posted on her blog (July 2013).

Richard III, his mistress, and his illegitimate children

Much has been written in fiction, and in some non-fiction, about the love between King Richard III and his wife, Anne Neville. But what if it isn’t true? What if Richard’s mistress was the great love of his life?  We may not know much about the mother or mothers of John and Katherine but we do know a little more about them from contemporary records.

Here Elizabeth discusses the two known illegitimate children of Richard III, and the women who might possibly be the mothers.  Then Elizabeth put forth another candidate:

In my novel By Loyalty Bound I suggest a new name for the mother of Richard’s illegitimate children: Anne Harrington. Although this is also based on speculation as the other names are, there is some circumstantial evidence that she may have been his mistress.

read more here @ Elizabeth Ashworth's blog

Now this third item is the most intriguing - and comes directly from the dig itself. Again, posted on Medievalist dot net (March 2015)

Lady in the Lead Coffin revealed

A mysterious lead coffin found close to the site of Richard III’s hastily dug grave at the Grey Friars friary has been opened and studied by experts from the University of Leicester.

Inside the lead coffin, archaeologists found the skeleton of an elderly woman, who academics believe could have been an early benefactor of the friary – as radiocarbon dating shows she might have been buried not long after the church was completed in 1250 (although analysis shows her death could have taken place as late as 1400).

The high status female was in one of 10 graves discovered in the grounds of the medieval complex, including that of Richard III, six of which were left undisturbed. Those that were examined were all found to have female remains.

Documents dating back to the time of the burials – about 700-years – name a lady called Emma, who was married to John of Holt. In September of that year, 1290, the Bishop of Lincoln issued an indulgence granting 20-days off Purgatory for anyone who would say ‘a Pater and a Ave for the soul of Emma, wife of John of Holt, whose body is buried in the Franciscan church in Leicester’. However, little is known about her, including what she looked like, her age at death or where in the friary church she was buried.

read more here @ Medievalist

Books & Reviews

It seems today every man and his dog has a blog reviewing books - some are professional reviewers, many are amatuers.  Many blog / review on a regular basis - others infrequently.  I would tend to lump myself in the latter of the two categories - an infrequent amatuer.  I don't get paid to review, I don't actively seek out works to review (I have on a couple of topics that have interested me), and I don't often post a review on every book I have read (I just don't have the time!). I have been approached to review books - some just don't interest me so I don't accept - occasionally one will spark my interest and I will accept.  Trouble is, once publishers (mainly located in UK and USA) realise that I am located in Australia, they quickly lose interest - like we don't read down under!

Anyway, I have posted a few reviews of books I have read here on this blog, Women of History, but now I will post mainly on my other blog, Melisende's Library (and also on Goodreads).

Melisende's Library will feature articles on authors I like, reviews of books I have read, posts on books / collections I own or on books or all things book-related that interest me.  To this end, I am going to collate those reviews I have posted here and send them over to the Library.  

You may find my taste rather eclectic - my favourite genre is history (and the women who have featured) but it is not limited to any particular time or country; however, having developed a passion for reading at an early age, I have gone through reading "phases" - eg: crime, mystery, historical fiction, biography, fantasy, sci-fi, series.  I have probably covered a lot of genres and my own personal Library reflects this.

I also have a passion for collecting books - okay I might be a bit OCD in this area - I collect (or hoard) books - can't throw away anything, even from childhood.  New or old books; printed or e-books; the good, the bad, the ugly - I have them all - and have read about 50% of what I actually own (like I said, not enough time!).

Hope you might spare a few moments and drop into the Library.

Sarah Losh: Forgotten Heroine

From The Economist:

In The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine—Antiquarian, Architect and Visionary, Jenny Uglow has brilliantly researched web of connections—of friends and family, ideas and influences. Losh left little of herself beyond the stone, wood and glass of her astonishing church and a few other local structures—a mausoleum, a cross, the schoolhouse, some cottages. Ms Uglow believes a diary will emerge one day.

From Amazon:

In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. Jenny Uglow’s The Pinecone tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Losh combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower—there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs, and poppies; an arrow pierces the wall as if shot from a bow; a tortoise gargoyle launches itself into the air. And everywhere there are pinecones, her signature in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life, death, and rebirth.

Losh’s story is also that of her radical family—friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge; of the love between sisters, and the life of a village; of the struggle of weavers, the coming of railways, the findings of geology, and the fate of a young northern soldier in the Anglo-Afghan War. Above all, though, it is about the joy of making and the skill of unsung local craftsmen.

Amelia Earhart - Case Closed

Fred Noonan & Amelia Earhart

I have just finished "Amelia Earhart - Case Closed" by Mike and Marjie Markowski, the revised edition of the original work of Walter Roessler and Leo Gomez.

"Case Closed" investigates the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan off Howland Island in July 1937.  However, unlike many other tomes that focus on Amelia's many aviation achievements, this book seeks to focus on the events that led up and contributed to that fateful day.

When we think of Amelia Earhart we tend to visualise a young daring girl setting off on a grand adventure, and who vanished off the face of the earth.  However, the truth is rarely as fanciful; and "Case Closed" seeks to dispel some of the myths surrounding this extraordinary woman and her exploits.

"Case Closed" leads us through the life and aviation achievements of Amelia - and touches briefly upon those of her predecessors.  We also learn of the personalities of Amelia and those surrounding her - and how these may have impacted upon decisions later made concerning her final flight. And we also learn that a series of events - each on its own probably not significant - together resulted in tragic consequences.

The authors look at a number of important issues that ultimately impacted on the final flight.  We learn of:

• Amelia's choice of plane in the Lockheed Electra - most of her other ventures were in the single-engine Vega;
• Amelia's crash on 20th March 1937 on her first attempt - an incident which resulted in damage to her Lockheed Electra and constant mechanical problems;
• the non-participation of half her original crew in the second attempt - both Paul Mantz and Harry Manning decided not to accompany Amelia and Fred;
• the decision to travel west-east rather than the usual east-west route;
• adverse weather conditions affecting the Electra, navigation and pilot;
• the decision not to take all necessary forms of communication on the final leg, whilst communication between both navigator and pilot was most basic;
• "jet lag" and fatigue affecting both Fred and Amelia which resulted in both experiencing navigational errors and poor decision-making

What "Case Closed" confirms is that Amelia and Fred did not survive the attempt and vanished, somewhere near Howland Island, on the final leg of their journey. What I appreciated in this work was the efforts of the authors to offer a critical assessment of events leading up to that fateful day and to offer constructive analysis rather than look at events through rose-coloured glasses.

But let there be no mistake - in no way do the authors disparage the character and achievements of Amelia and Fred; rather they seek to show that both were human with all the frailties of humanity.  Their disappearance was a tragedy and loss to the world of aviation.  

Recent news articles on Amelia Earhart that have been featured on Women of History:

• Amelia Earhart - Lost Evidence?
• Results of Amelia Earhart Search
• More on Amelia Earhart Search
• Amelia Earhart - New Evidence
• DNA Inconclusive In Search For Amelia Earhart
• Bone Key To Earhart Mystery
• Amelia Earhart Found??

I cannot but recommend "Amelia Earhart - Case Closed" for those who are keen to discover more about Amelia and Fred's last journey.

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History

Environmental journalist Florence Williams says that "Breasts are bellwethers for the changing health of people.”

It was after reading a news article about the effects of chemicals on breast milk that Florence set out to  investigate the natural and unnatural history of breasts.

Her book presents the findings of her forensic investigation of the evolutionary, social, sexual and historical knowledge on breasts.

From The Independent (Ireland):

They are, says Florence Williams, author of new book 'Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History', "bikinied, bared, flaunted, measured, inflated, sexted, YouTubed, suckled, pierced, tattooed, tassled and in every way fetishised".

Twelve Rooms of the Nile

“To speak the names of the dead is to make them live again.” –The Book of the Dead

There is no more apt way to introduce celebrated poet and short-story author Enid Shomer’s debut novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile. While Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale really did both travel through Egypt before they became the luminaries known to history, only in Shomer’s richly envisioned world did their journeys come to a crossroads, and did their lives become intertwined and their souls deeply connected. Shomer supplements rigorous research with vivid imagination, so that by the end of this novel, it will be difficult to fathom how Flaubert and Nightingale became the people we remember them as today without this story having taken place.

Enid Shomer won the Iowa Fiction Prize for her first collection of stories and the Florida Gold Medal for her second. She is also the author of four books of poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and many other publications. She lives in Tampa, Florida.

Marilyn by Lois Banner

MARILYN: The Passion and the Paradox - Hers was a life lived fully and ambitiously, and cut short tragically; this much we all know is true. But beyond the public persona that Norma Jeane Mortenson put forth, do we really know all that much about the reality behind Marilyn Monroe’s storied thirty-six years on this earth? 

Upon the fiftieth anniversary of Monroe’s death, feminist and historian Lois W. Banner presents us with a new, all-encompassing study of the star’s tumultuous life and mystery-sodden death.  Through her lens, we see a very different Marilyn Monroe—not merely a blond bombshell nor a fragile victim—but someone she reveals as a radical, an intellectual, someone with a deep interest in spirituality, and one of the most important women of the 20^th century.  

Lois Banner was a founder of the field of women's history and cofounder of the Berkshire Conference in Women's History, the major academic event in the field. She is the author of ten books, including her acclaimed American Beauty and most recently MM–Personal, which reproduces and discusses items from Marilyn's personal archives. In addition to her books on Monroe, Banner is a major collector of her artifacts. She is also a professor of history and gender studies at USC and lives in Southern California.

Lois Banner on youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hag9eb8GTVg

Review - Calling Invisible Women

Review of "Calling Invisible Women" by Ben Steelman at Star News Online:

Ever since H.G. Wells' 1897 novel, the notion of invisibility has been like catnip for writers and filmmakers.

Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" used invisibility as a metaphor for discrimination and for white America's blindness. H.F. Saint, in "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" (1987), used invisibility to probe the yuppie lifestyle. "Hollow Man," the 2000 Paul Verhoeven film starring Kevin Bacon, seemed to posit that invisibility might prompt an otherwise normal man to become a serial rapist.

But what about the Invisible Woman? Except for Marvel Comics, which promoted the Fantastic Four's "Invisible Girl" to adult status some years back, the idea hasn't been kicked around that much.

So Tennessee author Jeanne Ray is almost plowing virgin soil with her new novel "Calling Invisible Women" – and she's harvesting a bumper crop.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, "Calling Invisible Women" takes the perspective of a woman of a certain age – specifically, 54-year-old Clover Hobart, a sometime garden columnist for her hometown paper in Ohio.

Anonymous in Their Own Names

From We-enews:

Edward L. Bernays, Heywood Broun and Harold Ross have long been lauded as media innovators, their accomplishments chronicled in hundreds of articles and books. With very few exceptions, though, writers have failed to recognize a fundamental reason for the success of these three remarkable media ventures: each man had an uncredited collaborator.

"Anonymous in Their Own Names" consists of separate but intertwined biographies of these three women whose work was invisible in their own time and has remained invisible to countless authors who have detailed their husbands' accomplishments but could not "see" the crucial contributions of their wives.

Their invisibility is ironic given that they were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands and repeatedly battled the government and societal norms to continue using their names.

Still, they carried out their most important work anonymously--masked by their husbands' fame, which they helped create.

From the Publisher - Vanderbilt University Press:

Anonymous in Their Own Names recounts the lives of three women who, while working as their husbands' uncredited professional partners, had a profound and enduring impact on the media in the first half of the twentieth century. With her husband, Edward L. Bernays, Doris E. Fleischman helped found and form the field of public relations. Ruth Hale helped her husband, Heywood Broun, become one of the most popular and influential newspaper columnists of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925 Jane Grant and her husband, Harold Ross, started the New Yorker magazine.

Yet these women's achievements have been invisible to countless authors who have written about their husbands. This invisibility is especially ironic given that all three were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands, then battled the government and societal norms to retain their names. Hale and Grant so believed in this cause that in 1921 they founded the Lucy Stone League to help other women keep their names, and Grant and Fleischman revived the league in 1950. This was the same year Grant and her second husband, William Harris, founded White Flower Farm, pioneering at that time and today one of the country's most celebrated commercial nurseries.

Despite strikingly different personalities, the three women were friends and lived in overlapping, immensely stimulating New York City circles. Susan Henry explores their pivotal roles in their husbands' extraordinary success and much more, including their problematic marriages and their strategies for overcoming barriers that thwarted many of their contemporaries.

Women of Note

From Limelight Magazine:

Australia may be known as the lucky country, but it must not have seemed that way to many of the homegrown female composers of the past century as they struggled to be taken seriously in their field. Margaret Sutherland's psychiatrist husband discouraged her from composing by diagnosing her as mentally insane; Miriam Hyde was advised by a publisher to adopt “M. Hydekovsky” as her nom de plume; Peggy Glanville-Hicks declared that a woman must be not as good as men but better in order to succeed – and she wasn’t just talking about composing.

It is these attitudes to women creating music and making their voices heard that prompt journalist Rosalind Appleby to describe classical composition as a “battleground”. It’s the subject of her new book Women of Note, which has its Sydney launch at the Australian Music Centre on March 8 for International Women’s Day.

Summer Reading

Some interesting books that I would like to read over the remainder of summer (in the southern hemisphere).

The Book of Lost Fragrances by MJ Rose - "... fuses history and suspense moving from Cleopatra's Egypt and the terrors of revolutionary France to Tibet's battle with China and the glamour of modern-day Paris ..."

Hawk Quest by Robert Lyndon - follows the quest of a young French knight named Vallon in search of four rare gyrfalcons in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz - a novel of Sherlock Holmes narrated by Dr Watson 

We All Wore Stars by Theo Coster - memories of the classmates of Anne Frank

Treasure From The Attic by Mirjam Pressler - story of Anne Frank's family

Life Below Stairs by Alison Maloney - lives of Edwardian servants

Abandoned Women by Lucy Frost - Scottish women convicts exiled to Van Dieman's Land (Australia) in the early 19th century

Contested Will by James Shaprio - another "who wrote Shakespeare"

Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces

From the Chronicle Herald:

FAMOUS CANADIAN women abound. But while many people know the names Roberta Bondar, Alexa McDonough and Hayley Wickenheiser, fewer probably recognize Eliza M. Jones, Elizabeth Smellie and Kathleen Parlow.

The leader in agriculture, first female colonel in the Canadian Army and world-renowned violinist are three of the women featured in Merna Forster’s 100 More Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces (Dundurn, $24.99).

The followup to her first collection in 2004 features women from across the country who are noteworthy for reasons that vary from scientific discoveries, the arts and sports to prospecting at a time when women weren’t known for looking for the lucky strike.

Forster says that when she launched the first collection she already had plenty of names of potential profiles for the second book. But while promoting it, people would send dozens of potential names and see her at speaking engagements to share suggestions. Other names came from her travels and her work as a naturalist with Parks Canada.

By the time she was ready to start working on the second book, she had plenty of potential subjects but wanted to make sure she included a wide variety of women from different areas of the country, time periods, ethnic origins and types of achievement.

Wanted Women - Martyr & She-Devil

From Salon:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Aafia Siddiqui

Deborah Scroggins’ engrossing new book, “Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui,” is the story of a martyr and a she-devil. Or the story of a she-devil and a martyr, depending on your perspective. However, the author (a prizewinning international journalist) subscribes to neither view. By juxtaposing the lives of two (in)famous women involved with the so-called War on Terror — a celebrated critic of Islam and the only woman included on the FBI’s most-wanted list of al Qaida-linked international terrorists — Scroggins aims to show how “women like Ayaan and Aafia became symbols in battles that were really about other things.”

Although Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui have never met, and Scroggins wasn’t able to interview either one of them for “Wanted Women,” although there is no obvious connection between the two, the book works astonishingly well. Cutting back and forth between the two stories fosters a considerable amount of narrative suspense, and the juxtaposition of two similar personalities with two very different ideological positions keeps prompting the reader to look beyond easy or knee-jerk assumptions. Scroggins ultimately concludes that both women were “useful to the real drivers of conflict in their countries” because their stories provided political cover. Hirsi Ali’s talk of women’s oppression justified “Westerners who want to keep the Muslim world under Western rule,” and Siddiqui’s visible crusade against Western dominance masked the fact that jihadi were (at least in part) “fighting to maintain their control over women.”

Author & Historian Kate Williams

From the Guardian:

Could historian Kate Williams be the next Doctor Who? She can build her own Tardis, after all. Sitting in the Edwardian elegance of her north London house, the academic and novelist confides: "When I was a child one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother – a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I'd close him up in it and joggle him and say, 'We're in Victorian times now... and now we're in Egyptian times and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.' He was like, 'Let me out.'"

These days her methods are more "bluestocking" than Blue Peter, as she puts it. Williams studies overlooked or crassly simplified women and reveals their complexity, intelligence and significance to history. Her first book, England's Mistress, was about Emma Hamilton, who became the mistress of Lord Nelson and was, as Williams says, "from nowhere, the poorest strata of society, intended for nothing more than being a ballast to the industrial revolution." When Williams discovered a letter by her "it was as if a whole heart had been betrayed on to the page."

The next, Becoming Queen, was about the youth of Queen Victoria, and soon, Williams will release Young Elizabeth, a biography of the present queen.

Sexual History of London

From Pop Matters:

When it comes to sex, London has always had a bit of a reputation. One scrap of manuscript, dating from 1058, shows a young woman of Southwark, seated on a clapped-out mule, her hair falling over her shoulders. She is exciting the attention of travellers on the highways by means of her indiscreet clothing, and holding a little gilt rod in her hand, to indicate her profession. This is the first picture of a prostitute actively soliciting on the streets of London, and it gives some indication of the state of affairs even then. Of course, this early version of the permissive society had its critics.

Someone Else's War

From the Australian:

Someone Else's War blends documentary evidence with imagination in bringing Stambolis to life, but even without the fictional darning the facts of her story are extraordinary enough. Born illegitimate in 1904, she was reared by an independent-minded seamstress who served the Greek royal family. Despite a good education and hopes for university, at 17 she married Michael, 15 years her senior and living in Australia. Coming with him to his fish shop in Sydney's Pyrmont she gave birth to a succession of children including Kafcaloudes's mother, Nellie.

But the relationship proved problematic, partly because of personal tragedies and partly because of a frustration within Olga, who craved a broader, more vivid canvas than the deep-fat fryer existence she had bought into through marriage. For reasons that are revealed later in the book, Olga left her family in 1936 and moved to Athens.

The novel-based-on-fact path is never a totally felicitous one as most people are doggedly devoted to distinguishing truth from fiction. Kafcaloudes manages this obstacle-strewn journey admirably in most instances, signalling direct quotations from the diary clearly and embroidering soberly in a tone that blends well with the older voice. While the truth within these highly dramatic and heart-stopping fragments may not always be verifiable from other sources, they form a narrative that Olga was determined to record for an unknown posterity.

Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh. Remembering 1971

From the Express Tribune:

“War destroys the vulnerable and unfortunately the individual sufferings of non combatants are seldom highlighted,” Dr Yasmin Saikia, author of Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh. Remembering 1971, said at the launch of her book on Tuesday. The book was launched at Forman Christian College.

Dr Saika, a professor of history at the Arizona State University, explained that the book is about families with memories of violence and trauma, “missing in the archives of history of the war.”

The book records the sufferings of Bengali and Bihari women, some of them raped and tortured during the 1971 war. The author said she had interviewed 250 families over 10 years. Those interviewed included those directly affected by the war. Some of them were perpetrators of sexual violence.

Dr Saikia said she wanted to focus on the war as traumatised women’s experience and not as a War of Liberation, as widely accepted by the Bangladeshi public. She said from the day that she had started writing the book, she had consciously tried to avoid avoided writing a particular type of history. “I tried to persuade these women to speak up about their personal experiences, including the war babies,” she said. She said some of the women had lost their citizenship and for some writers their credibility.

Historical Fiction With Mansoureh Mir-fatah

From the Iran Book News Agency:

Talking about history novels, researcher of Iran's history Mansoureh Mir-fatah said:" The novel's historical figures shouldn’t turn into legends and myths, although Iran enjoys folklores and it is famed as the land of legends but historical figures shouldn’t turn into legends and myths.

IBNA: Talking about history novels, Mansoureh Mir-fatah told IBNA that during the previous year while I was researching for my book "Women in Iran", I had to go through some history books either research ones or novels.

She added:" During my studies and research I learned that several books were released about ancient Iranian women particularly women who lived during the Achaemenid era which encompassed imaginary pictures and hyperbole. For instance history novels hold many exaggerations about Pantea, a woman who lived during Cyrus while she had precious thoughts which could flourish throughout the history."

Books for 2012

The Wicked Wives by Gus Pelagatti

In The Wicked Wives by Gus Pelagatti, we are given the opportunity to look into the lives of a group of both women and men that were responsible for the murders of the women's husbands in the 1930s. The story is based on a true set of crimes, and the strange and unethical reasons understate how little it takes for someone to cross over to the side of murder. During this time in Philadelphia, the scandal resulted in seventeen wives being arrested for murdering their husbands. It would take one man to stand up for the victims and uncover the acts that would bring justice.

Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2,000 Years by Louise Foxcroft

Medical historian Louise Foxcroft explains in her new book, Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2,000 Years. Foxcroft fixed on the topic of weight-loss schemes after speaking to a friend who's a medic. "She said that whenever she gives talks, as soon as she mentions diet drugs, everybody in the audience perks up. I thought that was so interesting, so I decided to see if I could use the history of dieting to throw light on the assumptions we make about our health."

A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France By Caroline Moorehead

A Train in Winter is the story of brave women hailing from villages and cities of France united in their hatred and defiance against their Nazi occupiers. The book is based on interviews with these women, their families and brings to surface the historical archives and documents held by World War II resistance organisations covering this darkest chapter of human history. When Moorehead began writing this book, seven of the women were still alive and she talked to the ones whose health allowed them to. Moorehead has heavy relied upon interviews with survivors and their relatives giving this overlooked corner of history a new urgency and meaning.