2022 Mighty Women Reading List for Adults

A Philippine journalist who received the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize traces her career spent challenging corruption in her country and presents strategies for speaking truth to power and standing up against authoritarians to battle information and lies.

"Generations past have embraced a robust array of rituals and customs surrounding death and bereavement. When did we forget how to grieve well? When Amanda Held Opelt suffered a season of loss-including three miscarriages and the death of her grandmother and culminating in the unexpected death of her sister, New York Times bestselling writer Rachel Held Evans-she was faced with sorrow she didn't know to face. And through her career as an international...

"A darkly funny and devastating memoir of growing up in '90s Manhattan with a mentally ill single parent"-- Provided by publisher.

A thrilling biography of Edda Mussolini—Benito Mussolini's favorite daughter, one of the most influential women in 1930s Europe—and a heart-stopping account of the unraveling of the Fascist dream in Italy, from award-winning historian and author of the acclaimed Resistance Quartet, Caroline Moorehead

"Reads like a page-turning thriller."—BookPage

Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator

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"A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. Lea Ypi grew up in the last Stalinist country in Europe: Albania, a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. While family members disappeared to what she was told were "universities" from which few "graduated", she swore loyalty to the Party. In her eyes, people were equal, neighbors helped each other, and children...

"Part memoir and part literary true crime, Tell Me Everything is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open. Erika Krouse has one of those faces. "I don't know why I'm telling you this," people say, spilling confessions. In fall 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. The role seems perfect for her, but she quickly realizes...

"Florence Williams explores the fascinating, cutting-edge science of heartbreak while seeking creative ways to mend her own. When her twenty-five-year marriage unexpectedly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. What she doesn't expect is that she'll end up in the hospital, examining close-up the way our cells listen to loneliness. She travels to the frontiers of the science of "social pain" to learn why heartbreak hurts...

"No celebrity rivals Elizabeth Taylor's glamour and guts or her level of fame. She was the last major star to come out of the old Hollywood studio system and she is a legend known for her beauty and her magnetic screen presence in a career that spanned most of the twentieth century and nearly sixty films. But her private life was even more compelling than her Oscar-winning on-screen performances. During her seventy-nine years of rapid-fire love and...

"Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired...