Books like Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez

In Tehran, Azar Nafisi secretly hires seven female students each week to read banned Western classics, revealing the personal and political struggles of women under Iran’s revolutionary regime.

Haven Kimmel’s memoir, "A Girl Named Zippy," chronicles life in 1960s Mooreland, Indiana, blending humor and keen observation of small‑town customs as a spirited girl‑turned‑woman.

Amanda Lindhout’s memoir chronicles her daring travels across the globe, her fifteen‑month captivity in Somalia, and her transformation into a force for hope and education in the Horn of Africa.

Blithely flinging aside the Victorian manners that kept her disapproving mother corseted, the New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in American culture.Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the era to exhilarating life. This is the story of America's first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness.The men and women who made the flapper were a diverse lot. There was Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form and silhouette, helping to free women from the torturous corsets and crinolines that had served as tools of social control. Three thousand miles away, Lois Long, the daughter of a Connecticut clergyman, christened herself "Lipstick" and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entree into Manhattan's extravagant Jazz Age nightlife.In California, where orange groves gave way to studio lots and fairytale mansions, three of America's first celebrities--Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, Hollywood's great flapper triumvirate--fired the imaginations of millions of filmgoers.Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway and Utah-born cartoonist John Held crafted magazine covers that captured the electricity of the social revolution sweeping the United States.Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, pioneers of advertising and public relations, taught big business how to harness the dreams and anxieties of a newly industrial America--and a nation of consumers was born.Towering above all were Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era that would come to an abrupt end on Black Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed and rendered the age of abundance and frivolity instantly obsolete.With its heady cocktail of storytelling and big ideas, Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who launched the first truly modern decade.From the Hardcover edition.

29, 311 p. 24 cm

When the Taliban took control of Kabul, Kamela Sediqi and all the women of Kabul saw their lives transformed. Overnight, they were banned from schools and offices and even forbidden from leaving their front doors on their own. The economy collapsed and young men left the city in search of work and security. Desperate to help her family and support her five brothers and sisters at home, Kamela began sewing cothes in her living room. Little did she know that the tailoring business she started to help her siblings would be the beginning of a dresmaking business that would create jobs and hope for one hundred neighbourhood women and would come to mean the difference between starvation and survival for hundreds of families like her own.

In remote Afghan villages, women weave carpets that mirror their lives—hand‑knotted threads, enduring war and tradition, and the complex social fabric of a people whose art preserves history.