"This remarkable and wide-ranging collection, full of surprises, should encourage any woman who is trying to survive in a man"s world, and enlighten any man who sincerely wants to understand contemporary women." —Alison Lurie "This magnificent, handsome, handful of an anthology . . ."* includes sixty-one substantial selections from the twentieth-century literature of women"s lives: autobiographies, journals, and memoirs. "As varied in humanity as in geography,"** the women whose life stories are collected here include the famous—Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf—and the surprising—Emma Mashinini, a black South African labor organizer; Onnie Lee Logan, an Alabama "granny" midwife; Sara Suleri, an expatriate in America who reflects hilariously on the language of food in her native Pakistan. "Destined to become a classic,"‡ this treasury of women"s lives, brimming with intelligence, passion, wit, and determination, is a celebration of life itself. *Hungry Mind Review **Washington Post Book World ‡Library Journal