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From the best-selling author of King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts comes the astonishing but forgotten story of an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her time. Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she captured headlines across the globe when she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, scion of one of the legendary 400 families of New York high society. Together, this unusual couple joined the burgeoning Socialist Party and, over the next dozen years, moved among the liveliest group of activists and dreamers this country has ever seen. Their friends and houseguests included Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose stirred audiences to tears and led strikes of restaurant waiters and garment workers. She campaigned alongside the country's earliest feminists to publicly defy laws against distributing information about birth control, earning her notoriety as "one of the dangerous influences of the country" from President Woodrow Wilson. But in a way no one foresaw, her too-short life would end in the same abject poverty with which it began. By a master of narrative nonfiction, Rebel Cinderella unearths the rich, overlooked life of a social justice campaigner who was truly ahead of her time.



About the Author

Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild (pronunciation: ''Hoch'' as in "spoke"; ''schild'' as in "build") published his first book, "Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son," in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love . . . firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection." It was followed by "The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey," and "The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin." His 1997 collection, "Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels," won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa" was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. It also won a J. Anthony Lukas award in the United States, and the Duff Cooper Prize in England. Five of his books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves" was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award in Nonfiction and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.Hochschild's "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918" was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction and won the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction. Both it and his 2016 "Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939," were New York Times bestsellers. His "Lessons From a Dark Time," was published in 2018. "This collection of two dozen previously published essays was explicitly constructed as a response to the presidency of Donald Trump," wrote Kirkus Reviews. ". . . . Hochschild's graceful, informative, straightforward writing always finds the telling detail as well as the people of courage in the most horrifying of situations." Hochschild's latest book, "Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes," appeared in 2020. "Hochschild is a superb writer who makes light work of heavy subjects," wrote Jennifer Szalai in reviewing the book for The New York Times. The American Historical Association gave Hochschild its 2008 Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service, a prize given each year to someone outside the academy who has made a significant contribution to the study of history. "Throughout his writings over the last decades," the Association's citation said, "Adam Hochschild has focused on topics of important moral and political urgency, with a special emphasis on social and political injustices and those who confronted and struggled against them, as in the case of



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