"A beloved culinary historian's short takes on six famous women through the lens of food and cooking--what they ate and how their attitudes toward food offer surprising new insights into their lives. Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives--social and cultural, personal and political. Yet most biographers pay little attention to people's attitudes toward food, as if the great and notable never bothered to think about what was on the plate in front of them. Once we ask how somebody relates to food, we find a whole world of different and provocative ways to understand her. Food stories can be as intimate and revealing as stories of love, work, or coming-of-age. Each of the six women in this entertaining group portrait was famous in her time, and most are still famous in ours; but until now, nobody has told their lives from the point of view of the kitchen and the table. It's a lively and unpredictable array of women; what they have in common with one another (and us)

"A riveting, inspiring memoir of one woman's escape from an extremist religious sect and an extraordinary rise from housewife to shoe designer, to CEO and co-owner of the modeling agency Elite World Group. Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart's life-what she wore, what she ate, what she thought-was controlled by the dictates of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At nineteen, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she was married off to a man she barely knew. For the next twenty-three years, he would rule her life. Eventually, when Haart's younger daughter, Miriam, started to question why she wasn't allowed to sing, run, or ride a bike, Haart reached a breaking point. She knew that if she didn't find a way to leave, her daughters would be forced into the same unending servitude that had imprisoned her. So Haart created a double life. In the ultra-Orthodox world, clothing has one purpose-to cover the body, head to toe-and giving any thought to one's appeara