This is less the single secret to life than a glimpse into a fascinating one, along with some nudges as to how you might change your mindset to live your own to the full. From her childhood memory of Gandhi on his salt march, to weathering divorce in her 80s, Dr McGarey’s life makes a gripping read. And she has really thought about her audience; chapters are short and each leads neatly onto the next. When I first opened the book, McGarey was a trailblazing 103-year-old who became a doctor at a time when women were still cold shouldered by many in the profession. I finished the book quickly and immediately looked her up; she had just died the week before. It somehow made her insights all the more precious. Quite simply, this book is a page turner, which, for non-fiction, is quite an achievement.
Dr. Gladys McGarey, the centenarian mother of holistic medicine, reveals “a story that teaches as much as it inspires” (Edith Eger, New York Times bestselling author), filled with life-changing secrets for how to live with joy, vitality, and purpose at any age.
Dr. Gladys McGarey, cofounder of the American Holistic Medical Association, began her medical practice at a time when women couldn’t even have their own bank accounts. Over the past sixty years, she has pioneered a new way of thinking about disease and health that has transformed the way we imagine health care and self-care around the world.
There’s nothing like a letter or diary for whizzing you straight back into someone else’s head and bringing to life the world they inhabited. 14-year-old Julie Manet’s faded exercise books have become a precious art historical document. Julie was the daughter of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet, brother of the man who brought Paris Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Meanwhile, Renoir was like an uncle, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé her guardian, while Julie thought nothing of sauntering around the Louvre in the company of Edgar Degas; this was not a ‘normal’ childhood. Julie’s diary transports us to a high-ceilinged apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where the muffled scales of a girl’s violin practice overlap with snatches of erudite conversation at the table of the ‘grown-ups’. There’s an exquisite beauty in Julie’s unassuming description of the art world’s most famous faces. Here too we find a daughter’s heartbreaking response to her mother’s death (‘Her last living word was Julie […] Oh misery! Never did I think I would be without Maman.’). Julie’s diary has been invaluable to me in researching my new book on the women Impressionists. Passionate and engaging, this is a must for anyone interested in 19th-century Paris or the Impressionists.
Julie Manet, the niece of Edouard Manet and the daughter of the most famous female Impressionist artist, Berthe Morisot, was born in Paris on 14 November 1878 into a wealthy and cultured milieu at the height of the Impressionist era. Many young girls still confide their inner thoughts to diaries and it is hardly surprising that, with her mother giving all her encouragement, Julie would prove to be no exception to the rule. At the age of ten, Julie began writing her `memoirs' but it wasn't until August 1893, at fourteen, that Julie began her diary in earnest: no neat…
Dr James Barry tells the story of Margaret Anne Bulkley, a poor Irish girl in late 18th-century Cork who, refusing to accept her lot and with the help of a few well-placed sponsors, got herself an education and some trousers and turned herself into Dr James Barry. This is a gripping and meticulously researched account of her climb through the medical world and her trek across the globe, where the fear of her gender being discovered lurks on every page. Some parts are gruesome (diseases are horribly well researched and the description of a human dissection in chapter 7 is positively stomach-turning), other parts heartrending (like her probable but unspoken love for Lord Charles Somerset, one of her mentors). But it is also so gripping that I couldn’t put it down. Dr James Barry is a vivid reminder that truth really can be every bit as thrilling as fiction.
Dr James Barry: Inspector General of Hospitals, army surgeon, duellist, reformer, ladykiller, eccentric. He performed the first successful Caesarean in the British Empire, outraged the military establishment and gave Florence Nightingale a dressing down at Scutari. At home he was surrounded by a menagerie of animals, including a cat, a goat, a parrot and a terrier. Long ago in Cork, Ireland, he had also been a mother.
This is the amazing tale of Margaret Anne Bulkley, the young woman who broke the rules of…
Rosa Bonheur was the very antithesis of 19th-century society’s feminine ideal. She was educated, shunned traditionally ‘feminine’ pursuits, rejected marriage, and she wore trousers. But exceptionally, the society whose rules she spurned accepted her—because by the mid-19th century, Bonheur was perhaps the greatest painter of animals France had ever seen.
Rosa became famous in France, England and America, and in 1865, she was made Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, the first woman ever to have held this distinguished title. But despite her professional prestige, Rosa’s lifestyle remained firmly at odds with 19th-century social mores. She kept lions and monkeys in her home, she rode her horse resolutely astride and she was often mistaken for a man. She shared an intimate relationship with the eccentric, self-styled inventor Nathalie Micas, who nurtured the artist like a wife, then when Nathalie died, Rosa caused a scandal by falling into a similar relationship with the much younger American artist Anna Klumpke.
Art is a Tyrant explores what it meant to be a genius trapped in a body for which a gendered society predestined a subordinate role and the more modest pursuit of homemaking. The story tells of a woman fighting for equality and recognition in a gender-biased profession. It is a tale of passion and creativity, family and friendship, of one woman’s determination to do what she loved—and her refusal to compromise, whatever the cost.
