Sheroes is a dizzy, amusing dip into the lives of 200 women of substance from Harriet Tubman (the original American freedom rider), comic strip character Wonder Woman, and Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura to British adventurer Alexandra David-Neel (My Journey to Lhasa), Olympic champion speed racer Bonnie Blair, and African ecowarrior Wangari Maathai. Varla Ventura mainly celebrates easily recognized women, but deserves credit for ferreting out many early sheores, such as the five Biblical sisters who persuaded Moses that daughters deserved to inherit (albeit only when no sons are available), and little known luminaries like pro-hockey goalie Manon Rheume and Puerto Rico's freedom fighter Maria de la Mercedes Barbudo. Sheroes happily tweaks the historical record, flinging around words like "bodacious" and "braniac" such as to make scholars and feminists blanch, but it assembles a colorful listing of real and imaginary women as role models to which to aspire. --Francesca Coltrera
Sheroes: Bold, Brash, and Absolutely Unabashed Superwomen from Susan B. Anthony to Xena FROM THE PUBLISHER
Profiling 200 real and fictional women who dared, women who rock, and women who rule, this book features the low-down on Dana Scully, Rosa Parks, Foxy Brown, Wonder Woman, Emma Peel, Thelma and Louise, Mary Richards, and Eleanor Roosevelt, among others. 40 photos.
SYNOPSIS
This features Xena in the title, but Sheroes: Bold, Brash, and Absolutely Unabashed Superwomen from Susan B. Anthony to Xena is as much about the 200 role models and superwomen portrayed in the books's pages. These include Dana Scully, Rosa Parks, Wonder Woman, Emma Peel, Thelma and, of course, Louise, Eleanor Roosevelt, and...Xena! This is a great coffee-table book or one to keep by the bedside to find out about the female superheroes who have rocked the world.