"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"