"A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch-- and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories."--From publisher description. "Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford,...

"A dazzling group portrait of Franz Boas, the founder of cultural anthropology, and his circle of women scientists, who upended American notions of race, gender, and sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s--a sweeping chronicle of how our society began to question the basic ways we understand other cultures and ourselves."--Publisher's description.

Examines the life and work of the woman who became one of the twentieth-century's most respected and foremost anthropologists through her studies of various peoples and cultures. Includes a timeline and glossary.

"The startling coming-of-age story of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead, whose radical ideas challenged the social and sexual norms of her time. The story begins in 1923, when twenty-two-year-old Margaret Mead is living in New York City, engaged to her childhood sweetheart, and on the verge of graduating from college. Seemingly a conventional young lady, she marries but shocks friends when she decides to keep her maiden name. After starting graduate...