The Confidant – a book about Anna Marie Rosenberg. Amazing woman and an amazing book; how could I never hear about her?! I loved this review of this book on Goodreads, so I am copying it here instead of writing my own 🙂

Early 20th Century America was a place of change and opportunity. Within the first 50 years, US citizens were a party of industrialisation, the depression, two world wars, and the cold war. What is not so well known is the part Anna Rosenberg, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant, facilitated and negotiated to help shape the America we know today.

Anna Rosenberg, a 5’3″ pocket rocket, with little more than a high school education, rose to the inner sanctum of the White House during these pivotal years, ‘You don’t have to be like a man to succeed. If you know your stuff, you’ll be alright.’ Anna began as a negotiator between the fast-forming unions of the early 20th Century and capitalist corporates. Her unique sense of mediation, so that both sides could win, as opposed to brute force, won all-around trust. This skill base was leveraged to bring about the greatest mobilisation of troops and factory workers when the US entered WW II – including the negotiation to desegregate and include African Americans. She further pushed for the use of women in the war effort, ‘The morale of the nation depends upon its women.’ Despite being the first person to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, her credibility was attacked during McCarthyism. Still, throughout this ordeal, she held her head high and stayed true.

‘The Confidante’ not only details the life of this amazing woman. it also offers a robust summary of these transformational years in American history. It is astounding just how pivotal Anna Rosenberg, who is so little recognised today, was. Often stories of inspiring, historical women figures, are about the struggle they suffered in breaking into a ‘man’s world’. Anna’s story is different. Anna only saw advantages to being a woman within her place of work, ‘Men will talk more freely to a woman than to another man, and when men talk freely nine times out of ten misunderstandings vanish’. She ultimately just wanted to be herself and if that meant she could make a difference, then she worked hard at doing so.

Christopher Gorham has done a fantastic job delivering a short history of American politics in the early 20th Century and Anna Rosenberg’s pivotal, and unbelievably integral role within this. ‘The Confidnate’ is both an inspiring and illuminating book, well worth a read for so many reasons.

Moscow Excursion by P.Travers

I have mixed feelings about that book. On the one hand, it seems shallow, like “Look how weird these people are,” without any interest in finding what’s behind that behavior. Sometimes it feels like Travers purposefully wants to mount all this weirdness, making it Kafkian (although it is possible that she didn’t even have to overexaggerate that much.) On the other hand, possibly as a result of that sliding on the surface, she noticed things that were rarely noticed by foreign visitors.
Many details are painfully recognizable to me from my short encounter with the Intourst business, like trying to get out of the way to provide better food for foreigners only to still have it miserable, the lectures about economic achievements, the very bad English of the tour guides, “let’s go” and making sure the tourists are never left unattended. Overall – interesting. I learned something new :). And probably, I shouldn’t have expected an analytical essay. After all, these texts were originally produced as letters to a friend, talking about these “on the surface” impressions.

Without Children

Read it because the author was featured on WBEZ Reset. I think that the topic of normalizing women not having children is one worth discussing. For me, it is obvious that every woman has a right not to want children for whatever reason. It does not matter whether she has a medical condition or she is in a tough financial situation, or she simply does not want children. That’s her right. And I feel annoyed with all these discussions about what economic stimulus should be introduced to convince women to have more babies.

At first, the book sounded promising since it was discussing just that: leave women alone! But then it diverted to “many women take part in raising a child, not only her biological mother,” and went to the point that each woman should contribute to society by helping to raise babies.