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The Corner Bookstore: UNDAUNTED Reading and Launch Celebration, May 18, 2023

May 18, 2023

Photo by David Handschuh, May 18, 2020, Corner Bookstore

What a night.

It really began months ago when  Nick, Chris and the rest of the staff at the Corner Bookstore responded enthusiastically to hosting another Brooke book event as it had when The Suffragents came out in the fall of 2017.  The store featured the book up high in its May newsletter and promoted the event on its website.  I invited half the known world, many who have a handprint on this book in one way or another or in more ways than one, and they came out in force and many joined me at home afterwards to keep the celebration going. Below please find a slideshow that I’ll add to if folks send me more photos.

Introduced by the store’s owner, Lenny Golay, I read from the book’s passages on Ann Stringer, an extraordinary World War II reporter who worked for United Press and appears in Undaunted in Chapter 10, “Sidebars.” She’s an unknown, yes, but intersected directly with the likes of Walter Cronkite, Harrison Salisbury, and Drew Middleton. She covered many of the major stories of the war, including the Russian-American linkup at Torgau and the Nuremberg trials, where, in both cases, she bested the competition by lightyears.

 

There were several great questions. Thanks to Paula Span, I got to explain that although reviewers have used words like “compendious” and “encyclopedic” to describe the book, it really isn’t meant to be seen as a series of mini-profiles of famous women and those who should be in the canon. The examples chosen are meant to represent their respective decades in the journey of women journalists from progress to setback to progress to setback over the past 180 years. Here I explain why the women who are in the book are in the book:

Anne Barnard had already read in. She talked about the episodes in the book that she found most crazy-making—especially Chapter 18, “Power Coupling”—and wanted to know which ones had struck me in the same way.

Claudia Dreifus asked about how the changes in technology and format were impacting women and gave a better answer than I could have.

Back home we partied on and Jon Segal, my editor at Knopf, who has an enormous amount to do with why this book came about, how it is structured and how it was edited, said a few words.

And the photos: