If you get you're hands on this one, as I did as a 13 year old at a thrift store for 10 cents, you'll never let go. Now 20 years later, the entries by these women mean many different things to me. I didn't understand Anais Nin, I do now. I understood Anne Frank, or I thought I did. Then there were all these other wonderfully written pieces by who, I didn't know....Sand, Dostoevsky, Carr, Wordsworth, Sand. I still draw off these women and their love, work, and power as the book is broken into those three parts. I still believe in the next twenty years I'll find something new, and the twenty years after that. I believe my 10 cents went a long way, and whatever monetary value it is worth to you, this is their words for us to keep forever.

I highly recommend Moffat and Painter's selection of diary and journal entries by a wide variety of women. They organize the excerpts according to themes related to love, work, and power. Well-known diarists one would expect to be here are, such as Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, and Anaïs Nin. But some of the most striking are by women that are not well known, at least in America. Hannah Senesh, who did spying work for the early state of Israel; Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Brazilian who grew up in abject poverty; Martha Martin, who survived the ordeal of being stranded in Alaska and having to give birth by herself--these are a few of the extraordinary women in this book. Reading it is like sitting down with strangers who quickly end up friends--and since so many of them are writing because no one around them could listen, they pour out everything in their hearts and minds. The coeditors have a knack for selecting just the right sequence of entries, making the book more than the sum of its parts. Finally, Painter's afterward, titled "Psychic Bisexuality," caps the book with a thoughtful consideration of the significance of diary writing. Anyone who can appreciate self-expressive writing will profit by reading this book. Vintage is to be thanked for keeping it in print for so long.

The book would make a wonderful gift for elderly friends and relatives. It takes an in depth look at seniors (some famous faces included) living exciting and productive lives well into their golden years. Pamela Valois' beautiful photography complements the interesting side bar text making for a perfect addition to your cofee table.

You may have read many memoirs, and biographies about people affected by the Holocaust. However, do not think this is similar to other stories, or be put off by a topic that is upsetting. The journey through this book will be more than rewarding. Mary Felstiner has a deep, historical knowledge of Charlotte Salomon that she relays in a moving, and powerful style. You feel that you intimately know the people she writes about. Salomon's story is not one that is widely known, but it should be. She painted her life story during the Nazi years in the form of an operetta. Her paintings recently on display in the US tell a painful, vivid story of her, her parents, and her lover. This book is about what happened to Charlotte Salomon and her family during the Nazi years, but will also be of great interest to people interested in art, and in the human condition. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

It's a journey into time... I have bought after seeing the exhibition of Charlotte works in London. The book, which is a collection of her paintings, takes the visitor through her animated 'play' into her life, the destruction withing her and around her. But the beauty prevails.

Tibet occupies a unique place in the Western mind. It is seen as both a place of wisdom and spirituality and as a war-torn land with a culture in crisis of becoming extinct. In this novel, Charlotte Painter recounts her 1989 voyage to Tibet to meet with a native woman with alleged magical powers. Painter discovers that Tibet is a land with no easy answers, where nothing is as straight-forward as it seems.

Intermingled with Painter's travel diary is a fictional story entitled 'The Golden Road,' where Painter puts all of the hardship and struggle she sees into fictional terms. She acknowledges that there are problems in Tibet which she cannot address, and therefore uses her fictional characters to enact change.

One cannot find fault in Painter's willingness to show the dark side of Tibet, but there are still definite problems in her book. The fiction sections especially can seem very contrived at times, and too idealistic in comparison with the hardships facing the Tibetans of today. Also, the characters are flat, and due to their secondary nature within the book, there is no motivation to care about them. Tibet is the main character of the novel, and although Painter does a fair job of 'conjuring' it, I finished the novel wishing she had included more about how Tibetans view their own country.