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"I like biographies of exceptional women. Can you recommend some recent books that I might enjoy? Margo responds: Whenever I think of the term &amp;quot;exceptional women,&amp;quot; two names come to mind: Marie Curie and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These 19th-century women led very different lives -- and their contributions to the world are hardly comparable -- but both found a way to achieve what is an exceptional feat for women of any age: They successfully combined love and work. Curie and Stowe both managed to have it all: a family life and a stimulating career. The story of Marie Curie is best told by Barbara Goldsmith in her 2004 biography, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. Goldsmith takes a hard look at the discoverer of radium and shows us that the life of the first woman scientist to win the Nobel Prize is even more interesting than the deified version we learned about in school. Goldsmith covers Curie&amp;#039;s struggles as a single mother raising two children and, despite her fame, her continued battle against sexism in the scientific community. The oversimplified stories we learned in school about Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom&amp;#039;s Cabin, and the subsequent denunciations of the black stereotypes perpetuated by her antislavery novel, don&amp;#039;t do justice to the life of this 19th-century writer. Joan Hedrick&amp;#039;s classic 1993 biography, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, puts the author into her proper historic context as a member of the highly influential Beecher clan, a family of religious reformers who, despite their paternalism toward blacks, pricked the consciences of their fellow whites on the issue of slavery. Hedrick also describes the remarkable love of Harriet and Calvin Stowe, who saw their marriage -- which lasted for more than 50 years -- as a union of equals. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a21027/books-biographies-women-mar06/>