100 Books Like The Only Woman in the Room

In 2017, my family was invited to France to retrace my father’s footsteps after his plane was shot down over occupied France in May 1944. During that visit, I realized how many ordinary citizens aided in his evasion. I thought their stories deserved to be preserved. I spent the next five years researching and writing, The Duty of Memory. During four trips to France to visit the actual sites, I interviewed eyewitnesses and became friends with family members of those depicted and learned their stories. I also studied documents from the US National Archives and the French Military Archives, as well as personal documents provided by the families.

I have had a long, fruitful career as a business leader, entrepreneur, and inventor in the energy and chemicals industry with seven scientific patents. I'm the founder/CEO of Chem Systems, Inc., lectured at MIT about entrepreneurship and innovation, and recently wrote a book exploring industrial inventions tracing back to the Industrial Revolution. All inventors share the same qualities: they see opportunities, stay persistent, and maintain their faith in the value of their innovation. The books on this list celebrate those qualities and honor the innovators who embody them. The authors highlight the common threads binding past, present, and future together, showing how humanity's progress depends on innovation.

When I learned, at seventeen, of my father’s Jewish heritage, I flung myself headlong into reading about Judaism. Naturally, this led me to the Holocaust and World War II, and my novels are inspired by family stories from this harrowing time. While doing research, I traveled to Germany and London, interviewed WWII veterans, and read countless memoirs, academic nonfiction tomes, and historical fiction books about this era. I now speak at libraries and to community organizations about the Ritchie Boys, Secret Heros of WWII. People sometimes tell me concentration camp stories are too disturbing, so I recommend books about Jewish survival, heroism, and everyday life during the Third Reich.        

I’ve been an avid reader since I was a child, and my favorite protagonists are readers and writers. The Kansas tallgrass prairie horizons where I grew up fueled my imagination, and I wanted to write like the girls in my novels. I discovered Anne of Green Gables as a teen, and since then, I’ve researched, published, and presented on the book as a quixotic novel. As a creative writer, my own characters are often readers, writers, librarians, book club members, and anyone who loves a good tale. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do each time I return to them.

As well as being a novelist, I am also a script editor for film and TV. I specialise in thriller narratives and big themes in screenwriting, so it's no accident I am drawn to them in fiction too. Dystopian worlds offer such a rich backdrop for the BIG questions and observations. By putting new societies and threats under the microscope in stories, it can hold a mirror up to what's going on in real life. I think of dystopian novels as being akin to the canaries in the coal mine: they are not only cathartic, they sound the warning bell on where we are going as a society ourselves.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I was fascinated from an early age by Mexican cinema, but my interest in Dolores del Río really blossomed when I wrote the novel Frida. Del Río was part of Frida Kahlo’s entourage, but unlike her friend, del Río was elegant and refined. Highly intelligent, she was dissatisfied with the vapidity of Hollywood and longed to make a real contribution to society. At Georgetown University, I taught courses on Latin American culture, and the Mexican Revolution, which influenced painting, literature, and cinema, was central to the classwork. Thus, I was very familiar with Del Río and her historical context long before I began writing. 

I focus on real-life stories of people usually in wartime conflicts and study the American Civil War and WWII. I am friends with several Holocaust survivors. But my focus is on defiance, rather than evading capture or captivity. Wars show the extremes of human behavior, both good and evil. I have a place in my heart for women and girls who were thrust into a man’s world at incredible disadvantage and through extraordinary character and ability overcame the harshest realities. A few were military fighters, some spies, but all in death-defying roles. Many died in action, and most never recognized for their valor. These are the unsung heroes that I love most.  

As an author, I love telling stories set on the frontier and populated by pioneers. That has a lot to do with the books I read long ago. My characters tend to have their heads in the clouds, like Ken from Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka. They dream of towering peaks, promising paths, and opportunities beyond the world they grew up in. Back in high school, I took an elective class—Historical Fiction—I wasn’t even sure what that was! We read The Source by James Michener. When I’m not hiking or dreaming about horses, there’s nothing I love more than making up wilderness stories set in the 1800s.

Books have the power to change your life, that is, if you can find a story that inspires you. As a multiple-time CEO and board director I noticed the lack of fiction books with smart, strong, and positive female leaders- that’s why I started writing the Ceiling Smasher series. My first novel, The Closer, is about the first female CEO of a sports company and the secret society of professional women, called the Ceiling Smashers, who help her succeed. The books on this list are based on true stories about extraordinary women who demonstrated courage, brainpower, and grit to achieve great things and blaze new trails- who wouldn’t be inspired by that?

The central themes in my own writing have always encompassed those of identity, the nature of reality, and variations on immortality. The lives of ‘celebrities’ touch upon all those themes, albeit through a distorted kaleidoscope where their own lives and the public’s perceptions of their lives intersect and are amplified and a third ‘character’ – that of the composite person, is then brought into existence. I find it fascinating how we can all be myriad people dependent upon who we interact with, and this is heightened when layered over the notion of ‘celebrity’ and fame by association. The books I've chosen act as mirrors to celebrity, but also work as great storytelling.