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1.06k reviews for:
Cuentos de Buenas Noches Para Niñas Rebeldes = Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls
Favilli, Cavallo
4.28 AVERAGE
1.06k reviews for:
Cuentos de Buenas Noches Para Niñas Rebeldes = Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls
Favilli, Cavallo
4.28 AVERAGE
Es un libro que me hubiese encantado leer de pequeña, sin duda muy recomendable para leerle a las hijas y vean que también hay mujeres que son heroínas y modelos a seguir.
Honestly I would have liked to see this one, rather than hear it... and I wanted the stories to be longer... even for a child's bedtime story.
Dit is zo'n belangrijk boek. Het bespreekt 100 vrouwen die allemaal verschillende vormen van vrouwelijkheid belichamen en strijden voor hun positie in de wereld (en voor die van generaties na hen). Ik ben blij dat dit boek bestaat; ik had er zelf graag uit voorgelezen willen worden vroeger!
Amazing! Beautiful drawings and stories of amazing women.
This book is amazing - should be required reading for everyone, my daughter and I learned a lot about some amazing women.
So glad I backed this on Kickstarter!
So glad I backed this on Kickstarter!
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
fast-paced
Read as part of the Around the Year in 52 Books challenge. Week 1: A book that was nominated for an award in a genre you love.
An awesome collection on short stories about women who have changed the world.
An awesome collection on short stories about women who have changed the world.
Es de los libros más necesarios para la educación actual, una educación que nos permita tener una sociedad igualitaria, que permita a todas las personas crecer por igual. Considero que es un indispensable en la mesilla de noche de todos los niños y niñas del mundo, incluso en las de adultos también.
Este libro es el comienzo de un tipo de publicaciones que nos permitirán enseñarle a los niños y niñas la importancia de soñar, que un gran soñador puede venir de muchos lugares y en muchas formas, pero por sobre todo, que un soñador que trabaja duro llega hasta donde desee, no importa quien seas.
“Esperamos que estas valientes pioneras sirvan de inspiración. Ojalá que sus retratos les transmitan a sus hijas la fuerte creencia de que la belleza se manifiesta en todas las formas y colores, y a cualquier edad. Deseamos que cada lector y lectora se convenza de que el mayor éxito es llevar una vida llena de pasión, curiosidad y generosidad. Y quizás así cada una de nosotras recordaremos a diario que tenemos derecho a ser felices y a explorar el vasto mundo que tenemos frente a nosotras”.
-Cuentos de Buenas Noches para Niñas Rebeldes, pág xii.
Este libro es el comienzo de un tipo de publicaciones que nos permitirán enseñarle a los niños y niñas la importancia de soñar, que un gran soñador puede venir de muchos lugares y en muchas formas, pero por sobre todo, que un soñador que trabaja duro llega hasta donde desee, no importa quien seas.
“Esperamos que estas valientes pioneras sirvan de inspiración. Ojalá que sus retratos les transmitan a sus hijas la fuerte creencia de que la belleza se manifiesta en todas las formas y colores, y a cualquier edad. Deseamos que cada lector y lectora se convenza de que el mayor éxito es llevar una vida llena de pasión, curiosidad y generosidad. Y quizás así cada una de nosotras recordaremos a diario que tenemos derecho a ser felices y a explorar el vasto mundo que tenemos frente a nosotras”.
-Cuentos de Buenas Noches para Niñas Rebeldes, pág xii.
In an interview, Mackenzi Lee, author of Bygone Badass Broads: 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World, talking about the impetus behind her book, said, “There’s this myth that we just continue to perpetuate through our silence that women weren’t a part of history, even though there’s evidence to the contrary. If we don’t tell these stories, we just perpetuate this idea that women, that queer people, that people of color, etc. were all so busy being oppressed that they didn’t have time to do anything to contribute to history, or to do anything other than interact with their oppression and their identity.” This idea – that women were too busy being miserably oppressed, or fighting against their oppression, to make any substantial contribution to history – is the underlying theme of most history classes, from primary school all the way up to university, as well as of mainstream public discourses about history. Apart from a handful of women, such as Helen Keller or Marie Curie, or in subcontinental history, a Rani of Jhansi here and there, it would seem as if history was populated by men alone. It is the cheerful challenging and dismantling of this myth that is undertaken by two recent popular history books that aim to bring to light fascinating women across time from all parts of the world, complete with lively, engaging prose and gorgeous illustrations. Both Lee’s Bygone Badass Broads, and Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavollo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women, are joyful, celebratory books that remind us that women, of all races, ethnicities, religions and sexualities, have always been leading remarkable lives and doing remarkable work throughout history.
How both these books came to be created says a great deal about the extent to which such stories about forgotten and ignored women in history are needed and wanted. Lee’s book originally started out as the Twitter hashtag #bygonebadassbroads. Being an avid history fan, as well as an author of historical fiction, Lee was interested in telling stories of women that history had forgotten about (or had deliberately ignored), and so every week, using the hashtag she came up with, she would tweet about one woman and her story. The hashtag become immensely popular on Twitter, with thousands of people tuning in each week as she talked about women as far ranging as empresses, spies, midwives and pirates, so much so that she was approached by a publishing house to turn it into a book. Similarly, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls went from being an idea to a reality also on the Internet, a place where despite all the clamor and noise, there is space for people to come together and support interesting projects. Favilli and Cavollo, two women who run Timbuktu Labs, a children’s media innovation tech company, put up their idea of an anthology of short, illustrated international women’s biographies for children, up on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, where it became the most-funded and fasted-funded publishing project in crowdfunding history (a second volume was also subsequently funded and published). Written by Favilli and Cavollo and illustrated by 60 female artists from around the world, the book quickly became a New York Times bestseller.
There are many striking things about both these books – their existence in the first place, the aesthetic value they both have in intermingling the biographies of each woman with a beautiful, full-page portrait of her, the celebratory flair of the prose itself – but what stands out the most is the carefully curated list of women that are included in both volumes. The authors of both books went to great lengths to ensure that the women included would be from all parts of the world and of all races and ethnicities, not just Western, white women. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, being slightly more expansive in length (100 women instead of Lee’s 52) include well-known figures such as Jane Austen, Michelle Obama and our very own Malala Yousufzai amidst other lesser known, but no less interesting women. There are contemporary young women like Amna Al Haddad, a weightlifting champion from UAE, Yusra Mardini, a swimmer from Syria who participated in the Olympics as part of the first ever refugee team, Balkissa Chaibou, an activist from Niger who fights against forced marriages in her country and Sonita Alizadeh, a rapper from Afghanistan. There are women in all fields of study, from scientists to mountaineers, from warrior queens to ballerinas. Each woman gets a one-page biography written in a fairy tale-esque manner that will be immediately engaging to younger audiences (for Ada Lovelace, the woman who wrote the first computer program in history, back in 17th century Britain, the story begins “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Ada who loved machines.”). The stories are wide ranging, from a boxer in India to a surfer in Brazil to a Columbian spy and an astronomer from China, and within many of the stories, the book manages to explore important, serious topics with a light touch. For instance, the biography of Virginia Woolf mentions her lifelong struggles with mental illness in an accessible and thoughtful manner (“Virginia suffered from an illness known as depression. Virginia and Leonard were incredibly happy together and loved each other dearly, but sometimes Virginia’s depression made it hard for her to feel joy.”).
The selection of women and the witty way in which they are written about is even greater in Bygone Badass Broads. As it is meant for an older, more general audience, Lee is able to write the biographies of these women in easygoing, witty voice that points out with frank humor the absurdities and inequities with which these women had to grapple, and celebrates these women with infectiously joyous prose. It is like having the history of these women’s lives casually told to you by your whip-smart friend who makes snarky jokes and incisive social commentary in her telling. For example, when talking about Edith Garrud, a suffragette in 19th century England who taught other suffragettes the Japanese martial art of Jujitsi, she writes, “So it’s 1908. The suffrage movement in England is reaching critical mass, and the police are getting brutal because they thought girls just wanted to have fun, but it turns out they actually want to have fundamental human rights. What’s a girl like Edith to do when she sees women beaten in the street by men twice their size just for asking for the right to vote? Open a Jujitsu school to teach suffragettes to unleash their feminine fury on the men standing in their way.”
Lee’s selection of women is also even more discerning and fascinating, and she isn’t afraid to include women with morally dubious actions – for example, she tells the story of Sayyida Al-Hurra, a Muslim woman from 15th century Morocco who became the first lady of the Moroccan city of Tétouan and subsequently, as revenge against the Spanish who had conquered the Muslim kingdom of Granada, became a pirate queen with a large fleet of pirate ships that looted the ships of the Spanish and other European conquerors. She also tells the story of Ana Lezama de Urinza and Eustaquia de Sonza, a duo of badass ladies in 17th century Peru who were skilled in sword fighting and decided to take their skills to the mean streets of the Peruvian town of Potosí to dole out vigilante justice to the criminals infesting the town. Lee reaches all the way back to 2700 BC China to talk about Empress Xi Ling Shi, who discovered the process of extracting raw silk from silkworms, making the ancient Chinese empire the only manufacturer of silk fabric in the world for centuries, and even with more recent, well-known history, she reaches deep into the recesses of that history to highlight impressive women who have been entirely forgotten, such as Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian princess who became an important spy for the French and Allied Forces during the Second World War. As in Good Night Stories, Bygone Badass Broads has women doing important work in all fields, like Clelia Duel Mosher, a doctor in Victorian America who did revolutionary work in dispelling the Victorian myth of the fragility of female bodies, and who did important, some of the earliest research on menstruation and period cramps.
There is a lot to celebrate about these two books, not least of which is the fact that they bring to light the lives of these women in a format and style that will appeal to the larger general public, and not merely to historians or academics. These books come at a time when there is a small trend of popular women’s biographies aimed both at children and at wider reading public, but these two definitely stand out even amongst that small subgenre. They make reading about these remarkable women not merely fascinating, but also fun. Both books should be required reading for anyone who wants to get a fuller, richer picture of the history of the world, which should be all of us.
Published in Dawn, May 2018: https://www.dawn.com/news/1407267/non-fiction-breaking-myths-of-the-silent-woman
How both these books came to be created says a great deal about the extent to which such stories about forgotten and ignored women in history are needed and wanted. Lee’s book originally started out as the Twitter hashtag #bygonebadassbroads. Being an avid history fan, as well as an author of historical fiction, Lee was interested in telling stories of women that history had forgotten about (or had deliberately ignored), and so every week, using the hashtag she came up with, she would tweet about one woman and her story. The hashtag become immensely popular on Twitter, with thousands of people tuning in each week as she talked about women as far ranging as empresses, spies, midwives and pirates, so much so that she was approached by a publishing house to turn it into a book. Similarly, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls went from being an idea to a reality also on the Internet, a place where despite all the clamor and noise, there is space for people to come together and support interesting projects. Favilli and Cavollo, two women who run Timbuktu Labs, a children’s media innovation tech company, put up their idea of an anthology of short, illustrated international women’s biographies for children, up on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, where it became the most-funded and fasted-funded publishing project in crowdfunding history (a second volume was also subsequently funded and published). Written by Favilli and Cavollo and illustrated by 60 female artists from around the world, the book quickly became a New York Times bestseller.
There are many striking things about both these books – their existence in the first place, the aesthetic value they both have in intermingling the biographies of each woman with a beautiful, full-page portrait of her, the celebratory flair of the prose itself – but what stands out the most is the carefully curated list of women that are included in both volumes. The authors of both books went to great lengths to ensure that the women included would be from all parts of the world and of all races and ethnicities, not just Western, white women. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, being slightly more expansive in length (100 women instead of Lee’s 52) include well-known figures such as Jane Austen, Michelle Obama and our very own Malala Yousufzai amidst other lesser known, but no less interesting women. There are contemporary young women like Amna Al Haddad, a weightlifting champion from UAE, Yusra Mardini, a swimmer from Syria who participated in the Olympics as part of the first ever refugee team, Balkissa Chaibou, an activist from Niger who fights against forced marriages in her country and Sonita Alizadeh, a rapper from Afghanistan. There are women in all fields of study, from scientists to mountaineers, from warrior queens to ballerinas. Each woman gets a one-page biography written in a fairy tale-esque manner that will be immediately engaging to younger audiences (for Ada Lovelace, the woman who wrote the first computer program in history, back in 17th century Britain, the story begins “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Ada who loved machines.”). The stories are wide ranging, from a boxer in India to a surfer in Brazil to a Columbian spy and an astronomer from China, and within many of the stories, the book manages to explore important, serious topics with a light touch. For instance, the biography of Virginia Woolf mentions her lifelong struggles with mental illness in an accessible and thoughtful manner (“Virginia suffered from an illness known as depression. Virginia and Leonard were incredibly happy together and loved each other dearly, but sometimes Virginia’s depression made it hard for her to feel joy.”).
The selection of women and the witty way in which they are written about is even greater in Bygone Badass Broads. As it is meant for an older, more general audience, Lee is able to write the biographies of these women in easygoing, witty voice that points out with frank humor the absurdities and inequities with which these women had to grapple, and celebrates these women with infectiously joyous prose. It is like having the history of these women’s lives casually told to you by your whip-smart friend who makes snarky jokes and incisive social commentary in her telling. For example, when talking about Edith Garrud, a suffragette in 19th century England who taught other suffragettes the Japanese martial art of Jujitsi, she writes, “So it’s 1908. The suffrage movement in England is reaching critical mass, and the police are getting brutal because they thought girls just wanted to have fun, but it turns out they actually want to have fundamental human rights. What’s a girl like Edith to do when she sees women beaten in the street by men twice their size just for asking for the right to vote? Open a Jujitsu school to teach suffragettes to unleash their feminine fury on the men standing in their way.”
Lee’s selection of women is also even more discerning and fascinating, and she isn’t afraid to include women with morally dubious actions – for example, she tells the story of Sayyida Al-Hurra, a Muslim woman from 15th century Morocco who became the first lady of the Moroccan city of Tétouan and subsequently, as revenge against the Spanish who had conquered the Muslim kingdom of Granada, became a pirate queen with a large fleet of pirate ships that looted the ships of the Spanish and other European conquerors. She also tells the story of Ana Lezama de Urinza and Eustaquia de Sonza, a duo of badass ladies in 17th century Peru who were skilled in sword fighting and decided to take their skills to the mean streets of the Peruvian town of Potosí to dole out vigilante justice to the criminals infesting the town. Lee reaches all the way back to 2700 BC China to talk about Empress Xi Ling Shi, who discovered the process of extracting raw silk from silkworms, making the ancient Chinese empire the only manufacturer of silk fabric in the world for centuries, and even with more recent, well-known history, she reaches deep into the recesses of that history to highlight impressive women who have been entirely forgotten, such as Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian princess who became an important spy for the French and Allied Forces during the Second World War. As in Good Night Stories, Bygone Badass Broads has women doing important work in all fields, like Clelia Duel Mosher, a doctor in Victorian America who did revolutionary work in dispelling the Victorian myth of the fragility of female bodies, and who did important, some of the earliest research on menstruation and period cramps.
There is a lot to celebrate about these two books, not least of which is the fact that they bring to light the lives of these women in a format and style that will appeal to the larger general public, and not merely to historians or academics. These books come at a time when there is a small trend of popular women’s biographies aimed both at children and at wider reading public, but these two definitely stand out even amongst that small subgenre. They make reading about these remarkable women not merely fascinating, but also fun. Both books should be required reading for anyone who wants to get a fuller, richer picture of the history of the world, which should be all of us.
Published in Dawn, May 2018: https://www.dawn.com/news/1407267/non-fiction-breaking-myths-of-the-silent-woman