Femme Magnifique: 50 Magnificent Women who Changed the World

A pretty amazing anthology stuffed with 3-page bios of women both famous and obscure but all certainly quite magnificent. Best read in small increments as I think it would have worn me down to read it all at once.

My only reservation is that the creators were tasked to either write a straight-on biography (yay!) or write how the woman in question inspired them (hurm). The inspiration stories sometimes came off as self-indulgent and/or left me wishing I had learned more about the woman in question rather than the story's writer. Three pages is already a pretty short space to highlight a person's contribution to humanity.

If you liked this, I highly recommend you read the superb Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu.

Some of these are great and some suck really hard. The piece on Peggy Guggenheim is literally all about the men she came into contact with. Many are about the famous femme's influence on the writer which I found tiresome; the one on Misty Cohen is the most egregious example with a blonde ballerina inserting herself into the story. Overall, more misses than hits.