Lena S. Andrews – författare

A groundbreaking new history of the role of American servicewomen in WWII, illuminating their forgotten yet essential contributions to the Allies victory.Valiant Women is the story of the 350,000 American women who served in uniform during World War II. These incredible women served in every service branch, in every combat theater, and in nearly two-thirds of the available military occupations at the time. They were pilots, codebreakers, ordnance experts, gunnery instructors, metalsmiths, chemists, translators, parachute riggers, truck drivers, radarmen, pigeon trainers, and much more. They were directly involved in some of the most important moments of the war, from the D-Day landings to the peace negotiations in Paris. These womenwho hailed from every race, creed, and walk of lifedied for their country and received the nations highest honors. Their work, both individually and in total, was at the heart of the Allied strategy that won World War II.Yet, until now, their stories have been relegated to the dusty shelves of military archives or a passing mention in the local paper. Often the women themselves kept their stories private, even from their own families. Now,military analyst Lena Andrews corrects the record with the definitive and comprehensive historical account of American servicewomen during World War II, based on new archival research, firsthand interviews with surviving veterans, and a deep professional understanding of military history and strategy.

A rich and revelatory biography of the cinematic life of death-defying aviation pioneer Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to hold a pilot’s license, by the author of the national bestseller Valiant Women.For a brief and brilliant moment in the early 1920s, Bessie Coleman was one of the most famous people in America. Her performances were tracked meticulously by Black newspapers from Chicago to Los Angeles, written up in the New York Times, and celebrated in lecture halls across the country. Bessie’s aerial acrobatics—figure eights, stalls, dives, tailspins, and loop-the-loops—were as dazzling as they were dangerous, and they drew thousands of spectators to open fields on the outskirts of cities and small towns, where Bessie appeared suddenly (and loudly) in the cockpit of her plane, as if conjured from their imaginations.Then, almost overnight, she disappeared, killed in a plane crash in 1926. Bessie’s death was only the beginning of a long compression of her extraordinary life into a few lines of inspirational copy in children’s books, a face on a commemorative stamp, and a tale traded among pilots. While these tributes to Bessie’s life are deservedly reverent—she was, after all, the first Black woman to surmount the many obstacles to success that were thrown in her path—they fail to return to Bessie the thing that fame most reliably destroys: her humanity.Working with a historical record that is nearly nonexistent—she left no official papers and few artifacts—The Aviatrix resurrects Bessie. For the first time, Lena Andrews has assembled a kaleidoscopic biography that gives us the whole story of Bessie’s pioneering life; and it is some story. Born at the bleeding edge of the American frontier, Bessie educated herself out of deep poverty, came of age in the grit and grime of Chicago, bootstrapped her way across Europe, and returned home a minor aviation celebrity—where, improbably and imperfectly, she engineered her own rise to national fame. The portrait that emerges gives readers a rich reward: The Aviatrix reveals not just what made Bessie a hero, but what made her human.