| DRESSMAKER OF KHAIR KHANA, THE |
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Subtitle:
Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe
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Book Category:
Biography & Autobiography > General
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Author:
Lemmon, Gayle Tzemach
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Editor::
Cheiffetz (JC)
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Illustrator::
(None)
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Binding:
Hardcover
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ISBN 10:
0061732370
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ISBN 13:
9780061732379
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Price:
USD 24.99
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Publication Year:
2011
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Publisher Info
HarperCollins Publishers USA. InquiryTHE DRESSMAKER OF KHAIR KHANA tells the story of Kamila Sidiqi, the unlikely breadwinner in a burqa who became an entrepreneur under the Taliban. Desperate to support her six brothers and sisters at home and banished from Kabul's streets by the Taliban, she started a dressmaking business in her living room which offered work to 100 women in her community. Together these unsung heroines made the difference between survival and starvation for their families despite--and sometimes because of--the Taliban. DRESSMAKER tells their story for the first time. We see Kamila on a bus facing the barrel of a Taliban gun and trying to talk her way out of being sent to prison simply for trying to get to work. And we watch as the girls sew a half-dozen wedding dresses in just two days, only to learn later that the hastily planned wedding's groom is a Talib! We see Titanic fever take hold of Kabul, and the "Leo Look" seize the city's attention. And we meet the young women who persevere through all of it on their family's and their community's behalf. We are used to seeing women as victims of war who deserve our pity. DRESSMAKER shows us the resilient survivors who demand our respect. Theirs is a universal tale of what women do to pull families through no matter how impossible the circumstance, and the power of one to create hope for many. At a time when U.S. soldiers continue their fight in this war-hardened country, DRESSMAKER shines a light on the lives and struggles of those who believe a brighter future for Afghanistan is possible. Former ABC News reporter and Harvard MBA Gayle Tzemach is in a unique position to tell and promote this story. Her reporting on women's economic issues in Afghanistan appears in The New York Times Global Edition, CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post, and she serves as an informal advisor on the topic for Gen. McChrystal's staff in Afghanistan as well as economic officials at the American Embassy in Kabul. A recent story she wrote for The Daily Beast appeared on ABC News' "World News with Diane Sawyer." For the past two years she has been out building marketing momentum, talking with and writing for the charity Mercy Corps, which helped to promote Half the Sky, Harvard Business School, Women on the Web, the World Bank, women's organizations such as Vital Voices, and reporters from NPR to ABC to Daily Beast and the New York Times about the Dressmaker. She speaks regularly on the topic of women's economic issues at conferences nationwide and Washington think tanks: In March she served as a panelist at Tina Brown's invitation-only "Women in the World" event and this June she will be a featured speaker at the National Council for Research on Women's annual meeting in New York and the Center for Strategic and International Studies forum on women in Afghanistan. Already she has received invitations from Mercy Corps, Thunderbird University, Columbia University, and Harvard to speak about the book, and several leading women's organizations, including the International Center for Research on Women, have offered to host events around DRESSMAKER'S publication.
Meredith Greenhouse - 212-207-7044. Richard Frias 212-207-7541.