Ms. America

by Lynn Sherr and Jurate Kazickas, Times Books, 592 pages, $18.00 . CODE: RAN -15

The authors published their original version of this fifty-state guide in 1976. Now they’ve gone back to fill in the picture, demonstrating again that “no state in the Union is without its female contribution to our national heritage, but you wouldn’t know it from reading most standard tour books.”

From the first entry under “A”Athens, Alabama, with its plaque on a church wall memorializing a former slave who toured Europe as one of the Jubilee Singers—down to the last listing, where the Torrington, Wyoming, Burge Post Office is named for Ethel Burge, a single homesteader who opened the town’s post office, this is a browser’s delight. Not surprisingly, houses predominate: Margaret Sanger’s home in Fishkill, New York, Amelia Earhart’s birthplace in Atchison, Kansas. But there are also the less expected memorials, including a bridge, a cave, a hospital, and the nation’s first kindergarten, all of which mark the struggles and accomplishments of American women.