Miss America, 1945: Bess Myerson and the Year That Changed Our Lives

The acclaimed biography and cultural history, back in print after 12 years. Based on two years of research and interviews with more than 100 witnesses of the period, the accomplished writer Susan Dworkin skillfully interweaves the absorbing first-person account of how Bess Myerson became the country's first (and still only) Jewish Miss America in the same year the war ended, with a fresh portrait of what life was like for women and Jews in the '30s and '40s. Her tale of one girl's coming of age in pre-feminist America is "poignant and appealing . . . as much a cameo of an era as a work of biography."--ALA Booklist