Also of interest...in women making history

The Correspondents

by Judith Mackrell (Doubleday, $30)

The six World War II journalists profiled in this engaging book were “a formidable bunch,” said Caroline Moorehead in The Wall Street Journal. Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, Sigrid Schultz, and the others were “bold to the point of recklessness, resourceful, inquisitive, crusading, and utterly determined.” Though their stories sometimes “merge and blur,” The Correspondents puts across “a powerful picture of the overwhelming struggle these women were forced to endure to make themselves heard.”

Miss Dior

by Justine Picardie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40)

Fashion designer Christian Dior had a little-known muse, said Rachel Cooke in TheGuardian.com. The original “Miss Dior,” his heroic sister Catherine, was a Resistance member during World War II. Arrested, tortured, and sent to a concentration camp in 1944, she later returned to her brother as “a spectral presence.” Unfortunately, this biography can’t tell a full story. Catherine, who died at 90, barely spoke about her wartime suffering, and despite the book’s inventiveness, she “remains a shadow.”

Until I Am Free

by Keisha N. Blain (Beacon, $25)

The great civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer possessed a vision of her work that “foreshadowed the present moment unusually well,” said

Bill O’Driscoll in the Pittsburgh PostGazette. This new biography recounts her story: Unlike other movement leaders, the Mississippi native had only a grade-school education and embraced activism after age 40. Still, “she became one of the movement’s most effective speakers and organizers,” fired by a belief that “No one is free until everybody’s free.”

In the Shadow of the Empress

by Nancy Goldstone (Little, Brown, $32)

Marie Antoinette deserves better than this, said Caroline Weber in The New York Times. In a book that focuses on the Empress Maria Theresa and three of her daughters, the sex life of the youngest, who was eventually executed during the French Revolution, once again becomes a distraction. Ignoring ample evidence, author Nancy Goldstone treats old gossip as fact. And her misleading statements “are particularly troubling because they repeat the fake news that destroyed Marie Antoinette in the first place.”