Rad Women Worldwide: Artists and Athletes, Pirates and Punks, and Other Revolutionaries Who Shaped History

Not every story has a happy ending. Some women die, are imprisoned, or are executed. For example, Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian astronaut, dies in the Columbia space shuttle accident in 2003. Chinese poet Qui Jin is arrested and executed for writing two revolutionary poems in 1907. Pakistani Malala Yousafzai is shot on her school bus at age 14 but recovers. A final section titled "Stateless" notes, "One in every 122 humans on earth is a refugee, displaced person, or asylum seeker" and "Of the 60 million forcibly displaced people in the world, almost 80 percent are women and children. They leave their homes, cities, and countries due to war, violence, discrimination, hunger, environmental catastrophe."

Emma Goldman worked as a nurse and midwife in New York tenement slums in the 1890s and helped poor immigrant women get birth control, smuggling contraceptives into the United States from abroad.

Parents need to know that Rad Women Worldwide is the follow-up to Rad American Women A–Z, by the same team of author Kate Schatz and illustrator Miriam Klein Stahl. This one features short profiles of 40 women in 31 countries in all sorts of time periods, from a priestess-poet in Mesopotamia who lived 4,300 years ago to current American tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. The book is not structured chronologically, so readers can hop in and out at will. Topics that may require further parental discussion include Kasha Jacqueline Nagabasera, a gay rights activist in Uganda fighting for "the freedom to love" and Emma Goldman smuggling contraceptives into the United States for poor women in 1890s New York. An index at the back lists 250 "More Rad Women Worldwide" for readers to research on their own.