Book excerpt: First time in paperback, this unique biography and cultural history is based on History extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred witnesses from the period. Acclaimed novelist and playwright 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 that World War II ended, with a fresh portrait of what life was like for women and Jews in America in the 1930s and ’40s. Her tale of one girl’s coming of age in prefeminist America is “poignant and appealing . . . as much a cameo of an era as a work of biography.” —ALA Booklist