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Strong Like Her
Haley Shapley
Published April 7, 2020
272 Pages
Genre: Nonfiction, Sports/Athletic
This nonfiction work features stunning photography work and a wealth of historical and current information within women’s side of the athletic world. Interlacing photos of current athletes amongst a historical backdrop, the chapters are laid out perfectly, separated into categories based on the style of the sport and more.
This book showed me a new side of history- one unfortunately not as widely covered in history books – the world and rise of female athleticism. The book has an abundance of stories from throughout history – covering the challenges women faced throughout history and the rise of their prominence in various athletic fields.
I found the book to be very inspiring. The sports world is not something I have a strong familiarity with, so I enjoy challenging myself and learning more. The author herself is an athlete and it was very apparent that extensive research was done on writing this book, through interviews and more.
The one thing I did wish there was a bit more of was more of the historical photographs in addition to the modern ones. There are many large full page photos of the modern day athletes woven throughout the text and at the beginning of chapters, but the historical images were a bit more sporadic. It seems there may not have been much accessible or available visual documentation for these historical stories, which is likely why.
Overall, this is an excellent book that I would absolutely recommend to any woman interested in athletics, of any age. I think this could be an especially impactful gift for the sporty teens in your life due to the inspiration and wealth of knowledge it provides.
A big thank you to the author for providing a review copy to The Book Review Crew for honest review. All opinions and thoughts are my own.
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The author has graciously offered to answer a short Q&A question for our readers. Please enjoy this bonus snippet of my conversation with her, and getting to know her better as an author.
Liberty: What was your main inspiration for writing Strong Like Her?
Haley: Strong Like Her was really a melding of my personal and professional lives. I started strength training in the mid-2010s, and I felt like everywhere I looked, I was seeing women lifting weights and getting involved in sports like powerlifting and CrossFit and American Ninja Warrior. Although I played a lot of sports growing up, I didn’t see many women training in a way that was intentionally about gaining strength, so I wanted to know how that had evolved and whether there were other points in history where muscularity was more accepted. That led me to the library — one of my favorite places! — where I started to read a lot of books about the history of fitness. In those books, I found that there was very little content about women. I knew that there had to be incredibly interesting stories of women pushing their athletic potential since the beginning of time, so I set out to uncover and tell those stories.
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