Miss Alcott's E-mail: Yours for Reforms of All Kinds

Shouldn't life be more than simply showing up? Is it enough to be part of a family, make another family, earn your living, and then exit stage left? Or should you engage and be engaged in a bit of purposeful shaking and shoving along the way? These are questions that Kit Bakke urgently needs answered. Tired of self-proclaimed gurus and self-help books, she turns to her childhood role model―Louisa May Alcott―for direction.
She sends an e-mail to Louisa, and is amazed when she receives a reply. Their correspondence becomes a dance of ideas and tales bridging the mid-1800s and the twenty-first century. But why Louisa? Her abolitionist zeal, her women's rights advocacy, her hospital work, her crazy commune days, her heartfelt desire to leave the world a better place, her humor and her energy all materialized in front of me, writes Bakke. Louisa was serious when she signed her letters, 'Yours for reforms of all kinds.' She made her life, she didn't just live it.

Kit Bakke was born in Seattle, one of the first of the baby boom generation. On graduating from Bryn Mawr College in Political Science she worked for the Students for a Democratic Society, and then sided with its more radical splinter group known as The Weathermen. After several years both above and underground, she had a baby and rejoined society to go back to school for a nursing degree in upstate New York. After two masters degrees in nursing and public health she became a clinical information systems consultant. She is now a wife and mother of two daughters and a cockatoo and still lives in Seattle. Miss Alcotts E-Mail is her first book.