Enter Helen

Journalist Brooke Hauser follows Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, from 1965, when she took over an ailing Cosmopolitan and turned it into one of the most lucrative magazine brands in the world. When women's magazines were teaching housewives casserole recipes, Brown wrote for the single woman, with frank advice on men, money, power, pleasure and happiness. Hauser concentrates on these Cosmo years, cutting back to Brown's path from an Ozarks upbringing to Los Angeles. She draws on Brown's letters and papers and on new interviews with friends and former colleagues. Hugh Hefner, Nora Ephron and Gloria Steinem appear in a New York shaped by the years of the sexual revolution and the women's movement.

Africa.com chief executive Teresa Clarke named it in a What CEOs are reading roundup.