Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Child Brides, Global Consequences: How to End Child Marriage | (2014) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield | (2015) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Building Inclusive Economies: How Women's Economic Advancement Promotes Sustainable Growth | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage and Justice | (2021) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Anthologies
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a New York Times bestselling author that is best known for her debut novel “The Dressmaker of Khair Khana.” It is a story of a young female entrepreneur that supports her community that is under the boot of Taliban rule. She is also the author of “Ashley’s War” and “The Daughters of Kobani,” all which tell the stories of women who went against terrorists such as ISIS and the Taliban .
These are women who were technically the ground force that defeated the Islamic State. “The Daughters of Kobani” that she published in 2021 is a David and Goliath tale that tells of how a group of daring women beat ISIS and gave them their first defeat on the battlefield.
“Ashley’s War,” her second novel, is currently in development by Universal, which intends to make it into a major motion picture produced by Reese Withersppon. HiddenLight Productions which is a production house founded by Sam Branson, Chelsea and Hillary Rodham Clinton has optioned “The Daughters of Kobani.”
Lemmon went to the University of Missouri, from where she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in journalism. She then went to Harvard where she graduated with an MBA and also won the Dean’s Award for women entrepreneurship in 2006. Thereafter, she got a fellowship from the Robert Bosch Foundation in Germany and became a Fulbright Scholar.
She is a fluent speaker of French, Germans, Spanish and speaks some Dari. For a time, she served on the board of the International Center for Research on Women and the Mercy Corps. Lemmon is also a Council on Foreign Relations adjunct senior fellow.She has also taken up leadership roles in the private sector in national security and emerging technology sectors.
It was while she was studying for her Harvard MBA that she started writing extensively about entrepreneurship in countries that were experiencing or had experienced conflict. Before this she had been a political correspondent for the Political Unit at ABC News. Her work which included stories from the likes of Bosnia, Afghanistan, Liberia and Rwanda has been published by the likes of CNN, the World Bank, Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times and Harvard Business School.
Once she got her MBA she got a job with PIMCO the global investment company where she was a public policy analyst following the global financial crisis.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon frequently speaks on national security issues and has given talks at the National Infantry Museum, the Aspen Security Forum, the US Naval Academy, West Point, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Ted forums.
Her Ted Talk which was based on her second novel Ashley’s War already has more than a million views. She is a regular commentator on the likes of National Public Radio, MSNBC, PBS, and CNN. Aside from her work in national security she has written and reported in a range of topics from the importance of girls’ ambition, single mothers and school choice for The Atlantic and Child Marriage for PBS Newshour.
“The Dressmaker of Khair Khana” by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells the story of Kamila Sidiqi. Life as she knew it changed in the blink of an eye when the Taliban took over Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
During the civil war, she had graduated with a teaching degree which is a very rare thing for many women in the country. The Taliban proceeded to ban her from teaching and had her under house arrest. When her brother and father had to flee the city, she was left responsible for her five brothers and sisters.
The only tools she has at her disposal are determination and grit and she uses these to create a booming dressmaking business. The novel tells the true, even if incredible, story of an unlikely woman entrepreneur that thrived under the Taliban despite all the challenges.
Lemmon, who was a news reporter for ABC, spent years in Afghanistan reporting on the story. What she had produced is an unsanitized and intimate look into the lives of ordinary Afghanistan women. While they live tough lives, they do not like to look at themselves as victims but rather as the heart and backbone of the nation. The novel transports its readers to Afghanistan beyond the headlines to show you an Afghanistan that is not likely to be in the news.
“Ashley’s War” is a brilliant followup to the gripping and poignant debut from Gayel Lemmon. It is a compelling and insightful story of a pioneering team of female American warriors that worked hand in hand with Special Ops operatives on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan.
One of the most prominent of these is a beloved soldier named Ashley White who dies for a cause championed by her country. The Cultural Support Teams were first created by the Special Operations Command of the US Army in 2010. The program was the first of its kind that intended to put women alongside Army Rangers and Green Berets on the battlefield conducting sensitive missions.
The idea was that women could access people and places that were unreachable to male soldiers in a very conservative country such as Afghanistan. While they could not serve in combat, female soldiers could now work with different teams on the battlefield if they chose to join the program.
Tzemach Lemmon makes use of her insights on the complexities of war and first hand reporting to tell a compelling story of a unit of women with a remarkable hero at its core.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s “The Daughters of Kobnani” is a novel set in northeastern Syria in 2014. It is the last place any one thought would host a revolution about women’s rights.
But in that very year, ISIS had to face off with an all female militia in the small town of Kobani where they were soundly defeated. ISIS had by then swept across the north east of Syria taking over towns and countryside and spreading terror. From the unlikeliest of showdowns in Kobani emerged a powerful war machine that would fight alongside American troops to rout ISI in northern Syria.
In the process, the women of Kobani spread the vision of equality by fighting city by city, street by street and house by house to rout ISIS, an organization that was known to buy and sell women. It is a poignant and gripping story of a female Kurdish militia that would become a critical part of the war machine that stopped ISIS in its tracks.