A rich portrait of Beeton’s home life and the world of publishing in Victorian England.
Thoroughly researched, sympathetic and highly readable biography of the Victorian housewife who wrote the iconic Book of Household Management.
Hughes (George Eliot, 1999, etc.) delves into the lives of two generations of Isabella Mayson Beeton’s ancestors to reconstruct the world into which she was born. She shows us Isabella as a child making herself useful in a household containing a multitude of children; as a bride-to-be preparing to set up housekeeping; and as the young wife of a struggling book and magazine publisher. Sam Beeton launched The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1852, four years before their marriage, and by 1857, Isabella was writing for it. The Book of Household Management soon followed, appearing in 48-page installments beginning in 1859, with Isabella serving as compiler and editor. She may not have originated the recipes in it, but she excelled as a journalist and organizer. Under her direction, it came to be the source on which middle-class Victorians relied for guidance in all matters domestic: not just the preparation and presentation of food, but coping with servants, managing money, cleaning, stocking a pantry, entertaining, raising healthy children. To capture its flavor, Hughes inserts between the chapters on Isabella’s life brief sections she calls Interludes, which consider the Book of Household Management’s various aspects: its moral tone, its assumption that readers aspired to a higher style of living, prejudices against the servant class, an obsession with the purity of food and a nostalgia for a vanishing agrarian world. Acolytes assumed that the advice was coming from an experienced matron, but Isabella never even achieved middle age. After her death at 29, apparently of syphilis contracted from Sam on their honeymoon, her husband’s firm foundered. The book was acquired by another publisher, but the Beeton name remained firmly attached to it. Hughes follows the reception of its various incarnations through the centennial edition of 1960.
A rich portrait of Beeton’s home life and the world of publishing in Victorian England.Pub Date: May 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26373-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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