A welcome reconsideration of an underappreciated early-20th-century journalist and activist.
An overdue biography of an influential suffragist, pacifist, and civil libertarian.
“God meant the whole rich world of work and play and adventure for women as well as men,” Crystal Eastman (1881-1928) said in a 1914 speech. “It is high time for us to enter into our heritage—that is my feminist faith.” The daughter of two ministers, Eastman was especially close to her mother, who served with Thomas Beecher, the half brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, at a church in upstate New York. After earning a law degree from New York University, she pursued progressive causes, including workers’ rights, suffrage, socialism, reproductive rights, and civil liberties. In the first biography of Eastman, Aronson (Journalism and Media Studies/Fordham Univ.; Taking Liberties: Early American Women’s Magazines and Their Readers, 2002, etc.) casts her subject as a journalist and intersectional activist who advocated for social justice while embarking on love affairs, two unconventional marriages, and motherhood. Despite lifelong health problems, Eastman investigated hazardous labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation and wrote a landmark 1910 report on that effort, Work Accidents and the Law, which led to the country’s first workers’ compensation law. She later became a prominent suffragist and co-founder of forerunners of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, often working beside trailblazers such as Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman or with her brother, Max, with whom she co-edited the leftist monthly the Liberator. This dense and deeply researched biography features some distracting modern clichés (Eastman “noted that her biological clock had been actively ticking” and found herself “juggling work and family”), but Aronson leaves no doubt that Eastman was an inspiring figure who deserves the renewed attention that the book should bring.
A welcome reconsideration of an underappreciated early-20th-century journalist and activist.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-994873-4
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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