An enlightening account detailing how the Civil War changed the nation’s capital while expanding the role of women in...
Political commentator and bestselling author Roberts (Ladies of Liberty: The Women who Shaped our Nation, 2008, etc.) shines a spotlight on the remarkable political, literary, and activist women of Washington, D.C., during the tumult of the Civil War.
In her previous books, the author has recounted the changing roles of women and their significant impacts on the nation’s growth, and her latest is a natural follow-up. With the commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War in 2011, Roberts’ curiosity was piqued again. “I started wondering whether that horrific conflict had a similar impact on American women’s lives,” she writes. The author’s extensive research included diaries, newspapers, government records, and private correspondence, all of which capture the turmoil, excitement, and heartbreak that transpired in this once-quiet “prewar Capital City.” With the onset of the war, Washington evolved into a sprawling Union Army camp and then a reeking, overcrowded military hospital. As a result, some Southern belles fled to Confederate territory. Women shouldered new roles, becoming nurses and forming social service and relief agencies. Some wrote propaganda, and others became spies. Many women moved to Washington to fill positions once held by men. African-American women founded societies to advocate for improved conditions in the camps for displaced slaves. The author’s cast of characters is vast, from familiar names to those less well-known, and her detailed, layered narration makes the information fresh and highly relatable. Whether Roberts is relating the confidences between Mary Lincoln and her seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, the tireless work of abolitionist Josephine Griffing, or the struggles of Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, to secure her dying husband’s release from jail, each story widens the historical lens.
An enlightening account detailing how the Civil War changed the nation’s capital while expanding the role of women in politics, health care, education, and social services.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-200276-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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