A valuable and enjoyable historical compilation of American women’s speeches.
An anthology offers speeches by diverse women in American history.
In this book, Rubin—a writing and speaking coach—makes a good case for why nothing quite like this collection has been done before. Going beyond similar anthologies, the volume presents a mix of famous and lesser-known female figures, covering much of the span of American history, from the Colonial era to the present, with plenty of representation. The author—who has an online compilation, “Speaking While Female Speech Bank,” on which this book is based—acknowledges up front the challenges of sourcing in some cases. While historical figures such as Susan B. Anthony and Eleanor Roosevelt gave addresses that were widely published, other worthy female speakers, especially those who lived prior to 1830, have been barely acknowledged. The author also features the voices of many minority women, including Indigenous figures like Sarah Winnemucca and Ka’iulani. For those who enjoy American women’s history, this anthology will offer a lot that is familiar as well as some surprises. The speakers included here address a variety of issues—not all the speeches are about women, and, in some cases, they examine topics affecting minorities, from “Indian Removal” to Reconstruction-era convict leasing. And in the category of speakers whom readers thought they knew, Rubin offers some challenges. For example, with Sojourner Truth, her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in dialect (“I have borne thirteen chillen, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard”) is followed by the address she actually gave (“I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?”). In addition, the volume delivers occasional examples of White historical figures thought of as progressive (such as Clara Barton) expressing views about enslaved people that would be considered problematic by today’s standards. There is one notable exception in this diverse collection—while there are some Jewish women included, none of them strongly address Jewish issues in the way that other minorities tackle their communities’ problems (the closest is Lillian Wald’s speech on immigrant conditions). Otherwise, this is a compelling and needed historical resource that shows American women’s history in its full diversity.
A valuable and enjoyable historical compilation of American women’s speeches.Pub Date: June 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781637550304
Page Count: 398
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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