A candid portrait of an indefatigable woman.
Growing up queer in midcentury America.
In 2010, Windsor (1929-2017) sued the United States for recognition of her marriage to a woman, claiming her legal right of inheritance from her late wife’s estate. Her victory in the suit, which catapulted her to fame, marked the transformation of a deeply closeted woman into an outspoken gay rights activist. In a forthright and vivid memoir, written with the assistance of journalist Lyon (Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict, 2009), Windsor reveals her early realization of her attraction to women and her long struggle to navigate homophobia among family members and at work, to live openly as a lesbian, and to marry the woman she loved. After Windsor died, Lyon took over the unfinished project, resulting in “a memoir/biography hybrid” that complements, and often deepens, Windsor’s narrative with information and insights that Lyon uncovered from his continued research. Lyon discovered, for example, that Windsor had a fierce temper, that her skill as a card counter enabled her to win big in casinos, and that she tended to “brush past” painful memories, such as the rift within her family caused by her sexuality. Although Windsor knew she was gay, she married a man who had been a close family friend, thinking she could bury her feelings for women. Soon, however, she rebelled against the charade: “The core of my identity, my natural biological instinct, wasn’t going to change.” Divorced, she moved to Greenwich Village, where she dove energetically into gay social life and sex. “She went through so many women,” a friend told Lyon. At the same time, she embarked on a successful career as a mathematician, writing programs for the UNIVAC computer and eventually developing software at IBM. In the workplace, she deflected matchmakers by pretending to have a boyfriend. In 2007, when she married Dutch-born psychologist Thea Spyer after a relationship of more than 40 years, co-workers asked her why she had lied to them. Windsor’s world had changed dramatically.
A candid portrait of an indefatigable woman.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19513-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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