A rich life well deserving of reconsideration. Showalter provides a solid launching point.
An energetic new look at the author of the lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” finds a modern feminist thread in the heroine’s frustrated marriage.
Accomplished women’s studies scholar and author Showalter (Emerita, English/Princeton Univ.; A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, 2010, etc.) focuses on the unhappy marriage of New York heiress and bluestocking Julia Ward (1819-1910) to the crusading Boston doctor for the blind and handicapped, Samuel Howe, a union that lasted from 1843 until his death in 1876. Ward was a gifted singer and cultured young woman, and she fell for the handsome, moody “knight errant” Samuel despite early signs that he had a controlling, morose temper. The marriage grew increasingly strained through numerous pregnancies—unwanted by Howe, who yearned for an equitable, affectionate companion and dreaded the strictures of motherhood. Samuel, very much a man of his era, believed women should be completely fulfilled by domestic duties and motherhood and was no doubt bewildered and angry by Julia’s restlessness. Showalter can’t help that Howe comes across from her letters as whiny and spoiled and thus not a terribly sympathetic character. After refusing to come home to Boston from a trip to Rome, during which she plunged into her poetry and found her voice, she returned just ahead of a scandalous marital separation and was shocked by the tanned skin and “harsh voices” of the older children she had left behind. Readers may be shocked when reading about submission to her husband’s sexual will in order to avoid scandal (producing yet more children) and her inability to reveal to him her first book of poetry. The power struggle continued with her fame as the lyricist of the “Battle Hymn.” Still, Howe certainly came into her own in later years, embracing women’s suffrage and feminist causes, elements that the author might have dwelt more on.
A rich life well deserving of reconsideration. Showalter provides a solid launching point.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4590-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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