An inspiring portrait of a gutsy activist who produced a transformation in the political landscape.
The history of a defiant movement to elect women.
In 1980, Malcolm, the great-granddaughter of a founder of IBM, looking for a way to put her inherited fortune to use for effective social change, founded the Windom Fund, which contributed to organizations focused on women’s issues and voter registration. Soon, though, noting the dearth of women in Congress, Malcolm decided to address that dire political need by funding the campaigns of progressive, pro-choice Democratic candidates. Along with a handful of friends, she established EMILY’s List, an acronym for “Early Money Is like Yeast”—because it makes dough rise. Its premise was simple: the group would write letters about women candidates to its members, urging financial contributions of $100. With the assistance of Vanity Fair contributing editor Unger (The Fall of the House of Bush, 2012, etc.), Malcolm chronicles the exhilarating rise of this “unique kind of PAC.” Its membership eventually grew to 3 million and exerted decisive influence in women’s political achievements: helping aspirants, such as Barbara Mikulski and Dianne Feinstein, win primaries; helping candidates under attack—the authors document a vicious campaign waged against Ann Richards in her bid for Texas governor; and following election results down to their nail-biting conclusions. Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, heard before an all-male committee, and exposure on 60 Minutes galvanized much support. As more women earned seats in Congress and state houses, the group decided, in addition to funding, “to build from scratch a full-service political operation…that involved recruiting a new generation of women candidates, training them and their staffs,” and guiding them in fundraising, dealing with the media, and fending off the inevitable attacks. With more than 110 Democratic women elected to the House and 19 to the Senate, the group still has a major goal: to see Hillary Clinton elected president in 2016.
An inspiring portrait of a gutsy activist who produced a transformation in the political landscape.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-44331-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
