Recalling her girlhood frustration at finding no books that accurately reflected the female experience, Marilyn French...
In celebration of its 30th anniversary, City University’s Feminist Press offers an anthology on growing up female, with pieces drawn from contemporary authors as well as the neglected masters the Press helped restore to prominence. Part One, “Family,” includes such classics as an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s gritty, groundbreaking 1942 memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road; “Raymond’s Run” (1979), by recently deceased Toni Cade Bambara, which portrays an African-American girl’s love for her brother, is among the modern work here. The “Teachers and Friends” section ranges from “The Fire,” Helen Rose Hull’s 1917 tale of a teenager’s subtly erotic relationship with her art teacher, to an excerpt from A Cross and a Star, in which Marjorie Agosín chronicles her Jewish mother’s experiences growing up in a small Chilean town filled with Nazis. Part Three, “Work and the World,” contains some of the publisher’s most treasured rediscoveries, from Agnes Smedley (Daughters of Earth) to Kate Chopin (“Wiser Than God”).
Recalling her girlhood frustration at finding no books that accurately reflected the female experience, Marilyn French exclaims in her introduction, “If only The Feminist Press had existed then!” Today’s mothers and daughters will cherish this wide-ranging collection as a pleasing reminder that it’s here now.Pub Date: May 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-55861-233-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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