The early chapters recall Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, but later chapters become unfocused as Howe...
A frank, engaging memoir by Feminist Press founder Howe (editor: The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from the 30 Founding Mothers, 2000, etc.) about growing up poor, smart and determined.
The most absorbing part of this elaborate work—at times overlong and overly detailed—is the charming early account of the young protagonist born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a Jewish ghetto in the 1930s. Relegated to second place after the birth of her brother, the “new golden baby boy,” the author was nonetheless the one her grandfather taught Hebrew and Yiddish until his death in 1940. Howe was a strong student, thwarted early on by illness and her mother’s stingy ways, but she attained spectacular heights in education, first on scholarship at Hunter College—where she was mortified to learn that she had a working-class Jewish Brooklyn accent, and worked hard to rid herself of it, although she stopped talking in class and didn’t regain a public voice for many years—and then graduate studies at Smith College and the University of Wisconsin. Growing up in the pre-feminist era, the author had no greater ambitions than becoming a high-school English teacher, but she went on to get a doctorate and teach college. She was discouraged to pursue writing and even wrecked an unbelievable chance to write for the New Yorker because she did not pursue an entrée with editor William Shawn. Moreover, she imagined she had to marry the men she had sex with, which proved disastrous. In the chapter titled “Becoming a Feminist,” Howe chronicles her early work introducing women’s studies to college curriculums and her decision to start the Feminist Press in 1970 in response to the need for biographies on notable women. The author compartmentalizes much of her rich experience in discrete chapters—family, marriages, tenure track, activism, friendships—yet each part resonates with a lively, frank deliberation.
The early chapters recall Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, but later chapters become unfocused as Howe tries to include everything. Nonetheless, a valuable chronicle of a life devoted to ideas and social justice.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55861-697-4
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
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
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