Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear...
A biography of the famed author and feminist, written by British academic and editor Todd (A Wollstonecraft Anthology, not reviewed).
Pushy, excitable, proud, highly imaginative, and terrifically self-assured, Wollstonecraft moved through a remarkable range of intellectual and moral positions with the determination and tenacity that marks an authentic search for truth and self-fulfillment. The author stresses the seriousness and originality of this search, carefully tracing the elements of morality, politics, sexuality, and imagination that kept reconfiguring themselves in Wollstonecraft’s views back to her experience. This canny and articulate biography also makes it clear that the mother of modern feminism was a drama queen of no mean proportions: tactless, self-absorbed, with a capacity for complaint and reproach as inexhaustible as her energy and intellectual openness. Such a figure should and does make for a lively narrative. In addition to following her rather bizarre series of love affairs, both chaste and carnal, we see Wollstonecraft as a young governess hilariously snubbing her aristocratic employer; as a radical author in revolutionary Paris watching in horror as ever more heads rolled away from the guillotine; and as a soon-to-be-abandoned woman traveling gamely in Scandinavia, baby and seasick maid in tow, competently doing business for her lover Gilbert Imlay while at the same time writing reams of needy, reproachful, and clingy letters to him. Throughout, her life was characterized by contradictory forces of pitiful dependence and self-deception on one hand and tremendous will and self-sufficiency on the other. Especially compelling in this regard is her relationship with her sisters, whom she supported, bullied, and ignored by turns, and her famously unconventional marriage to William Godwin, who kept a separate household from her.
Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear illustration of the source and significance of that connection and an absorbing account of the extraordinary life that engendered it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-231-12184-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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