Kaplan’s coverage of this broad-reaching topic is as deep and diverse as women’s abilities.
The former editor-in-chief of Parade magazine pays tribute to women who have contributed indispensable work in a variety of fields.
Near the beginning, Kaplan (The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life, 2015, etc.) asks a pertinent question: “In our current era of assumedly aroused consciousness to gender issues, why do both men and women still assume that men’s contributions to society are the ones that really count?” The author does readers a service by spotlighting the achievements of many remarkable women. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn had sisters with equal or better talent, but while Fanny Mendelssohn was able to publish her work, Maria Anna Mozart achieved little recognition. In the sciences, the sins are more egregious. Female lab assistants have often conducted breakthrough research only to earn prizes for their professors or to discover the basis of world-changing science that enables another prizewinner. As she searches for characteristics of genius, the author lists a number of requirements. The first is to have acknowledgment, support, and encouragement from a parent or mentor. Being naturally smart (whatever that means) isn’t at the top of the list; tenacity and determination come before innate intelligence. How many women are out there who never understood their full capabilities because no one ever mentioned it? From science, technology, and math to literature, art, and psychology, Kaplan presents a diverse cast, including those geniuses still at work—e.g., Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Donna Strickland, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics. Who is considered a genius depends on who sets the rules; throughout history, that has been men. Refreshingly, as the author points out, there are now countless groundbreaking women paving the way for future generations, who will see power differently and demand to be taken seriously. “Once we expect to see women’s genius on display,” she writes, “the lack of it seems wrong and inexplicable.”
Kaplan’s coverage of this broad-reaching topic is as deep and diverse as women’s abilities.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-52-474421-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
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