A gratifying, agenda-free story, effortlessly sweeping away tendentious criticisms of a first-rate American thinker and...
A perspicuous charting of the pilgrim’s progress that was Jane Addams’s hopeful, generous life.
Social activists get buffeted around more than most after they die both by their detractors and their champions. Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics/Univ. of Chicago; Real Politics, 1997, etc.) works hard, and successfully, here to clarify Addams’s goals in opening Hull House, the great settlement house in Chicago, and more generally in leading the life she chose. She persuasively establishes Addams’s importance as a social theorist, though that aspect of her work has sustained the most consistent attacks, by deploying extensive passages from her writings and speeches to illustrate her freethinking approach and her frequent eloquence. Elshtain has no difficulty dismissing the specious accusations of condescension, cultural fascism, and racism that have been leveled at Addams. Nor is it difficult to understand why her defense of anarchists, her peace activities, and her defense of immigrants and aliens won her such calumny. But her account of the founding of Hull House—beginning with what influenced Addams’s vision of it, from George Eliot to the social gospel—most decisively displays the great reformer’s empathy and humility and best explains how she could open the eyes of so many others to their abilities and possibilities. It is as difficult to imagine such an establishment now as it must have been wonderful to see it then: a place “available to any and all citizens of a city, including bewildered newcomers,” where hospitality, education, art classes, avenues of debate, even a bath, could be found along with childcare, union organizing, theatrical performances—the whole political and civic life of Chicago. “One is left nearly breathless,” Elshtain concludes.
A gratifying, agenda-free story, effortlessly sweeping away tendentious criticisms of a first-rate American thinker and activist. (8-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-465-01912-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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