A sympathetic biography that seeks to clear the noted birth-control pioneer's name of the charges of elitism and racism, which have darkened her reputation in recent years.
Feminist historian Baker (History/Goucher Coll.; Sisters: Lives of America's Suffragists, 2005, etc.) tells both Margaret Sanger's (1879–1966) personal and public stories. Born to a large, poor Irish family, Sanger transformed herself from middle-class housewife to internationally renowned sex educator. Although trained as a nurse, she left school before earning a degree and consequently worked primarily as a midwife in New York's Lower East Side. It was the death of a young woman from a self-induced abortion that impelled her to take up the cause of women's rights to contraception. Baker chronicles her early years as an activist, mingling with bohemian intellectuals and developing her skills of writing, organizing and fundraising. For her forthright language on sexual matters, she was charged in 1914 with violating the Comstock anti-obscenity laws. The charges were later dropped, but Sanger was imprisoned briefly in 1917 for opening a clinic and disseminating forbidden information. Into her account of Sanger's years of activism, the author weaves the story of her several debilitating illnesses, her two marriages and numerous sexual alliances, her encounters with the famous (e.g., Havelock Ellis and Mahatma Gandhi) and her gradual displacement as leader of the birth-control movement. Baker ably illuminates the time period, making clear the attitudes that Sanger confronted and the political and religious forces that were arrayed against her. She acknowledges Sanger's support of eugenics but asserts that Sanger was being pragmatic, requiring allies and finding many in the then-popular eugenics movement. Baker also asserts that to label her as racist is an unjust tactic of pro-life groups and that, in her day, Sanger, who opposed segregation, was more racially tolerant than most Americans. A wealth of information about the birth-control movement and the dedicated woman who was long at the center of it.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9498-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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