A lucid account that humanizes historical figures hitherto rolled up into a single image.
Public work, private lives: a thoughtful portrait of five women’s-rights pioneers.
Baker (History/Goucher Coll.; The Stevensons, 1996, etc.) is right to suggest that our view of the suffragists is gray and one-dimensional: “We conflate them into one middle-class overweight white woman with a severe look, hair unflatteringly pulled behind her ears, dressed in a high-necked black dress with a lace collar and cameo pin for decoration.” In fact, she observes, the early feminists were a diverse lot, though with some commonalities—many, for instance, had suffered at the hands of fathers or husbands and therefore understood firsthand the injustices wrought on women by virtue of mere gender. Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard and Alice Paul, each of whom Baker considers indispensable to the women’s movement, were quite different, each possessing a different reason for advocating women’s right to vote: Stanton wished to advance women’s rights generally, for example, while her ally Anthony paid closer attention to the rights of working women. Baker carefully traces the origins of these various emphases while linking them to episodes in the leaders’ lives: Stone, foremost a champion of women’s education, attended college against her father’s wishes; it took her nine years to save enough to pay a year’s tuition, but her success there swayed her father to lend her money for the next year. Anthony, no stranger to “same-sex passion,” and Stanton, married for 47 years, forged an alliance of ideas and activism while finding reasons to disagree on many points. And Willard campaigned vigorously not only for women’s rights but also for “sexual purity” and temperance, motivated by the death of a brother to alcoholism and the certainty that women who smoked and danced could have no self-respect.
A lucid account that humanizes historical figures hitherto rolled up into a single image.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-8090-9528-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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
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