At times a difficult read, but the humanity and McNeil’s indomitable spirit shine through.
Helderman chronicles a woman’s journey from battered wife to advocate for victims of spousal abuse in this nonfiction work.
Two quotes set the stage for this well-researched narrative that puts a human face on an all-too-common issue. The first comes from Ginger McNeil, who tells the author, “I lived in a cabin in the woods, too poor to afford electricity, and too afraid of my husband to leave.” The second comes from Ginger’s husband, Mike, who, matter-of-factly and without remorse, comments: “One time I hauled off and slapped the fool out of her….Men will understand….I wouldn’t change a thing if I could go back.” Hearing these words, the author, then on assignment to write a magazine piece about poverty in Alabama, switched her focus to McNeil and her story. In this book, she reports with a journalist’s keen eye and ear for the telling detail and quote: “I noticed her when she came in the door,” says a county clerk worker, recalling Ginger years later. “She looked broken down, like an old hollow-eyed woman in a faded cotton print dress. I could see she was frightened to death.” The author notes that the family lived remotely, like pioneers or survivalists; “He chose this way of life for us,” McNeil explains. In Helderman’s telling, McNeil’s fraught exit from her marriage (a scene in which her husband shows up at a court hearing and hands her a picture of their dead son, a suicide victim, is chilling) feels like a hard-won triumph. The author does give Mike—now deceased—the opportunity to tell his side (“It wasn’t all bad. Ginger and me”). Though those encounters thrum with the tension of possible threats to her own safety, she does an admirable job of presenting his perspective without resorting to “gotcha” questions. But the narrative is rooted in McNeil’s bravery and her determination to tell her story as repayment to the women’s shelter workers who aided her. This is an updated version of Helderman’s award-winning 2010 book.
At times a difficult read, but the humanity and McNeil’s indomitable spirit shine through.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781950495337
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Lucid House Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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