A fresh contribution to women’s history.
A biography of the determined woman who battled misogyny to help women in need in 19th-century New York City.
Ann Trow (1812-1878) came to the U.S. from her native England in 1831 with her husband and young daughter, hoping to make a living as a seamstress. Two years later, her husband was dead, she and her daughter were living in a Manhattan slum, and she was desperate to earn enough to support them both. As Wright recounts in a sharp, lively biography, Ann soon managed not only to support herself, but to become one of the wealthiest women of her time. From a local apothecary, she learned how to create pills that would bring on a miscarriage; it’s likely that he taught her, as well, how to perform surgical abortions. In 1836, she remarried, and she and her new husband set out to bolster her business as an abortion and birth control provider. She styled herself the faintly aristocratic Madame Restell, claimed she had learned medicine from her French grandmother, and advertised widely. Praised as a “female physician to the human race” and widely profiled by journalists who found her charming, Restell took up residence in a respected part of town, where her business thrived. In narrating Restell’s story, Wright chronicles the history of abortion in America, which became increasingly criminalized during the 19th century, as physicians, religious leaders, and politicians demanded control over women’s bodies. Restell was first arrested in 1839, spent two months in the notorious Manhattan prison The Tombs in 1841, and six months in a penitentiary in 1848—where she was given unheard-of privileges, such as wearing her own fashionable clothing rather than prison garb. Several times she was falsely accused by women of having botched their abortions, and even though her own lawyers prevailed, Restell’s reputation became tarnished. Now, when once again women’s access to reproductive care is being impeded, Wright’s well-researched biography is not only interesting, but, sadly, timely.
A fresh contribution to women’s history.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780306826795
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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