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AMERICAN QUEENMAKER

HOW MISSY MELONEY BROUGHT WOMEN INTO POLITICS

The author opens our eyes to a woman who should be a household name.

The first biography of Marie Mattingly Meloney (1878-1943), “a journalist, publicist, social reformer, mother, rainmaker, diplomat, political operative, and patron of women, the arts and sciences.”

After her father’s death, Missy (as the author refers to her throughout) used her literary and social knowledge to introduce herself into Washington, D.C., society and the sophisticated world of statesmen and men of letters. She began a lifetime of making contacts and went on to have a “public impact [that] reverberated broadly,” writes former history professor Des Jardins (Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Era, 2015, etc.), a board member of the National Women’s History Project. A fall from a horse left Missy with a permanent limp, and her recurring battles with a tubercular lung could have condemned her to a restricted life. However, “she vowed never to be the unavailable convalescent her mother had been.” When the Washington Post published her letter promoting a church, a journalist was born. Not long after, she captured a scoop on Spanish-American War hero George Dewey. Missy delivered not only a story, but also photos and connections to famous neighbors, whom she knew personally. As Des Jardins clearly demonstrates, she never stopped looking beyond the story. In 1900, she went to Colorado to recuperate from a TB attack and returned home as the Denver Post’s Washington correspondent—at age 18. One of Missy’s strengths was her patience. Whether seeking a story, convincing someone to write for her national publication, This Week, or gaining access to the Senate press gallery, she waited, worked, and always succeeded. What she discovered along the way was the strength of women’s ability to accomplish things through contacts and friendships. Without the vote, titles, or positions, one could still master the art of influence. Missy’s network extended across Europe and America and the political and intellectual spectrums. Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Lou and Herbert Hoover are only some of the people whose lives she affected. Her accomplishments were vast, and Des Jardins capably brings them to light.

The author opens our eyes to a woman who should be a household name.

Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-5416-4549-3

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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