Inspiring reading about women who have shown “that it’s all right to occupy our humanity.”
Karbo (Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life, 2013, etc.) sketches the lives of 29 extraordinary women.
The author defines “difficult” women as those who believe their “needs, passions, and goals are at least as important as those of everyone around” them. In this book, Karbo creates word portraits—accompanied by drawings—of modern women who refused to let any social, cultural, or personal barriers stand in the way of their respective “mission[s].” Her subjects run the gamut from writers, artists, and performers to athletes, politicians, and media executives and include luminaries such as J.K. Rowling, Josephine Baker, Billie Jean King, Helen Gurley Brown, and Hillary Clinton. Karbo begins each portrait with one word that helps describe the woman: Rowling is “feisty,” Baker “gutsy,” King “competitive,” Brown “relentless,” and Clinton “ambitious.” She then highlights those parts of her subjects’ lives that have earned them reputations as “difficult.” Despite monumental success as a novelist, Rowling refused to allow herself to be “imprisoned by her role as creator of one of the most beloved fictional universes in literary history.” Dancer Baker dared to shake “body parts no one knew you could shake” up until four days before her death at age 68. King, who beat fellow tennis player Bobby Riggs in a 1973 “battle of the sexes” tennis match, fought tirelessly for “equal pay, equal treatment [and] equal respect” for women athletes. For more than 50 years, Brown advocated that women should not only enjoy the glamorous life, but also become sex objects, the better to enjoy the sexual freedom. Clinton kept moving forward toward lofty goals like the presidency despite the sexual and political scandals that rocked her husband’s administration. Refreshingly frank, Karbo’s book celebrates women who forged provocative identities and found life fulfillment despite the odds they faced.
Inspiring reading about women who have shown “that it’s all right to occupy our humanity.”Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1774-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
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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