An erudite, compelling examination.
A portrait of women engaged in the history-making business, as well as a meditation on the occasional burden of being immensely quotable.
Ulrich (History/Harvard; The Age of Homespun, 2001, etc.) wrote the titular sentence, now found on everything from T-shirts and mugs to compendiums of quotable women, in a scholarly article published in 1976. As she tells it, she was at the time “a 36-year-old housewife enrolled in a graduate seminar in early American history.” Curiosity about the everyday lives of colonial women prompted an article on the funeral sermons of pious dead—and the sentence that launched a thousand bumper stickers. “My objective,” she writes, “was not to lament their oppression, but to give them a history.” Three decades and a few feminist movements later, her single line has spawned countless debates over what it means to make history as a woman, as well as what it means for a lady to be well-behaved. Did Marie Curie succeed because she “misbehaved,” by pursuing science against the social mores of her time? Or did she succeed by behaving exquisitely well in science? Was Rosa Parks a revolutionary figure because she was a simple seamstress who made a single defiant stance? Or because she was a quiet, hardworking and dedicated member of the NAACP? Engaging in this debate, Ulrich writes primarily (and wonderfully) about the lives of three female writers separated by generations and continents. Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Virginia Woolf each chronicled in her own way not just the bold, brash women who defied convention, but also the quieter ones who made history by simply recording their lives. Ulrich is especially interested in the ways individual women reconcile the competing demands to act out or shut up.
An erudite, compelling examination.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4159-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
