Interesting reading, but Elizabeth Marsh remains in many ways an enigma.
A life whose tumultuous historical backdrop included the Seven Years War, the slave trade and globalization becomes a lens through which to view a world in motion.
Colley (History/Princeton; Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 2003, etc.) mingles history and biography in this account of the adventures of Elizabeth Marsh (1735–85). Born to a seafaring family in Portsmouth, England, Marsh moved to Menorca at age 19 with her parents and siblings. This was the beginning of a lifetime of audacious global exploration; she subsequently ventured out on transcontinental journeys to Morocco, Gibraltar, Rio de Janeiro, London, southern and eastern India and the Cape of Africa. In these places, Marsh bore witness to cultures and belief systems that were unfamiliar to most European women at the time. She bravely withstood months of captivity in Morocco, where she nearly became Sultan Sidi Muhammad’s slave. She wrote about these experiences from a female perspective in the first known English-language text about Morocco, despite the fact that publishing it, even privately, was potentially harmful to her reputation. Marsh’s story is unusual and inspiring, and Colley’s thorough descriptions of her travels, as well as the meticulous research and references to her journals, are compelling. However, while the book’s strength lies in its details, this is at times also its weakness. Striving to create an intersection of the public and private, the personal and the historical, the author too often shifts the focus from Marsh to write at length about other members of her family. As a result, it becomes difficult to get a sense of how Marsh feels during many of the changes and journeys in her life.
Interesting reading, but Elizabeth Marsh remains in many ways an enigma.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42153-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
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
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