A fierce and unsentimental book that stands eloquent testament to the high price that women of a certain generation had to...
In this quietly probing memoir, Blew (English/Univ. of Idaho; Jackalope Dreams, 2008, etc.) chronicles how she tried to escape her rural Montana roots as a young adult, only to be unexpectedly “called home” by an academic job that would both liberate and entrap her.
The great granddaughter of “one of the earliest homesteaders in central Montana,” the author had toughness in her blood. However, she was determined to leave ranch country and make something of herself. Education was her way out, but as a young married woman in the 1950s, social expectations forced her to walk a thin line between family and personal ambition. Nevertheless, with two babies and a husband in tow, she earned a doctorate in English. While not the simple teaching certificate demanded by the maternal side of her family, her degrees promised a self-sufficiency that aligned, albeit uneasily, with her mother and grandmother’s vision for her. Blew eventually found work at a small Montana college where, as a young assistant professor, she came face-to-face with the reality of just how hard she would have to fight to fulfill her ambitions. Not only did she find herself at violent odds with a husband unable to cope with having a professional wife; she also got caught in a sexually charged game of cat and mouse with the college president that cost the unyielding Blew her job. The author eventually found much-deserved success as a scholar and writer at Idaho.
A fierce and unsentimental book that stands eloquent testament to the high price that women of a certain generation had to pay to pursue their dreams.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3011-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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
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
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