Though sometimes more detailed than it need be, a psychologically acute group portrait of a family that managed (in...
A slow-paced yet often incisive collective biography of Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia Peabody—three Massachusetts sisters who helped spark educational reform and the American mid-19th-century literary renaissance.
A historiographical revolution has occurred since the previous major biography of the trio, Louise Hall Tharp’s The Peabody Sisters of Salem (1950), notably in feminism and in greater candor about sexual matters. But this account by Marshall (a specialist in women’s- and New England history), while longer than Tharp’s, covers only half its subjects’ life spans, thus losing in narrative nimbleness. Still, using a vast cache of family letters and journals, Marshall masterfully analyzes how the three “both welcomed their group identity and resented it as they strove for independent self-fulfillment.” Most startling, she depicts two triangular relationships, with Mary and Sophia succeeding in winning the affections of their eventual husbands (educator Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, respectively) from Elizabeth. Above all, Marshall sets the sisters’ hard-won achievements against the background of their family and time. The Peabodys followed their unconventional mother’s lead into teaching—a necessity in a household with an underachieving father and three brothers. Elizabeth, the oldest, often intimidated not only her sisters but also many men with her precocious intellect. Author, translator, bookseller and publisher, she introduced the kindergarten movement to the United States. Mary, the family beauty, wrote a biography of Mann and even a posthumously published novel inspired by the love triangle with Elizabeth. Sophia, an invalid afflicted by migraines, blossomed into an accomplished painter and sculptor even as she drew out the shy Hawthorne. Marshall demonstrates how the sisters not only supported Hawthorne and Mann, but also Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Emerson and other Transcendentalists.
Though sometimes more detailed than it need be, a psychologically acute group portrait of a family that managed (in Elizabeth’s words) “to move the mountain of custom and convention.”Pub Date: April 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-395-38992-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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