Engaging study of a vibrant woman.
In a short, admirable biography, Brady—who has edited several books about Nelly Custis Lewis, Martha Washington’s granddaughter—recreates the life and loves of America’s original first lady.
George Washington was not Martha’s first husband. At 18, Martha—or Patsy, as friends and family often called her—married Daniel Custis, an older man from New Kent County who deeply loved Martha, and took her as his bride despite his father’s controlling opposition. She came into a huge estate when Custis died, and proved an efficient and decisive businesswoman. The dashing George Washington then courted the young widow, though surviving letters reveal that he was deeply infatuated with another woman, Sally Cary Fairfax. Still, Brady is at pains to insist that George felt some affection or esteem for Martha, that he didn’t marry her just for her money. Whatever the case, Martha was certainly smitten with George, and, Brady writes, the pair grew into a deeper love over the course of their marriage. Martha would recall the years at Mount Vernon before the Revolution as the couple’s “golden years.” But politics intervened. During the pre-Revolutionary boycotts of British goods, Martha had to scramble to make sure her household had sufficient windowpanes and cloth. Then came the war, and a whirlwind political career. She found being first lady somewhat tedious—she disliked having to fuss constantly over her hair and clothes. Still, she did much to shape the office, insisting that she was a hostess and a public servant, not a queen. Brady offers a fascinating discussion of the ways Washington’s biographers have caricatured Martha—creating, for example, a “timid” wife who wouldn’t risk overshadowing her husband. Brady corrects that picture without going too much toward the other extreme. Her Martha is not a protofeminist, and she doesn’t attempt to cover up her subject’s warts (she is quite frank, for example about Martha’s failure to share her husband’s “certainty that slavery was wrong”).
Engaging study of a vibrant woman.Pub Date: June 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03430-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
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