A densely written, well-documented history of the British experience that will resonate with American women as well.
A scholarly study of the role of suffragists in the years leading up to World War I, of women scientists during the war, and of the kind of discrimination they still face today.
Fara (History and Philosophy of Science/Univ. of Cambridge), who has written previously on both the history of science and the place of women in that history (Scientists Anonymous: Great Stories of Women in Science, 2007, etc.), introduces readers briefly to the status of women and then takes a closer look at the suffragist movement that had been hammering away for years at the barriers preventing women from full participation in society. When the war called men away, women became essential replacements in traditionally male jobs in science, technology, and medicine, but they were often seen as temporary, inferior, and cheaper replacements. The author provides profiles of many of the educated, talented, and resourceful individuals who temporarily filled these jobs. However, as Fara notes, for many of these women, “the War seems to have represented a career hiccup rather than a life-altering event.” When the men returned, many women were forced into lower-status positions, if they kept a job at all. Still, the war had given women a taste of independence and had shown that social change was possible and that there would be no going back to prewar conditions. Furthermore, writes Fara, women had successfully demonstrated their competence, and many had acquired professional qualifications not previously available to them. The author concludes that the suffragists had a clear goal—getting women the right to vote, a right that was granted in 1918 to British women over 30—but that the discrimination facing women continues to be “elusive, insidious, and stubbornly hard to eradicate.” Choice selections from Fara’s wide reading open each chapter.
A densely written, well-documented history of the British experience that will resonate with American women as well.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-879498-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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