An easy read with lots of good anecdotes, a dose of history, and some surprising statistics, but its focus on one segment of...
A feminist journalist argues that single women, who now outnumber married women in the United States, are changing society in major ways.
Between 2010 and 2015, New York Magazine writer at large and Elle contributing editor Traister (Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, 2010, etc.) interviewed nearly 100 women across the country, selecting from them some 30 whose stories she relates here. Many of them are women like herself—college-educated New Yorkers—which gives her book a definite slant. Before letting these women talk about their lives, the author turns to prominent women of earlier decades—Anita Hill, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem—and to single ones of earlier times who were abolitionists, suffragists, labor agitators, and social reformers. The present, writes Traister, “is the epoch of the single woman, made possible by the single women who preceded it.” Through her interviews, she explores their friendships with other women, relationships with men, sex and social lives, careers, freedoms, activism, independence, loneliness, living arrangements, and choices about children. At times, the author inserts her own story into the narrative, but she underrepresents the lives of poor women, minorities, and older widows. Although too often absent from the text, the needs of such women are recognized in an appendix that outlines changes in policies in wages, insurance, housing, welfare, and health care and in attitudes toward reproductive rights and family structures that single women must demand. If single women possess the political power that Traister attributes to this growing population (“a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives”), big changes are on the way.
An easy read with lots of good anecdotes, a dose of history, and some surprising statistics, but its focus on one segment of one generation of single women is a drawback.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1656-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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