Eye-opening, entertaining portrait of a fascinating proto-feminist.
A welcome biography of the Broadway star turned California Democratic Congresswoman.
Journalist Denton (Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America, 2006, etc.) does a handsome job exploring Helen Gahagan’s early life as an actress and singer as well as her later political activism. The author can’t quite crack the nature of her romantic attachments, particularly to husband and fellow actor Melvyn Douglas and to political mentor Lyndon B. Johnson, but she does better with her driving spirit. “Feisty and curious…strong-willed and theatrical” certainly characterizes the young woman who defied the wishes of her well-to-do Episcopalian parents in Brooklyn and single-mindedly pursued a Broadway career. She debuted at age 22, but despite earning terrific acclaim, acting couldn’t contain her. Gahagan set her sights on opera, apparently quite successfully until her marriage to Douglas took her to Hollywood, where the lucrative jobs abounded. While her husband cavorted with Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939), Gahagan Douglas threw herself into social causes such as the plight of the migrant workers, antifascism and the WPA programs in California. She and Melvyn, a supporter of the Democratic Party, befriended the Roosevelts and became a “power couple” in California politics. From 1944 to 1950, she served as one of a handful of pioneering women in the U.S. Congress. Labeled a “radical leftist” for her support of Henry Wallace, blacks and the “liberal vanguard,” she grew increasingly out of touch with the growing conservatism of the time. When she ran for the Senate in 1950 she was roundly beaten by then-Congressman Richard Nixon, whose operatives smeared her as “the Pink Lady.” (She retaliated by giving her opponent his most enduring epithet, “Tricky Dick.”) Denton displays a solid grasp of the ignominious politics of McCarthy-era America.
Eye-opening, entertaining portrait of a fascinating proto-feminist.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-480-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
