A useful addition to the Alcott archives that would also appeal to younger readers.
A tightly focused biography on a brief period in the life of Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888): her time as a nurse during the Civil War.
Alcott’s life seems like something out of our imagination. She was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, with a transcendentalist father and social worker mother, and she became closely acquainted with John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, with whom she shared abolitionist sympathies. Though she experienced a wealth of intellectual stimulus, she and her family also struggled financially, causing her and her sisters to seek work where they could find it. As young adult nonfiction author Seiple (Death on the River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Amazon Adventure, 2017, etc.) shows, that was a most difficult task in 1860s America, where options for women were severely limited. Thankfully, Alcott realized her writing talent early, and by her late 20s, she had published a book as well as articles in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1858, tragedy struck with the death of her younger sister, despite Louisa’s devoted nursing. By 1862, she discovered the popularity of sensational thrillers published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and provided a steady stream of stories under a male name, thus providing a small income. Even with her literary success, she felt the need to affect the ongoing war, so she volunteered and traveled to Washington, D.C., to serve at the Union Hotel Hospital. There she met a badly wounded man who opened her heart and wakened her authentic voice, transforming her characters and stories forever. During her time at the hospital, Alcott nearly died of pneumonia and returned to Concord. There she wrote Hospital Sketches, Thoreau’s Flute, and Pauline’s Passion and Punishment, which earned enough to save her family. Then she published Little Women, in which “she expertly weaved her progressive beliefs and empathetic insights…creating original and unforgettable characters.” Throughout, Seiple’s fluid style of writing displays few fireworks but makes the story read like a novel.
A useful addition to the Alcott archives that would also appeal to younger readers.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-58005-804-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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