A timely contribution to a virulent debate.
Two defiant women.
Drawing on considerable archival sources, journalist Gorton creates an informative history of the fight for women’s reproductive rights in her dual biography of activists Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Mary Ware Dennett (1872-1947). Dennett came to the cause from her personal experience of accidental pregnancies and birth trauma; Sanger, from work as a visiting nurse among the poor of New York City, where she saw women die after illegal abortions. The two first met in 1902, but although they shared goals, they fell out over the means to attain them. Dennett, Gorton reveals, shunned publicity and preferred to put her efforts into lobbying politicians and physicians; Sanger, a charismatic public speaker and successful fundraiser, relished being in the public eye. They differed, too, over who should hold prescribing privileges for contraceptives, with Sanger insisting that only physicians and nurses should. The women’s most stalwart adversary was Anthony Comstock, U.S. Postal Inspector and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Comstock Act of 1873 had made dissemination of information about contraception illegal, punishable by imprisonment. Both women suffered the brunt of that legislation. As Gorton points out, Project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for a future Trump administration, “explicitly states the Comstock Act should be revived and enforced” a dismal prospect at a time when the legal right to contraception is codified in only 13 states. “A woman’s body belongs to herself alone,” Sanger proclaimed in 1914. “It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other government on the face of the earth.…Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”
A timely contribution to a virulent debate.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780063036291
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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