Feminist icon, goddess, social climber, bunny—who is Gloria Steinem? All of the above, according to a serious new biography that examines Steinem's life from early childhood to ``this-is- what-63-is-like.'' To many, if not most, who came of age around 1972, Steinem is synonymous with the second feminist revolution. That year marked the launch of Ms. magazine, the popular journal of women's revolt against the patriarchy. According to Stern (coauthor, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry, 1990), Steinem was late to the revolution. Her famous article, ``A Bunny's Tale,'' about her debilitating experiences as a Playboy Bunny, was published in the same year as Betty Friedan's seminal The Feminine Mystique, but Steinem's ``click'' did not come until 1969, when she attended a speakout on abortion. From then on, her liberal ideology and her writings began to focus on women. What's new here is a real look at Steinem off the public platform, at the ambitious woman who barred marriage and children from her agenda but used men as access to the next rung of the social ladder. A long list of lovers here runs from the well-connected scion of a musical family to publishing and real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman. Over the years, Steinem managed to keep most of the lovers as friends. That was tangential to developing herself, with the help of eloquent podium partners, as spokeswoman for the movement. Stern points up that in spite of—or perhaps because of—Steinem's short skirts, iconic hairstyle, possible face-lift, and questionable protestations that good looks have been a hindrance, she is kind, caring, generous, and genuinely dedicated to women's interests. Some of the more touching stories of the formative years have been revealed in Steinem's own books but are told here with a perspective that glorifies a heroine for the '90s, kohl eyeliner and all. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55972-409-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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