An impassioned look at a fiery radical fueled by an “unyielding sense of outrage.”
Provocative essays on the shaping of 19th-century suffragist Stanton’s thought by feminist and literary critic Gornick (The Situation and the Story, 2001, etc.).
Working as an editor at The Village Voice in 1970, Gornick realized in an illuminating flash that “well into the final half of the 20th century women still did not take their brains seriously.” Her personal discovery of feminism provides a segue into the life and thinking of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: devoted wife, mother of seven, and high-spirited, uncompromising thinker and writer who laid out a scheme for universal suffrage at a time when most activists were concerned exclusively with the rights of freed slaves. By the first Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Stanton had concluded that without suffrage, one was not a citizen. She was continually amazed at the vitriol aimed at the women’s movement, writes Gornick: “She was made to see the depth of unreality that a person who is a woman embodied not only for those in power, but for the mass of people living lives of ordinary appetite and acquisition, shrouded in received wisdoms so long unreviewed that they seemed at one with nature.” Stanton marched in the movement’s radical wing, an ally of Susan B. Anthony and an orator of extravagant rhetoric (Gornick clearly admires her flourishes). Her union with expedient radical Harry soured, eventually leading her to attack the inequitable structure of marriage. The title comes from Stanton’s swan song speech in Washington, D.C., in 1892. At the age of 76, she spoke the existential truth that each person must make the voyage of life alone, and that “to deny anyone the tools of survival—that is, the power to act— is criminal.” Gornick masterfully places Stanton in the feminist tradition that stretches from the visionary Mary Wollstonecraft to the trenchant Simone de Beauvoir and beyond.
An impassioned look at a fiery radical fueled by an “unyielding sense of outrage.”Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-29954-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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