A rollicking good tale that effectively illustrates the level of marital entrapment endured by women of the Georgian era.
A sprightly feminist biography of a British heiress.
Mary Eleanor Bowes (1749–1800) was the only child of the enormously wealthy George Bowes, owner of abundant coal deposits in County Durham and Yorkshire. She was educated by a slew of tutors and earned the admiration of her doting father, who died when she was 11, leaving the young girl under the lax attention of aunts. As the idea of marrying for love was gaining currency—and there was nobody to check her impulses—Mary Eleanor first married John Lyon, the handsome, reserved older ninth Earl of Strathmore, with whom she had little in common. After effectively signing over her family’s properties to him, he ran up ruinous debts before leaving her a widow before the age of 30, with five children. Less than a year later, she was essentially duped into believing that an ardent admirer and cunning Irish opportunist, Andrew Robinson Stoney, fought a duel over her and lay dying; recklessly, she married him in 1777. Despite a miraculous recovery, Stoney proved to be a libertine, gambler, crook, wife-beater and all-around villain who made Mary Eleanor’s life hell for nearly a decade. Moore (The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery, 2005) vividly demonstrates that despite enjoying every material advantage, Mary Eleanor was virtually imprisoned and disenfranchised in her two marriages. The author skillfully chronicles her ultimate escape and vindication through the courts, emphasizing how the Bowes’ sensational divorce case paved the way for the reform of divorce and custody laws in England.
A rollicking good tale that effectively illustrates the level of marital entrapment endured by women of the Georgian era.Pub Date: March 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-38336-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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