A sobering account of women's struggle for opportunity and equality in the work force, seen through the eyes of one of the leaders in the fight. Gould's professional life was dedicated to ``helping women broaden their options'' (she was director of career services at Barnard College and later a founder and director of its Women's Center, an early force in women's studies). Her narrative relates in concrete detail and in more philosophical consideration Gould's brave and dedicated personal and professional fight for expanded horizons for herself and other women. Juggling begins with an ``epiphany,'' the moment when, as a 35-year-old mother of two and supportive doctor's wife, Gould realized that the world of open possibilities had vanished for her: ``I had reached the high point in my life when I was nineteen and it had been downhill ever since.'' Subsequent chapters on Gould's childhood, adolescence, and college years offer insight into how her family and complex Jewish background helped to shape her character. And the quirky and interesting family members and their history offer an exciting narrative of immigration, fortunes won and lost, and both close and fractured family ties. The remainder of Gould's memoir primarily reviews her professional career, beginning with her daring reentry into the work world during the 1950s. As Gould shares the many obstacles she faced in returning to work as a career counselor for ``reentries'' like herself, as well as the resistance she met among certain colleagues at the university level, her readers will likely accept the pioneer status she claims for herself. Gould is characteristically honest about the limitations of her experience: She worked primarily with white, middle-class women—women like herself. Despite this admitted shortcoming and the occasional excess of personal information, Juggling provides an honest and insightful consideration of one courageous woman's experience.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55861-172-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist 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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
