67943203.599 Hennessee, Judith BETTY FRIEDAN An exhaustive, readable, forthright biography of the woman who, however truculent she may have been in both personal and political disputes, earned her way as one who launched the second-wave feminist revolution. Journalist Hennessee (coauthor with Dr. Michael Baden of Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner, 1989) makes clear that Betty Friedan, a woman of extraordinary energy and intelligence, was her own worst enemy, “rude and nasty, self-serving and imperious.” But she was also vibrant, focused, and compelling, a combination of qualities that enabled her not only to write The Feminine Mystique (1963) but to spearhead the founding of the National Organization for Women and later, the National Women’s Political Caucus. Born Betty Goldstein in Peoria in 1921 to a prosperous Jewish family, she graduated from Smith College, did a graduate stint at Berkeley, then moved to New York, where she reported for the labor press and married Carl Friedan, her husband for 22 years and father of her three children. This biography closely tracks her personal life, including episodes of domestic violence, divorce, and a long series of lovers. The personal mirrors the political: with Friedan, at home or in a feminist caucus, it was her way or the highway. For instance, Friedan, who liked men (better than she liked women), rejected the thesis put forth by radical members of NOW that patriarchy was “the root of all evil.” She also resisted the growing influx of lesbians into NOW. Soon, Gloria Steinem began to overshadow her—at least with the media—as “superstar of the women’s movement.” A furious Friedan fought back, but when the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment was lost, so was Betty. She turned to international organizing, writing (The Fountain of Age, 1993), teaching, and leading think tanks. Now nearing 80, she is, according to a friend, a “sweeter, calmer, happier person.” Friedan has left such a residue of ill will that many feminists will resist giving her the credit accorded even in this evenhanded treatment; it is nevertheless must reading for feminists and students of those tumultuous times, returning Friedan to her deserved place in “herstory.”(16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-43203-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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
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