Such unsupportable assertions, heartfelt though they may be, undermine the authors’ considerable research.
How sisterhood has flourished throughout history.
While male friendships have been “extolled…as the noblest form of human attachment,” women’s bonds, cultural historian Yalom (How the French Invented Love, 2012, etc.) and Brown assert, have been overlooked and even disparaged. Aiming to rectify this slight, the authors chronicle abundant evidence of women’s friendships, focusing on communities (nuns, for example, quilting circles, and the Lowell, Massachusetts, factory girls) and particular pairings: the “loving friendship” between German mystic Hildegard von Bingen and her disciple Richardis von Stade; Teresa of Avila and her sister Carmelite Ana de San Bartolomé; Mme. de Sévigné and Mme. de La Fayette, 17th-century French salonnieres; American patriots Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren; memoirist Mme. Roland and Sophie Grandchamp, who described their relationship as “a mutual rapture of the soul”; reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, who co-founded Hull House; and many others. Yalom and Brown examine bonds forged at college, among working women, between feminist activists, and the comradeship, as they put it, among divorced women. The authors wear their scholarship lightly, creating a lively narrative. Unfortunately, their enthusiasm leads them to make extravagant, unfounded claims: friendships formed “during political upheaval and war,” they conclude, “are among the strongest experienced by humankind.” Women’s friendships, characterized by affection, self-revelation, physical contact, and interdependence, can change the world: the “power, and often the wisdom, of what women seek and find in friendship could lead future generations into lives of dignity, hope, and peaceful coexistence.” Women, the authors insist, “will continue to show the world how to be friends” and help to create “a world in which the strengths of the friendly sex imbue society with greater concern for the well-being of every person.”
Such unsupportable assertions, heartfelt though they may be, undermine the authors’ considerable research.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-226550-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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