A remarkable biography (the second, after Lois Beachy Underhill's The Woman Who Ran for President, 1995) of one of America's most controversial (and neglected) suffragists. Victoria Claflin Woodhull (18381927) was a clairvoyant, a spiritualist, a stockbroker, a newspaper editor, a women's rights crusader, a presidential candidate, and a sometime prison inmate. Yet shortly before her death, she noted that she wanted to be remembered by a line from Kant: ``You cannot understand a man's work by what he has accomplished but by what he has overcome in accomplishing it.'' A more apt epitaph could not have been chosen for her. Born impoverished to a forger father and an emotionally unstable mother, Woodhull and her sister soon were the sole breadwinners of the very extended Claflin clan, earning a living as spiritualists and healers. But the sisters wanted to get more done. After using their so-called healing powers to aid business tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, he reciprocated with financial assistance in their venture to become Wall Street's first female brokers. Not long after this, Woodhull—who was driven to social reform in part by her experiences in marrying an alcoholic at age 14 and bearing an imbecile son—declared herself a candidate for president of the US, the first woman ever to do so. She was also the first woman to address a congressional committee about women's right to vote. A vibrant, highly opinionated person who espoused free love, Woodhull alienated more than a few of her suffrage contemporaries, notably movement leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They tried to write her out of feminist history, censoring so many of her reform actions that Gabriel, a Reuters journalist, had to play Sherlock Holmes to piece Woodhull's life together. Well written and researched, this book warrants a spot on every serious American history student's bookshelf. (19 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-132-5
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
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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