“Long Live Girl Scouts!” may be the cry on readers’ lips after finishing this tribute to a spirited and inspirational...
Marking the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts, this biography brings to life the woman whose efforts galvanized an entire nation of young women.
Cordery (History/Monmouth Coll; Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker, 2007, etc.) vividly evokes an era when the Girl Scouts’ founder, the unconventional Juliette Gordon Low (1860–1927), faced an uphill battle convincing the public that girls deserved the same adventures and patriotic duties as their fellow Boy Scouts. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, camping, hiking and participating in military drills were considered the province of men alone. The head of the Boy Scouts, James West, went so far as to complain that Girl Scouts would “sissify” his organization, and he tried to block Daisy from using the word “Scout,” preferring the more feminine “Guide.” But Low remained undeterred by such threats, pushing ahead with her plan to create a national organization that would bring together girls of all faiths and ethnicities in fun, service-oriented activities. Despite growing up in a wealthy family in the Deep South, Daisy was no stranger to hardship, having married a cad who whisked her off to England, squandered their money and committed adultery. Sadder but wiser after his early death, and suffering from her own lifelong health problems, she strove to create a lasting monument to sisterhood that would foster independence as well as sorority. The Girl Scouts boosted their civic profile by stepping up to fulfill a bevy of tasks during World War I, from nursing to babysitting to growing vegetable gardens. By the ’20s, many original critics of Girl Scouting came to advocate it as a means for transforming wayward, idle young women into strong, nurturing, productive members of society. Although Cordery’s narrative occasionally bogs down in descriptions of the administrative and bureaucratic details of the organization, it nevertheless brightly illuminates the growing pains of both Daisy and her Girl Scouts.
“Long Live Girl Scouts!” may be the cry on readers’ lips after finishing this tribute to a spirited and inspirational American leader.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02330-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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