A spirited autobiography by a pioneering feminist, labor organizer, socialist, and scholar. Alice Hanson Cook (1903—98) may not be a household name, but she helped change the American workplace culture by pressing for, among other things, comparable-worth legislation (whereby women earn as much as men for doing the same work) and policies aimed at bettering the lot of working women. In this autobiography, completed just before her death, she writes of her education as an activist. As a pacifist during and just after WWI, she encountered jingoist scorn, as well as the displeasure of her Spanish-American War veteran father, who “deplored my activities”; she later traveled to Weimar Germany to study, and there she witnessed the rise of Nazism, which, like so many other foreign observers, she thought a passing phase of German discontent. Converted to socialism, she returned to the US, lived in a commune informally called “Soviet House,” held a great variety of odd jobs (which prepared her, she writes, to understand the true nature of “women’s work”), and later became a teacher of labor history and labor education at Cornell University. As a scholar, Cook studied the economic role of working women in several cultures, traveling widely through Europe and East Asia; as an activist connected with entities like the Ford Foundation, she was able to advance her case that women should be more justly rewarded for their indispensable contributions in the workplace and at home. Her book closes with reflections on her long struggle for equality—and with a firm slap at the Republican Contract with America, which, she says, “abandoned the helpless by equating poverty with laziness.” A worthy addition to the literature of labor activism and women’s studies. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 7, 1999
ISBN: 1-55861-189-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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