Spiritualist, blackmailer, newspaper editor, presidential candidate, free love enthusiast: As this terrific tome proves, history is anything but boring when Victoria Woodhull is the topic. The past six months have seen not one but two excellent books finally giving this woman her historical due. The first, Notorious Victoria by Mary Gabriel (published in January), while offering some pertinent historical background information, doesn—t stray far from the events of Woodhull’s soap-opera life. Goldsmith (Little Gloria...Happy at Last, 1980; Johnson v. Johnson, 1987) takes a broader approach in her journey through the emotional and financial roller-coaster ride of Woodhull’s life. With her keen storytelling skills, she vividly brings to life the time and places in which Woodhull moved: New York City in 1868, when Woodhull arrived—a teeming, bustling, expanding city; the brothels where Woodhull peddled various health elixirs and birth control products. In this way, taking long side trips into events influencing turn-of-the-century America’s collective consciousness, Goldsmith produces a powerful, comprehensive analysis of one of history’s most fascinating women. Goldsmith’s Woodhull is a scrappy woman who usually landed on her feet after adversity, befriending along with her sister the business tycoon Commodore Vanderbilt, launching the first female brokerage house on Wall Street, and becoming the first woman to run for president. She also became one of the most ardent leaders in the suffrage and Spiritualist movements (Goldsmith’s account includes such gems as a letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton asking Woodhull to contact the biblical Rachel, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and other dead women). But when she took on Henry Ward Beecher, a powerful but philandering pastor, Woodhull quickly alienated those who had once revered her and died in England, a forgotten figure in her native land. A meticulously researched, absolutely marvelous rendering of an intriguing era and one of the women who helped make it so. (90 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-394-55536-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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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