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
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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