On the personal side, a best-case scenario; on the political side, a brilliant thinker sets the adrenaline flowing all over...
Betty Friedan tells her side of the story, in an autobiography so amiable that friends and enemies alike will wonder what happened to the confrontational woman who was the intellectual tsunami in the second-wave struggle for women’s rights.
Friedan (The Fountain of Age, 1993) sticks with the basic outline of earlier (unauthorized) profiles. Growing up “different” in Peoria, Illinois, Friedan felt out of step. Mainstream society (or her vision of it) shaped her thinking: change comes from the middle class, as she said later. Smith College disciplined her mind but did little to relieve the social pressures (in support of marriage and childrearing) that she felt she could not measure up to. Reflections on her children (“I never had problems with my kids”), her marriage (divorce only after years of black eyes), her lovers, and her travels are interesting enough, but they pale beside the recapitulation of her thoughts as she shapes The Feminine Mystique. With due credit to the then-anonymous women who urged her on, Friedan recounts the founding of the National Organization for Women. She walks us through the controversies that were engendered within the movement by a growing opposition to her belief that men are not the enemy, and although she admits disarmingly that her opinions have changed on some issues—especially her feelings towards lesbians—she still maintains that male vs. female separatism is a mistake. As the separatists gained power, she dropped out (or was maneuvered out) of feminist centers of power and moved on to preach independently about “second-stage” feminism. With a million-dollar Ford Foundation grant now behind her, Friedan now continues her research and writes on the “new paradigm” of social organization (emphasizing such practical supports for working families as childcare). Although friends say she has mellowed, Friedan declares bluntly that “I’ve always been a bad-tempered bitch.”
On the personal side, a best-case scenario; on the political side, a brilliant thinker sets the adrenaline flowing all over again.Pub Date: May 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-80789-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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