Impeccable research informs a prose that sings, whirls, and delights. (10 photos, not seen)
Lively, literate biography of the incredible Sarah Breedlove, who rose from perfect poverty to create her own hair-care business and build a mansion on the Hudson.
“There has never been anyone like her,” declares novelist Lowry (The Track of Real Desires, 1994, etc.; Creative Nonfiction/George Mason Univ.) of the African-American entrepreneur praised by the National Association of Colored Women as “the foremost business woman of our race.” Charging into her story with boundless energy and a bountiful imagination, the author employs all her considerable artistic and scholarly skills to uncover the rough edges of a life smoothed over in her subject’s promotional materials. A consummate businesswoman who took the surname of her third husband and declared herself “Madam,” Walker frequently lied to journalists, and many details of her life cannot be verified. Not for lack of effort on the part of Lowry, who chased Walker all over the country—from her birth in 1867 and her childhood on the Mississippi to her years in St. Louis, Denver, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and New York City—digging in public records, reading old newspapers, trying to establish a sturdy foundation on which to erect the edifice of her story. When Lowry cannot uncover fact, her fecund imagination suffices: “[We] engage in storytelling and educated guesswork,” she states, and one magnificent example is her stunning set piece about doing wash in pre-Maytag days (Walker spent years as a washerwoman). The author chronicles the long and uneasy relationship between Walker and Booker T. Washington, who was never comfortable around this determined, ambitious woman. Throughout, Lowry weaves in depressing data about lynchings and racial murders. She includes characters as diverse as the two Johnsons (Jack and James Weldon), but the focus always remains sharply on Walker, on the development and marketing of her hair-care products, and on her wastrel daughter A’Lelia, who frittered away her mother’s fortune. (A’Lelia gets more sympathetic treatment in Ben Neihart’s Rough Amusements, p. 213.)
Impeccable research informs a prose that sings, whirls, and delights. (10 photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-44642-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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