Berkin once again provides a fresh perspective on women in American history.
Biography of three important women from the Civil War era.
The author of multiple books about women in colonial America, Berkin (History/Baruch Coll.; Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 2005, etc.) jumps ahead to the Civil War to investigate how these women’s marriages to prominent men shaped their lives. Angelina Grimké Weld, who married abolitionist agitator Theodore Weld, was an outspoken proponent of abolition, racial equality and women’s rights; Varina Howell Davis had a sharp mind and an independent streak that helped her fight for the freedom of her husband, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, after his postwar imprisonment; Julia Dent Grant found contentment in her domestic role as wife to Ulysses S. Grant and mother to four children. Any one of these women would make for an engaging biography, but Berkin uses their stories—reconstructed from their letters, diaries and speeches—to serve a larger theme: the female experience in the late 1800s. It often meant sublimation and compromise. Though Angelina Weld was an early star in the abolitionist movement, she submitted to quiet domesticity after her marriage. Varina Davis was often criticized by her husband for her lack of passivity, even though he said he treasured her “fine mind.” Julia Grant so fully embraced the ideal of domestic life that she only found her voice, as a memoirist, in the last few years of her life. Indeed, as Berkin emphasizes in this probing sociological portrait, all three women “had access to the seats of power but no power themselves.”
Berkin once again provides a fresh perspective on women in American history.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4446-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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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