Compelling tale with a gritty heroine: Broad’s hardscrabble adventures forcefully remind readers that 18th-century life bore...
Prolific biographer Erickson (Alexandra, 2001, etc.) skillfully renders the extraordinary life of Mary Broad, who survived a voyage to and from a penal colony to become James Boswell’s protégée.
Born in 1769 and raised in Cornwall, Mary grew up amid filth, violence, and privation in a period of especially hard times: harvests had failed, the fish were not running, the Cornish were starving. Arrested for robbery and sentenced to be hung, the 20-year-old girl was instead sent to the recently established penal colony of New South Wales in Australia, because the British government needed people, women in particular, to settle there. In the fetid prison hulks that dotted Plymouth harbor, imprisoned with prostitutes and habitual criminals, Mary became pregnant before she finally set sail. The 15,000-mile voyage was grueling: space, food, and water were limited, diseases rampant, and sexual abuse common. But Mary survived, giving birth to a daughter en route. When they reached Australia, she married fellow convict William Bryant in order that they could acquire their own land. But crops failed, famine was rife, the natives were hostile, and mortality was high; realizing that their lives were even worse than they’d been in England, the Bryants decided to escape. Bringing along Mary’s daughter and newborn son, they stole a boat and sailed with seven other adults up the east coast to Dutch-ruled Batavia, some 4,000 miles away. It was an epic feat, but Mary wasn’t yet safe. Discovered and sent back to England, with both her children dead, she was once more imprisoned. Luckily, her amazing story garnered public sympathy and the support of Boswell, who determined to secure her freedom.
Compelling tale with a gritty heroine: Broad’s hardscrabble adventures forcefully remind readers that 18th-century life bore very little resemblance to an episode of Masterpiece Theater.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-471-27140-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
Memories of two male relatives whom the noted South African playwright believes helped inspire him to write, mingled with bittersweet recollections of his youth, in a poignant but underdeveloped memoir. Fugard idolized his slightly older Cousin Johnnie, a maternal relative from the tightly knit Afrikaner side of the family. Johnnie's piano playing ``stirred up wonderfully turbulent feelings'' in his cousin, who improvised words to accompany it for performance pieces they called ``musical stories.'' Cousin Garth Fugard, a troubled man 14 years Athol's senior, prompted much more ambivalent emotions; during his periodic visits, proclamations of turning over a new leaf were inevitably followed by drinking binges. The key to Garth's alcoholism and inability to settle down finally emerged when he confessed to his cousin that he was a homosexual; Athol, realizing that he had already guessed this, had his ``first experience of that most essential of all writers' faculties—intuition.'' This connection of a personal moment with ruminations on the creative process is typical of the book, which is neither a full-fledged memoir nor a sustained examination of how his plays evolved, but a rather uneven mix of the two. There are some lovely, evocative descriptions of the South African town Port Elizabeth and its gloomy lower-middle-class residents; touching portraits of Fugard's parents; and interesting accounts of the autobiographical elements in works from The Blood Knot to Master Harold . . . and the Boys. As was the case with Notebooks (1984), readers need to be quite familiar with Fugard's plays to gain much enlightenment from his unelaborated comments about their sources. In addition, distinguished though his career as a dramatist unquestionably is, there's a faintly smug, self-satisfied tone to many of his musings about writing that only underscores the sketchy nature of the insights offered here. Good enough to intrigue Fugard's admirers, but not good enough to draw in anyone else. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55936-132-8
Page Count: 154
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
The jurist who gave Richard Nixon fits receives his due in a satisfying biography. Gormley (Law/Duquesne Univ.) approaches Cox as an exponent of a particularly tough, independent-minded, Yankee kind of approach to the law. Born in 1912, Cox came of age in a time when the legal profession was nearly universally respected and when whole lineages devoted themselves to the practice of law (Gormley notes that Cox's great-grandfather William Maxwell Evarts defended Andrew Johnson when impeachment proceedings were undertaken against him in 1868). After clerking for the eminent federal judge Learned Hand, Cox became a government labor lawyer, then a Harvard professor, and then entered politics somewhat reluctantly as a speechwriter for presidential candidate John Kennedy. Despite his solid rÇsumÇ, Cox was seemingly unprepared for the scrutiny that would attach to his work as the government's special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation of 1973. Gormley examines Nixon's charge that Cox was a politically motivated hit man who, with his staff, ``bored like termites through the whole executive branch,'' noting that Cox was in fact something of a legal conservative who criticized such rulings as Roe v. Wade and who found the whole business of turning up evidence against a sitting president personally distasteful. Gormley gives a careful account of the events leading up to Cox's dismissal at Nixon's orders; the man who fired him was a federal judge named Robert Bork, whose role as hatchet man would come back to haunt him more than a decade later as a nominee for the Supreme Court. Students of the Watergate years will find a few other gems in Gormley's pages, including an admission from Nixon's chief of staff Alexander Haig that the president ``could well be guilty.'' Otherwise, this well-written biography will be of most interest to students of law in the public interest. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-201-40713-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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