Former Columbia University English professor Heilbrun (Hamlet's Mother and Other Women, 1990, etc.) turns her considerable writing and analytical skills to understanding an icon of the women's movement. Heilbrun begins with an introduction that acknowledges the inevitable biases of the biographer; the more a biographer claims to be neutral, she writes, the more suspect he or she becomes. That said, Heilbrun clearly states that she is a fan of her subject (who cooperated with the project), whom she sees as ``the epitome of female beauty and the quintessence of female revolution.'' Balance can be provided by others, she writesand in Steinem's case, many have been more than happy to fill her detractors' shoes. Heilbrun eventually discusses the hostility and derision Steinem has drawn from all sides of the political and social worldthe fear she's inspired in conservative men, the jealousy in less attractive and intelligent womenbut she begins with Steinem's family: Her early feminist paternal grandmother; her obese, peripatetic, irresponsible, and charming father; her well-meaning but frankly insane motherall these and more contributed to the making of the complex adult Steinem. From her unconventional and impoverished youth in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem went on to the privileged world of Smith College and then to India, where she firmed up her understanding of the need for social and racial equality. Her realization that women were underprivileged in a unique and insidious way would not come until many years, causes, and men later, in the late '60s; but when she did discover it, she would adopt it with her characteristic wholeheartedness. Steinem's feminism, like her well-known project Ms. magazine, was criticized for being too glossy and bourgeois by some, too radical by others. But while Heilbrun admits Steinem's numerous errors in judgment, she argues convincingly that what is never in doubt is Steinem's sincerity. Unapologetically one-sidedand nobody could ask for a more eloquent, lucid, or intelligent advocate.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-31371-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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