A first authoritative biography of Florence Nightingale which is based on a tremendous amount of new material (from family papers to her own exhaustive "private notes") and which creates a powerful, impassioned portrait. For here is no gentle lady of the lamp, but a woman who disregarded her beauty and her wellborn background, who had an amazing aptitude for organization, who avoided all public recognition, whose courage was equalled by a harsh impatience and whose mystic sense of mission was countered by an exaggerated despair. Here, from the time when she was seventeen and she first knew that she was to give her life to the service of others (for her, as well as Joan of Arc, there were the "voices"), there followed a "secret life of agony and aspiration" until she reached the certainty that she was to nurse the sick, and only sixteen years later achieved that end after a bitter break with her family. The apprenticeship which began in the wretchedly squalid hospitals of these times found its apotheosis in the Crimea where she met not only the resentment of the officers and the open freeze of the doctors, but faced the filth of fever ridden barrack hospitals, sickness and starvation, and the overloading of injured men in a calamitous campaign. Broken in health, and in spirit, she returned to England, haunted by the facts of preventable disease, determined to reform health standards. And the last decades represent a lifetime of long and often losing battles among official, political circles, solitude and invalidism, embattled crusade which was not without its cruelty, until the last years brought with them a softening serenity... An impressive, absorbing biography heralded as brilliant by the British press, which will receive strong support here.
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1951
ISBN: 0094758107
Page Count: 615
Publisher: Whittlesey
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1951
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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