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CRUSADER FOR FREEDOM

A LIFE OF LYDIA MARIA CHILD

``Over the river and through the woods,'' the opening of Lydia Maria Child's popular Thanksgiving song, best describes this biography: The book skips lightly over the turbulent times that Child participated in as a writer and abolitionist, and it gets lost in the woods of Child's nearly nonexistent domestic life and personal relationships—which Clifford (Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, 1978) presents in much detail but with little insight. Child (1802-80), a largely self-educated New England baker's daughter, supported herself and her improvident husband through teaching, editing, and writing. Her works included Hobomok, the first novel to describe a marriage between a Native American and a white settler; domestic manuals such as The Frugal Housewife; antislavery propaganda; and a history of religion. Her own childhood, lost at age 13 when her mother died, was reclaimed in her stories for and about children and in her marriage to David Child, who wandered about pursuing noble but futile causes during their years together (which produced no offspring, apparently because of their ``childlike'' lovemaking). Child, Clifford tells us, rejected literary culture (she refused to meet Dickens, and dismissed Emerson as a ``wandering prophet'') and even feminists, preferring to work with men. Raised a Calvinist, she became a Swedenborgian, lived among Quakers, and participated in sÇances. But there must have been more. Clifford neglects the Civil War, in which this ``crusader for freedom'' had considerable stake, as well as Child's literary contemporaries outside the salon- -including Emily Dickinson, her neighbor in Northampton, and Walt Whitman, who was involved in the same causes at the same time and places. The major problems here, however, are a strident voice (defending instead of presenting the life); soft focus (missing, in order to demonstrate a thesis, what was important to Child); and an overworked style marred by passive voice, baggy sentences, and the inflated rhetoric suggested by the title.

Pub Date: May 11, 1992

ISBN: 0-8070-7050-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992

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HOW TO FIGHT ANTI-SEMITISM

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.

While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

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