A well-researched study of one American woman’s enterprising career.
Lape’s exploration of her great-great-grandmother’s life reveals the entrepreneurial spirit of a Midwest madam.
Lizzie’s frequent self-reinventions—and eight marriages—yielded multiple surnames throughout her life. She was born in Whitley County, Kentucky, in the mid-19th century, and was “living the low life in Chicago by the time she was 18.” Her adventures eventually brought her east to Ohio, where she became the owner of multiple establishments of ill repute, including the White Pigeon in Marion, a gathering spot with “the best girls, the best buffet, [and] the best poker games.” Her creative use of limited resources made her an undeniable force, able to navigate the law and even get in the good graces of future president Warren G. Harding. (Lape speculates that Lizzie and Harding, then a newspaper editor, plotted a fake police raid of the White Pigeon in order to catch a Harding competitor red-handed.) However, Lizzie’s motivations and convictions remain matters of conjecture, as the documents Lape has unearthed don’t indicate much about her forebear’s interior life. Lizzie’s outward traits are likewise somewhat murky; readers don’t ever really discover whether she was loud, funny, mean or charming. Yet there are some intriguing insinuations of Lizzie’s personal qualities; for instance, she opportunistically and cleverly volunteered the Pigeon to a revivalist church in 1903, in order to create a mission for unwed mothers—“a win-win opportunity to the community.” Lape also shows how Lizzie demonstrated her political leanings in unusual ways; for example, she named one of her daughters “Mary Jennings Bryan Veon,” after Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The author’s genealogical investigations are meticulous, and her admirable process of uncovering the past becomes as much a topic of this biography as Lizzie herself. When Lape broadens the scope of her explorations to consider other subjects, such as the era’s postwar politics, her work is most informative (although she only minimally explores 19th century brothel life). The sections that more narrowly focus on Lizzie and her descendants, however, may be of more limited interest to general readers.
A well-researched study of one American woman’s enterprising career.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492733409
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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