A sympathetic introduction to a passionate and remarkable woman.
The life and times of the egotistical but extraordinary woman who challenged family and society to become the first modern feminist.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous polemic, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was published at the height of the French Revolution (whose seminal Declaration of the Rights of Man did not necessarily include females). But her thesis had its roots in the frustrations of her English childhood and youth. Deprived of formal education and limited to jobs as teacher or companion, Wollstonecraft (1759–97) set on a course of self-education, reading Rousseau and Locke while other girls her age favored romantic novels. Jacobs (Christmas in July, 1992) brings fresh insight and detail to her story, thanks to a newly available correspondence that includes letters from her mentor and publisher, Joseph Johnson. The author takes a more tolerant view of Wollstonecraft’s self-centered personality, her inconsistencies, and even her two suicide attempts than Janet Todd displayed in the rather judgmental Mary Wollstonecraft (2000). She helped (some say forced) her sister to leave an abusive husband, and together they opened a school. Although the school failed, it launched Wollstonecraft’s writing career with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, published by Johnson. Her ideas continued to develop and mature as news and discussion of the French Revolution filled the English press and Parliament. She wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman in response to Edmund Burke’s critique of the Revolution. Eventually she found her way to France, where she lived through the Reign of Terror, wrote reports to England, took an American lover, and bore his child. Abandoned by Gilbert Imlay, she solidified a friendship with (and later married) the English philosopher William Godwin. She died bearing a second daughter, Mary, who would grow up to write the novel Frankenstein.
A sympathetic introduction to a passionate and remarkable woman.Pub Date: May 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-81093-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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