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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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