Full of fascinating details and illuminating insights.
A lively and nuanced look at gender roles as they have been revealed by the lives of concubines and mistresses over the centuries.
Abbott (A History of Marriage, 2011, etc.) a former Dean of Women at the University of Toronto and now a research associate, begins this romp through history with a quip by British multi-billionaire Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, who said, “when a man marries his mistress he creates an automatic job vacancy.” The book has the irresistible fascination of celebrity gossip—the author tells the story of Alice Keppel's affair as one of the mistresses of the famous womanizer King Edward VII, and the romance of her great-granddaughter Camilla Parker Bowles, now married to the current Prince of Wales—but it reveals far more than the foibles of the rich and famous. Abbott writes about the vulnerability of women in out-of-wedlock situations, beginning with the biblical story of Hagar, the bondwoman of Sarah, whom she calls “the first concubine to be named in recorded history.” The author relates this to the situation of Chinese concubines, who, as recently as the 20th century, were brought into families as lower-status second wives to provide male heirs. Abbott also looks at the abuse faced by female black slaves and Jewish women in Nazi death camps, and how the institution of marriage has often fostered out-of-wedlock relationships in which women were vulnerable even when they were willing partners. This was the case for the celebrated novelist Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot), who suffered social opprobrium for living in a common-law arrangement with her married lover George Lewes, whose wife had refused to divorce him. In the chapter “Mistresses as Trophy Dolls,” Abbott delves into the tragic death of Marilyn Monroe after she was discarded by JFK, as well as the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Full of fascinating details and illuminating insights.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59020-443-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of the most remarkable books to emerge from the treasure trove of communications between the Germans and the Japanese intercepted by the Allied code breakers in World War II. Bruce Lee—coauthor of Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement (not reviewed), and an editor or researcher for a number of highly respected authors on this subject, including Cornelius Ryan, Gordon Prange, and Ronald Lewin—has reviewed the massive archive of diplomatic summaries made of the interceptions of the Japanese diplomatic communications, code-named Magic, and also interviewed many of the American military commanders before they died. Baron Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, had remarkable access to Hitler and other German leaders, and his reports back to Tokyo are, as Lee rightly remarks, ``so devastatingly accurate that allied strategists might as well have been sitting in on the meetings.'' This access provides a perspective that most histories of WW II have failed to take into account, either because the information was classified or because of security constraints. The information crossing General George C. Marshall's desk every day was amazing: Hitler informs Baron Oshima how and where and when he believes the D-Day invasion will take place, and he is wrong in every respect; Eisenhower pushes forward on a wide front, which enables him to move decisively to take advantage of the weak points disclosed by the intercepts; the Americans decide not to drive to Berlin because they calculate it will cost 100,000 additional casualties (it costs the Russians 300,000); and they have no difficulty in persuading the British to agree to dropping the atomic bomb when it becomes clear that the Japanese military leadership will never accept unconditional surrender. The book is written in a rather irritating historic present tense, but it is an important, extraordinarily informed, and comprehensive insight into the grand strategy of the Second World War.
Pub Date: May 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-57576-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
With this history of the civil rights movement focusing on the Everyman turned hero, the commoner as crusader for justice, Payne challenges the old idea that history is the biography of great men. That definition of history has been nowhere more strongly posited than in the case of the American civil rights movement. According to legend, Martin Luther King and his band of righteous acolytes galvanized the masses of black people and ushered them into the American franchise. But Payne (African-American Studies/Northwestern) attacks the myth on both its linguistic premises—``great'' and ``men''—offering in cogent detail a narrative of civil rights that features the historically unfeatured, adding new heft and weight to an often-told tale. Payne takes as an operating motif a quote from Gandhi, ``There go my people. I must hurry and catch up to them for I am their leader.'' There are familiar faces here, to be sure—Medgar Evers, Ella Baker—but Payne concerns himself with those he believes to have been the real actors in the drama for American freedom, the men and women in the rural communities across the South who left their homes and plowshares to agitate for freedom—people like Amzie Moore, a founder in 1951 of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, which offered a collective voice to blacks in the Mississippi Delta. People like Septima Clark, who, fired from her teaching job for her NAACP membership, helped create Citizenship Schools to educate blacks. But Payne dares even further to reveal the profundity of mind present in the local leaders, arguing that the beliefs binding the people together was more than a sentimental, communitarian version of mother wit, but a conscientious philosophy of protest and activism, carefully conceived, arduously employed. In this thoughtful social history, Payne gives due regard to those activists great and small. (27 b&w photographs, map, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-520-08515-9
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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