Freedman (History/Stanford), author of a previous book on prison reform, tackles the commanding Miriam Van Waters, an early prison reformer and feminist. Van Waters grew up in Oregon, the eldest child of an open-minded minister and a mother who suffered from nerves. After obtaining her undergraduate and master's degrees in philosophy, Van Waters obtained a Ph.D. in anthropology. Whether it was from some innate sense of duty or from years of caring for her siblings and her mother, Van Waters became an ardent believer that even the most hardened female criminal was salvageable. She returned to the West Coast for a tour of duty in California's juvenile court system, where she obtained the rank of judge and was famous for her tongue-lashings of men who had abandoned pregnant girlfriends. She left in 1932 with her adopted child, Sarah, and made her way to the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, where she would become superintendent. A compelling presence, Van Waters used such basic tools as trust and friendship to effect a change in the prisoners, whom she elected to call ``students.'' This period of Van Waters's work is the most exciting, complete with a political effort to remove her from office on charges that she condoned homosexuality in the prison. However, Freedman avoids a fuller account of Van Waters's prison and focuses instead upon proving, with diary entries and letters, that Van Waters was herself a lesbian. The reformer's letters to Geraldine Thompson, her benefactor and a friend to Eleanor Roosevelt, are frankly obvious, and the legacy of Van Waters's prison reform becomes a bit lost amid long evaluations of this relationship. A fascinating and brilliant woman, whose personality shines through sometimes plodding and digressive prose. (40 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-226-26149-2
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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