The early chapters recall Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, but later chapters become unfocused as Howe...
A frank, engaging memoir by Feminist Press founder Howe (editor: The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from the 30 Founding Mothers, 2000, etc.) about growing up poor, smart and determined.
The most absorbing part of this elaborate work—at times overlong and overly detailed—is the charming early account of the young protagonist born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a Jewish ghetto in the 1930s. Relegated to second place after the birth of her brother, the “new golden baby boy,” the author was nonetheless the one her grandfather taught Hebrew and Yiddish until his death in 1940. Howe was a strong student, thwarted early on by illness and her mother’s stingy ways, but she attained spectacular heights in education, first on scholarship at Hunter College—where she was mortified to learn that she had a working-class Jewish Brooklyn accent, and worked hard to rid herself of it, although she stopped talking in class and didn’t regain a public voice for many years—and then graduate studies at Smith College and the University of Wisconsin. Growing up in the pre-feminist era, the author had no greater ambitions than becoming a high-school English teacher, but she went on to get a doctorate and teach college. She was discouraged to pursue writing and even wrecked an unbelievable chance to write for the New Yorker because she did not pursue an entrée with editor William Shawn. Moreover, she imagined she had to marry the men she had sex with, which proved disastrous. In the chapter titled “Becoming a Feminist,” Howe chronicles her early work introducing women’s studies to college curriculums and her decision to start the Feminist Press in 1970 in response to the need for biographies on notable women. The author compartmentalizes much of her rich experience in discrete chapters—family, marriages, tenure track, activism, friendships—yet each part resonates with a lively, frank deliberation.
The early chapters recall Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, but later chapters become unfocused as Howe tries to include everything. Nonetheless, a valuable chronicle of a life devoted to ideas and social justice.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55861-697-4
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
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