Ridley has definitely done her homework in recognizing Baret as an overlooked but important historical figure.
Dense, inquisitive biography of the first woman to circle the globe by sea.
After learning about intrepid voyager Jeanne Baret (1740–1803), Ridley (English/Univ. of Louisville; Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 2005) was intrigued by their shared interest in botany and surprised at the lack of information available. Compelled to uncover the truth about her subject, Ridley scoured historical texts, personal journals, shipping logs and encyclopedias. Baret’s interest in naturalism blossomed early, and she eventually caught the eye of esteemed Parisian botanist Philibert Commerson, who became enamored by this “herb woman” and her botanical wisdom. In 1766, Commerson joined French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville on the first world circumnavigation expedition, which was staffed with 330 men. Anxious to join him in collecting floras of the worlds, Baret bound her chest, cross-dressed, donned a pistol and covertly enlisted as Commerson’s male servant—though, Ridley asserts, Commerson was well aware of the arrangement. Tolerating ravaging seasickness and unpredictable weather patterns, Baret was able to blend in with the crew (she claimed to be a eunuch) and reveled in discovering new plant species. However, upon reaching Tahiti in 1768, she was nearly gang-raped by native islanders who saw through her disguise. Ridley points out implausible discrepancies in Baret’s accounting of her voyage versus what was dictated into the logs of seamen who worked with her on the ships. She also expresses skepticism about Commerson’s naïveté, demonstrating that many of Baret’s crewmates were already aware of her gender but were wary to “rock the boat.” Dual themes of feminism and sexual equality anchor the author’s scholarly analysis as Baret reportedly remained ever-fearful of exposure, which would have placed Commerson and Bougainville’s respective reputations in jeopardy at a time when “a female stowaway was a curiosity, but a female botanist was a breach in the natural order of things.”
Ridley has definitely done her homework in recognizing Baret as an overlooked but important historical figure.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46352-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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