An informative and enlightening blend of sports history and women’s history.
A British writer and cycling enthusiast offers a global history of women cyclists while discussing the connection of cycling to feminist issues worldwide.
The concept for the bicycle can be traced back to a German inventor working in the early 1800s, but it wasn’t until 1885 that the first true ancestor to the modern bicycle emerged in Britain. In this well-researched, readable book, Ross shows how these “freedom-machine[s]” became intertwined with women’s emancipation and the feminist movement. In the first section of the four that comprise the book, the author examines how the rise of cycling coincided with the emergence of the Anglo-American “New Woman,” “feminists who…wanted to throw off the restrictive shackles imposed by late-Victorian patriarchy.” Women able to afford bicycles embraced them for the freedom of movement they offered. Some, like dress reform advocate Florence Wallace Pomeroy, campaigned for women’s cycling bloomers. But such women often found themselves at odds with social conventions that deemed cycling a menace to “femininity, grace and even fertility.” In the second section, Ross explores how minority females, along with those living in anti-feminist regimes worldwide, combat underrepresentation by creating cycling groups and teaching each other how to ride. She also shows how women like the “pre-Hollywood” Audrey Hepburn used bicycles during World War II to circulate “anti-Nazi propaganda.” The third section, about female cycling adventurers, features stories about intrepid individuals such as Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Dervla Murphy, who used their bicycles to travel Europe and the world. In the final section, Ross celebrates the largely unsung bicycling champions—e.g., Olympian Emma Pooley—who have fought, and continue to fight, sexism and lack of financial support for competitive female cyclists. Comprehensive and inclusive, the narrative shines the spotlight on a neglected history while making an impassioned plea for gender equality in cycling.
An informative and enlightening blend of sports history and women’s history.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08360-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
