A sterling educational text and a memorable commemoration of female trailblazers, past and present.
An homage to prominent women of the world who made a difference.
Hillary Clinton (What Happened, 2017) collaborates with her daughter, Chelsea (Don’t Let Them Disappear: 12 Endangered Species Across the Globe, 2019), in this celebration of more than 100 pioneering women who inspired them most. Written as a conversation between the distinguished mother-and-daughter team, the book profiles women whom the Clintons have found to be greatly inspirational not only to them, but to the world, based on their contributions to global society and female empowerment. The book is attractively designed and arranged based on the women’s areas of knowledge and expertise. The opening section features women the authors have been personally inspired by. In addition to profiles of intergenerational extended family members, the authors also appreciate the legacies of Helen Keller, Anne Frank, and outspoken 1964 presidential candidate Margaret Chase Smith. The Clintons’ informative back and forth also affords readers a closer glimpse into the specific, myriad ways both of their lives were influenced by these innovators. Elsewhere, they dive into achievements in a wide variety of fields, including education, literature, environmentalism, sports, diplomacy, and activism, eloquently illuminating their subjects’ years of valiant heroism in the face of massive obstacles. The narrative range is vast and features distinctly inspiring women such as Shirley Chisholm, “the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination”; Ellen DeGeneres, who leveled homophobic speculation by coming out publicly in 1997; Rosa May Billinghurst, a leading British suffragist in early-20th-century England; and Fraidy Reiss, the founder of Unchained at Last, an organization that fights against child marriage. Overall, the collection—which also features Harriet Tubman, Rachel Carson, Clara Barton, Jane Goodall, Maya Angelou, Temple Grandin, and Malala Yousafzai, among many other major figures—will bond optimistic readers together in remembrance of the major contributions of a sisterhood that is smartly and accessibly presented by the Clintons.
A sterling educational text and a memorable commemoration of female trailblazers, past and present.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7841-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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