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AMERICA'S FIRST WOMAN LAWYER

THE BIOGRAPHY OF MYRA BRADWELL

A dry, bare-bones biography of Myra Bradwell (1831-94), whose plea to practice law was denied by the Supreme Court because she was a woman, and who went on to become the publisher and editor of the influential Chicago Legal News. In telling Bradwell's story, Friedman (Law/Wayne State University) labors under two considerable constraints. The first is the paucity of original source material (Bradwell's family gave her correspondence with Mary Todd Lincoln—who was a friend as well as a client—to Robert Lincoln's estate, which destroyed it because it dealt with Robert's consignment of his mother to a mental hospital). The second problem is Friedman's apparent wish to fit Bradwell into the politically correct pantheon of feminist heroines. It's true that Bradwell worked hard through her journalism to initiate reforms ``in the areas of women's rights, child custody, the legal system, treatment of persons alleged to be `insane' ''—she was largely responsible for Mary Todd Lincoln's release from the mental hospital—and to make the Chicago Legal News the most widely circulated legal newspaper in the country. But, reflecting her era, she was also an anti-Semite; an elitist; a woman who distanced herself from what she perceived to be the strident and polarizing approach of leading suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and a believer in the ``ethos of `true womanhood'—sensible and devoted mothers, wives, and daughters uniting together to ask of their fathers, husbands, and brothers the right to vote.'' Still, Bradwell's considerable accomplishments are revealed in her own writings, which offer an impressive record of more than two decades of legal criticism, advocacy, and astute business acumen. More legal brief than biography as the personal Myra Bradwell is subsumed in the political figure—but a welcome revival of a forgotten reputation.

Pub Date: May 17, 1993

ISBN: 0-87975-812-0

Page Count: 215

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993

Awards & Accolades

  • National Book Award Winner


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist

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THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...

Awards & Accolades

  • National Book Award Winner


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist

A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.

In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.

A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005

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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

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

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