Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear...
A biography of the famed author and feminist, written by British academic and editor Todd (A Wollstonecraft Anthology, not reviewed).
Pushy, excitable, proud, highly imaginative, and terrifically self-assured, Wollstonecraft moved through a remarkable range of intellectual and moral positions with the determination and tenacity that marks an authentic search for truth and self-fulfillment. The author stresses the seriousness and originality of this search, carefully tracing the elements of morality, politics, sexuality, and imagination that kept reconfiguring themselves in Wollstonecraft’s views back to her experience. This canny and articulate biography also makes it clear that the mother of modern feminism was a drama queen of no mean proportions: tactless, self-absorbed, with a capacity for complaint and reproach as inexhaustible as her energy and intellectual openness. Such a figure should and does make for a lively narrative. In addition to following her rather bizarre series of love affairs, both chaste and carnal, we see Wollstonecraft as a young governess hilariously snubbing her aristocratic employer; as a radical author in revolutionary Paris watching in horror as ever more heads rolled away from the guillotine; and as a soon-to-be-abandoned woman traveling gamely in Scandinavia, baby and seasick maid in tow, competently doing business for her lover Gilbert Imlay while at the same time writing reams of needy, reproachful, and clingy letters to him. Throughout, her life was characterized by contradictory forces of pitiful dependence and self-deception on one hand and tremendous will and self-sufficiency on the other. Especially compelling in this regard is her relationship with her sisters, whom she supported, bullied, and ignored by turns, and her famously unconventional marriage to William Godwin, who kept a separate household from her.
Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear illustration of the source and significance of that connection and an absorbing account of the extraordinary life that engendered it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-231-12184-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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