A well-meaning biography, mired in detail. Goodwin, an independent scholar formerly with with the Unitarian Universalist Association, may win the prize for laboring longest on a biography: 40-plus years. Ironically, the book might have been more readable had she not been quite so meticulous. The subject, absorbing and worthy of study: Sarah Ripley, a Boston teacher, mother, pastor’s wife, and one of the most learned women of the 19th century. Scioness of both the Bradford and Alden families of colonial Massachusetts, Ripley was the eldest daughter of a prosperous sea captain. Her mother’s lingering illness and eventual death forced Sarah to take responsibility for several of her younger siblings, setting a pattern of domestic constancy that would enable her to raise her own children (seven of them), take in an orphaned niece, and serve as teacher and den mother to the countless boys enrolled in her husband’s boarding school. What sets Ripley apart from other women of her era is her own astonishing erudition. A true intellectual, she would parse Greek and Latin verbs by candlelight and read the great philosophers while stirring the sauce. The Emersons were her neighbors and friends (Ralph Waldo wrote her obituary, which Goodwin uses as a fitting prologue for the book). Unfortunately, the biographer focuses so intimately on the daily dramas of Ripley’s domestic life that we only rarely can glean where her story fits into the larger context of 19th-century American womanhood. In part, this is because Ripley left no published works, only letters, and eschewed public participation in such issues as abolition and women’s rights. (Her staid husband also may have curtailed her activism and public voice; he once threatened to burn her writings when she quoted Virgil.) Goodwin should resist her tendency to lose sight of the forest for the trees. (11 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-55553-368-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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