A New-York Historical Society historian examines the impact of 20th-century newspaper columnist and women’s self-help guru Marjorie Hillis (1889-1971).
Hillis first entered American consciousness with the 1936 publication of her bestselling book, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. Then single and living and working in Manhattan, she exemplified the glamorous “Live-Aloner.” Scutts suggests that Hillis achieved fame during this time because the Depression had opened a space of “possibility and promise” for working women, who saw old certainties about marital security collapse with the economy. Combining the positive-thinking approach espoused by such self-help writers as Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie with a sharp eye for home and personal style, Hillis helped single women see their solitary ménages as spaces for “creativity and reinvention.” By 1939, she disappeared from the cultural scene into a happy marriage. During the 1940s, women had the opportunity to become an important part of a wartime economy and feel independent as never before. Hillis became a widow in 1949, just as the United States entered a period when the new gender ideal for women emphasized domesticity and subservience to husband and family. Working very much against cultural trends, Hillis published another book, You Can Start All Over, in 1951, which encouraged mature live-aloners to take pride in their accomplishments and to continue engaging with the world through work and other social activities. While the feminist movement of the 1960s challenged the cultural backlash against women, Hillis wrote Keep Going and Like It (1967), which offered retired single women advice on continuing to take pleasure in the world on their own stylish terms. Rich in historical detail, Scutts’ book is not just an elegant biography of a neglected protofeminist figure and a vivid exploration of American sociological history; it is also an important homage to a woman’s right to choose how to live her life.
A sparklingly intelligent and well-researched cultural history.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-273-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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