The author opens our eyes to a woman who should be a household name.
The first biography of Marie Mattingly Meloney (1878-1943), “a journalist, publicist, social reformer, mother, rainmaker, diplomat, political operative, and patron of women, the arts and sciences.”
After her father’s death, Missy (as the author refers to her throughout) used her literary and social knowledge to introduce herself into Washington, D.C., society and the sophisticated world of statesmen and men of letters. She began a lifetime of making contacts and went on to have a “public impact [that] reverberated broadly,” writes former history professor Des Jardins (Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Era, 2015, etc.), a board member of the National Women’s History Project. A fall from a horse left Missy with a permanent limp, and her recurring battles with a tubercular lung could have condemned her to a restricted life. However, “she vowed never to be the unavailable convalescent her mother had been.” When the Washington Post published her letter promoting a church, a journalist was born. Not long after, she captured a scoop on Spanish-American War hero George Dewey. Missy delivered not only a story, but also photos and connections to famous neighbors, whom she knew personally. As Des Jardins clearly demonstrates, she never stopped looking beyond the story. In 1900, she went to Colorado to recuperate from a TB attack and returned home as the Denver Post’s Washington correspondent—at age 18. One of Missy’s strengths was her patience. Whether seeking a story, convincing someone to write for her national publication, This Week, or gaining access to the Senate press gallery, she waited, worked, and always succeeded. What she discovered along the way was the strength of women’s ability to accomplish things through contacts and friendships. Without the vote, titles, or positions, one could still master the art of influence. Missy’s network extended across Europe and America and the political and intellectual spectrums. Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Lou and Herbert Hoover are only some of the people whose lives she affected. Her accomplishments were vast, and Des Jardins capably brings them to light.
The author opens our eyes to a woman who should be a household name.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4549-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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