A thoroughly researched and well-balanced history.
How the influential women’s organization evolved.
Historian Turk tells a lively story of the development of the National Organization for Women by focusing on three activist members: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins, and Patricia Hill Burnett, women whose vastly different backgrounds shaped their views on feminism. Hernandez (1926-2017), a New Yorker, was the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. In 1965, after a decade spent organizing textile workers, she was appointed to the newly established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. However, she soon became disillusioned “in her quest to make government power work for women.” Burnett (1920-2014), married to a wealthy Detroit businessman and the mother of four, was a frustrated artist, chafing against society’s “expectations for a moneyed white wife.” Collins (b. 1939) was raised in an Irish Catholic family that struggled financially, and after college, she worked in the corporate world, where sexism was rife. Turk traces the women’s careers and growing influence in NOW: Hernandez became its second president, succeeding Betty Friedan; Burnett led the organization’s international program; in the 1980s, Collins became one of NOW’s two vice presidents. The author also reveals the “smoldering disagreements,” internal rivalries, and financial problems that beset the organization from the start. Disagreements arose over NOW’s position on the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion; lesbian, transgender, and Black women felt excluded from NOW’s largely White, middle-class membership. Turk recounts NOW’s protests against sexism “in churches, law, employment, beauty pageants, Little Leagues, advertising, toys, and more,” and she sets the organization’s goals and strategies in the context of an increasingly polarized political arena. Admitting that she considers herself a beneficiary of NOW’s achievements, she recognizes that she lives in a world “where elite women can scale the heights of influence while their sisters suffer crushing inequality and insecurity; a world where sexism thrives, but often in disguise; a world whose backlash to feminism is evidence of the movement’s continued power.” The book includes 16 pages of black-and-white images.
A thoroughly researched and well-balanced history.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780374601539
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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