A rich portrait of Beeton’s home life and the world of publishing in Victorian England.
Thoroughly researched, sympathetic and highly readable biography of the Victorian housewife who wrote the iconic Book of Household Management.
Hughes (George Eliot, 1999, etc.) delves into the lives of two generations of Isabella Mayson Beeton’s ancestors to reconstruct the world into which she was born. She shows us Isabella as a child making herself useful in a household containing a multitude of children; as a bride-to-be preparing to set up housekeeping; and as the young wife of a struggling book and magazine publisher. Sam Beeton launched The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1852, four years before their marriage, and by 1857, Isabella was writing for it. The Book of Household Management soon followed, appearing in 48-page installments beginning in 1859, with Isabella serving as compiler and editor. She may not have originated the recipes in it, but she excelled as a journalist and organizer. Under her direction, it came to be the source on which middle-class Victorians relied for guidance in all matters domestic: not just the preparation and presentation of food, but coping with servants, managing money, cleaning, stocking a pantry, entertaining, raising healthy children. To capture its flavor, Hughes inserts between the chapters on Isabella’s life brief sections she calls Interludes, which consider the Book of Household Management’s various aspects: its moral tone, its assumption that readers aspired to a higher style of living, prejudices against the servant class, an obsession with the purity of food and a nostalgia for a vanishing agrarian world. Acolytes assumed that the advice was coming from an experienced matron, but Isabella never even achieved middle age. After her death at 29, apparently of syphilis contracted from Sam on their honeymoon, her husband’s firm foundered. The book was acquired by another publisher, but the Beeton name remained firmly attached to it. Hughes follows the reception of its various incarnations through the centennial edition of 1960.
A rich portrait of Beeton’s home life and the world of publishing in Victorian England.Pub Date: May 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26373-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
