Straightforward and informative—a solid introduction to female American leaders.
From Sen. Hutchison (R-Texas), a compilation of sincere biographical snapshots of great American women.
As a follow-up to her previous book American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country (2004), the author presents mini-biographies of women who aided the development of the United States in a variety of fields—politics, journalism, literature, science, medicine, social work, the military and more. Hutchison sketches each woman’s early years and then works up to the events that made the subject famous, taking care to include the various hardships each woman faced. Regardless of the author’s choices, some readers will undoubtedly complain about certain omissions: For example, why Condoleezza Rice, but not Madeleine Albright? While some of the women, like Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks, are as famous to the average American as, say, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King Jr., others are known only to history buffs or professionals in a specific field—especially the entries in the military, science and medicine sections. At times, the book reads like an encyclopedia, with the more recent ladies receiving greater attention. What sets this book apart is the manner in which Hutchison acknowledges why each subject still merits attention today. Although she rarely delves into minute details, the author provides enough material to encourage readers to seek out a more thorough biography. She clearly respects her subjects—even those who may not share her politics—and her enthusiasm is infectious.
Straightforward and informative—a solid introduction to female American leaders.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-113824-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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