Though regional in nature, the hardships and contributions of these pioneers reflect those of women across the country. A...
Senator Hutchison (Leading Ladies: American Trailblazers, 2008, etc.) brings stories of her state’s unsung heroines to light.
The author writes of women who, in the early 19th century, followed their husbands to settle in Texas with its promise of cheap land and prosperity. Generally well educated and from genteel backgrounds, these pioneers had the courage and resilience to endure wars, primitive living conditions, diseases and grueling labor. It was all too common for women, such as Emily Austin Bryan Perry, sister of Stephen F. Austin (“the Father of Texas”), to survive the deaths of more than one husband and several children. Hutchison’s roots go back to her great-great grandfather Charles S. Taylor, a key figure in the state’s fight for independence from Mexico in 1836. During ensuing conflicts, her great-great grandmother was among the women who packed their families in wagons and headed east, fleeing the Mexican army in what was called the “Runaway Scrape.” Like many others, her three daughters died along the way. Readers will also learn about Margaret Houston, who suffered from melancholy, disliked politics and tended her eight children, mostly alone, while Sam Houston was away managing affairs of the state; Rachel Parker Plummer, who was kidnapped by a Comanche tribe and rescued, forever scarred by the ordeal; and Sarah Cockrell, the “mother of Dallas.” The book is laden with historical facts, and some readers may wish for more fluid storytelling, but Hutchison ably sets down a record of these remarkable women’s lives. For readers who want to learn more, she provides a comprehensive bibliography.
Though regional in nature, the hardships and contributions of these pioneers reflect those of women across the country. A valuable resource for the archives of Texas and women’s history.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-213069-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
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