An informative, occasionally dry account of a publishing house that has mostly succeeded in its mission “to rock the boat.”
The history of a pioneering publishing company devoted to women writers, as told by one of its longtime publishers.
In 1978, at age 25, Goodings, the chair of Virago Press, arrived in London from her native Canada determined to succeed in publishing. Her first job was as an assistant to a man at a publicity company who bellowed, “Coffee please!” and called her a communist when she suggested he could get it himself. It wasn’t long before she joined Virago, one of the first publishing houses devoted to championing the works of women. When Goodings asked Carmen Callil, the founder, why she started the company, Callil said, “To change the world, darling. That’s why.” In her debut memoir, Goodings charts the company’s history and offers observations on not just “the march of feminism,” but also editing, reading, so-called post-feminism, and more. Much of the book reads like an expanded catalog of Virago titles, with dozens of examples of the authors and books they publish, and the tone can be self-congratulatory and defensive. Of women who criticized Virago for not being radical or independent enough, the author writes, “How many people have you reached? How many lives have you touched? Have you changed anyone’s mind? Given anyone joy? Inspired change?” Goodings defends Virago’s many compromises—selling to Little, Brown in 1995, publishing “celebrity feminists”—as necessary steps toward a bigger goal. But that goal was vital, and the book is strongest when Goodings shares anecdotes about the many women authors she has worked with. Among them are Margaret Atwood, whose attitude toward late trains and clueless interviewers was a carefree, “never mind, it’s all material” for future books; and Adrienne Rich, who, when a female hotel receptionist apologized for reserving a double bed after seeing Rich’s female partner, “calmly, graciously, put out her hand for the key and said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ ”
An informative, occasionally dry account of a publishing house that has mostly succeeded in its mission “to rock the boat.”Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-882875-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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