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. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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