Insightful biography of renowned muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford (1917–1996).
Born into a life of British aristocracy, at age 12 Mitford wrote a letter to a London bank requesting to open a “Running Away Account.” Her action, even at such a young age, was emblematic of the life she would lead—that of an outsider, an activist and a hot-blooded liberal from a family with fascist leanings. Brody (Creative Writing/Univ. of Redlands; Red Star Sister: Between Madness and Utopia, 2000) gives full access to Mitford's story, from her first marriage to Winston Churchill's nephew, Esmond Romilly, to her migration from the comforts of England to the exploding social scene of New York City in the 1940s. The narrative accelerates as Mitford struggles to find solid footing in a foreign land, and the World War II backdrop intensifies after Mitford's husband is discovered missing in action and presumed dead somewhere in the North Sea. After Romilly's death, Mitford's slide to the political left continued upon marrying Civil Rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, who encouraged his wife’s passion for activist reporting. Mitford witnessed firsthand the Freedom Riders' beatings in Birmingham, as well as other violent events during the civil-rights movement. Throughout her life, she courted danger while still managing to brush shoulders with royalty. She held chats with William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, while across the sea, her family dined with Hitler. “Had tea with Hitler,” her mother reported. “He is very agreeable and has surprisingly good manners.” The political differences between Mitford and her family were exacerbated by Joseph McCarthy's HUAC trials, which called upon Mitford and her husband to testify, an indignity that would only further solidify her role as a resilient muckraker long into the future.
A valuable retelling of a provocative life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-453-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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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