by Lyndall Gordon ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2005
Nonetheless, an outstanding, rigorously researched intellectual biography.
A serious reconsideration of the short, passionate life of the 18th-century protofeminist, by accomplished English biographer Gordon (Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and T.S. Eliot).
Gordon sets out to readjust the record of the crusading intellectual and feminist’s life after its skewing by the odium attached to her unmarried affairs and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Wollstonecraft’s story was largely defined by the straitened circumstances her profligate, idle father left the family in, squandering his inherited wealth and moving every few years; the eldest daughter would witness horrific scenes of domestic violence in an age when women were chattel of their husbands, and she would even secretly orchestrate the rescue of her younger sister, Bess, from an abusive marriage. She gained an education by the “school of adversity,” working as a governess and schoolteacher, then determinedly establishing herself in London to make a living by her pen. Within the community of male writers who clustered around the print shop of Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft absorbed the radical ideas of the day—support for the American Revolution, abolition of slavery, liberal methods of teaching, enlightened sexuality, the French Revolution and women’s rights. Her groundbreaking Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) made her instantly famous, reminding the revolutionary leaders in no uncertain terms that women should be included in the public debate. Gordon moves bravely through the electrifying ideas of the era and tracks Wollstonecraft’s desperate love affair with the oily American frontiersmen Gilbert Imlay, who probably saved her life during the Terror in Paris, as well as her reputation. Gordon devotes two chapters to posthumous mythmaking by Wollstonecraft’s husband of five months, William Godwin, whose vehement biography of his 38-year-old wife (dead after giving birth to her second daughter) painted her as “a female Werther, suicidal, doomed.” Overall, Gordon is more concerned with ideas, and does not infuse her subject with the life force of similar schoolmistress-spinster-autodidact Elizabeth Peabody in the recent Peabody Sisters (p. 214).
Nonetheless, an outstanding, rigorously researched intellectual biography.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-019802-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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