No startling new insights here, but a useful and refreshingly cheerful overview of women’s changing roles in marriage and...
An upbeat history of the evolution of marriage, “wifedom,” and women’s status through European and American history.
Yalom (Institute for Women and Gender/Stanford Univ.; A History of the Breast, 1997, etc.) suggests that she intends to examine the historical roots of the dramatic changes marriage roles have undergone over the last 50 years, but instead she meanders amiably through wifedom’s many permutations over the centuries with little momentum toward a conclusion. The book’s scope is too broad for much groundbreaking original scholarship, or even scrupulous historical accuracy, especially in the early chapters; for example, the Iliad and the story of Jacob’s marriage to Rachel and Leah are presented as evidence of beliefs and even practices, without any discussion of their status as literary inventions, and there are casual references to “the biblical period” as though all times and regions over the thousand-year course of Biblical composition were basically the same. Still, brisk, jargon-free prose and wonderfully vivid case histories, including the 15th-century Florentine soap opera of Lusanna di Benedetto and Giovanni della Casa, more than compensate for any lapses of scholarly rigor. Yalom hits her stride with the early Renaissance, offering the redoubtable couple Katherina and Martin Luther as an early prototype for politically charged “republican marriages” in the era of the American and French revolutions. Although the Victorian dogma of “separate spheres” damped down this 18th-century burst of egalitarianism, the demands of Empire and frontier paradoxically offered women new opportunities, illustrated by passages from previously published journals and letters. The struggles of women like Bethenia Owens-Adair, who divorced her abusive husband to become a medical doctor in 1880, culminated in the activist “New Women” of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. After a brief tour through the backlash of the 1950s, Yalom traces the growing flexibility of marriage in the postmodern era.
No startling new insights here, but a useful and refreshingly cheerful overview of women’s changing roles in marriage and society.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019338-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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