by Marilyn Yalom ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001
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
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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