A remarkable biography (the second, after Lois Beachy Underhill's The Woman Who Ran for President, 1995) of one of America's most controversial (and neglected) suffragists. Victoria Claflin Woodhull (18381927) was a clairvoyant, a spiritualist, a stockbroker, a newspaper editor, a women's rights crusader, a presidential candidate, and a sometime prison inmate. Yet shortly before her death, she noted that she wanted to be remembered by a line from Kant: ``You cannot understand a man's work by what he has accomplished but by what he has overcome in accomplishing it.'' A more apt epitaph could not have been chosen for her. Born impoverished to a forger father and an emotionally unstable mother, Woodhull and her sister soon were the sole breadwinners of the very extended Claflin clan, earning a living as spiritualists and healers. But the sisters wanted to get more done. After using their so-called healing powers to aid business tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, he reciprocated with financial assistance in their venture to become Wall Street's first female brokers. Not long after this, Woodhull—who was driven to social reform in part by her experiences in marrying an alcoholic at age 14 and bearing an imbecile son—declared herself a candidate for president of the US, the first woman ever to do so. She was also the first woman to address a congressional committee about women's right to vote. A vibrant, highly opinionated person who espoused free love, Woodhull alienated more than a few of her suffrage contemporaries, notably movement leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They tried to write her out of feminist history, censoring so many of her reform actions that Gabriel, a Reuters journalist, had to play Sherlock Holmes to piece Woodhull's life together. Well written and researched, this book warrants a spot on every serious American history student's bookshelf. (19 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-132-5
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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