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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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