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AN UNCONVENTIONAL WIFE

Name: AN UNCONVENTIONAL WIFE
Author: Mary Hoban
ISBN: 978-1-947534-82-7

THE LIFE OF JULIA SORELL ARNOLD

by Mary Hoban ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2020

A sparkling biography and cultural history.

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An illuminating portrait of a Victorian wife and mother who was rescued from silence.

Recipient of the inaugural Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, an award honoring the esteemed Australian biographer, historian Hoban makes her debut as a biographer with an absorbing, deeply perceptive life of Julia Sorell Arnold (1826-1888). Grandmother to novelist Aldous Huxley and his brother, biologist Julian Huxley; sister-in-law of poet and critic Matthew Arnold; and mother of bestselling novelist Mary (Mrs. Humphry) Ward, Julia, after her marriage to Tom Arnold, became ensconced in one of the most famous families in 19th-century England. As the “ruling belle” of Hobart, Australia, she caught Tom’s eye in February 1850, and the romance quickly progressed; in less a month, they were engaged. Two months later, they married. Although Julia often found Tom’s jealousy irritating and knew that he believed husbands should master their wives, she was enamored by his “earnest, sensitive nature, his deeply spiritual temperament, and his self-deprecating humour.” For his part, he absolutely adored her. Drawing on archival sources, histories, and memoirs, Hoban creates a revelatory, sympathetic portrait of a woman whose married life was undermined by financial pressures and a rift between husband and wife that proved unbridgeable. In Tasmania and later in Ireland and England, the couple was saddled with debt; and through the years, with eight children to support, debts increased. Money was an enduring problem, but religion even greater. Tom’s early skepticism took a sudden turn when he decided to convert to Roman Catholicism, a resolve that Julia met “with a torrent of hate and despair.” The abyss between Anglicans and Catholics was profound. “Religion,” writes the author, “was never simply about belief. It was about position, about economic stability, about possible trajectories, not just for Tom and Julia, but also for their children.” Risking the family’s well-being seemed to Julia unconscionable, but she struggled with her decision to be, as Tom put it, “a revolutionary wife or a Christian one.” She chose, at last, hard-won independence.

A sparkling biography and cultural history.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-947534-82-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Scribe

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)