A biography that skillfully sets Bates’ work against the backdrop of the times in which she lived.
A biography of the multitalented woman who wrote the words to “America the Beautiful.”
Katharine Lee Bates carved herself a place in America’s cultural history by penning the majestic poem, first published in 1895, that later became the lyrics to the iconic anthem “America the Beautiful.” But as author Ponder (Hawthorne’s Early Narrative Art, 1991) convincingly shows in her similarly majestic account of Bates’ life, this poem was just one of many achievements of its creator—a woman who, through her work as a writer, teacher, and social activist, set an example of female independence in late-19th-century America. Bates was raised by her mother, as her father died within weeks of her birth in 1859. She first experienced “women’s collective power” when the widows of her hometown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, mourned the slaying of President Abraham Lincoln by draping their black shawls around the local church to make up for an insufficient supply of mourning cloth. She took advantage of opportunities afforded women after the Civil War, graduating from Wellesley College and going on to teach literature there after studying at Oxford University in England. But she still faced blatant prejudice, as personified by a Harvard president who, at an 1899 Wellesley event, questioned why women should go to college when, in his opinion, they weren’t as intelligent as men. Ponder, a lucid writer, is particularly effective at showing how Bates’ tumultuous environment, as America transitioned from a largely rural to an industrial society, inspired her poetry and novels. She points out that the words to “America the Beautiful,” for example, percolated in Bates’ mind amid the depression of 1893 and a visit to see the glories of the Colorado Rockies. For Bates, the famous phrase “sea to shining sea” expressed the “ideal of brotherhood” that she believed would see America through the crisis. As Ponder writes, “Knowing what it was like to be marginalized and silenced, she wrote for those who had no voice, and she gave Americans a fresh and inspiring ideal of their country as an inclusive community.”
A biography that skillfully sets Bates’ work against the backdrop of the times in which she lived.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941478-48-6
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Windy City Publishers
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
A crash course in big-bucks tort litigation, as rich as any novel on the scene. In the mid-'70s, the small industrial town of Woburn, Mass., found itself afflicted with a plague of biblical dimensions: 12 local children, 8 of them close neighbors, had died (or were dying) of leukemia. The parents suspected the water supply, which was foul-smelling, rusty, and undrinkable, but they had no hard evidence of a link to the cancers. But in 1979, the accidental discovery of carcinogenic industrial wastes in the town's wells led the grieving parents to hire personal-injury lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, new to the profession but intoxicated with the sizable damages he'd won so far. This is magazine journalist Harr's first book, but his complex portrait of Schlichtmann is the work of a master. Egomaniacal, quixotic, workaholic, greedy, altruistic, and naive, Schlichtmann is Everylawyer, and as he allows the Woburn case to consume his practice, he almost loses his license and his life. Harr wisely downplays the dying-children angle, focusing instead on Schlichtmann's case against the two corporate Goliaths who dumped the waste: Beatrice Foods (represented by Jerome Facher of Boston's Hale & Dorr) and W.R. Grace (represented by William Cheeseman of Boston's Foley, Hoag & Eliot). Despite their white- shoe lineage, Facher and Cheeseman play dirty, withholding evidence and repeatedly seeking Schlichtmann's suspension for having filed a ``frivolous'' lawsuit. But the real villain of the story is Federal District Judge Walter J. Skinner, whose personal dislike of Schlichtmann (and camaraderie with Facher) leads him to grant the defense's motion to split the trial into two protracted phases. By the time Judge Skinner submits four incomprehensible questions to be bewildered jury, Woburn's young victims have been forgottenand the whole legal system has suffered a tragic loss. A paranoid legal thriller as readable as Grisham, but important and illuminating. (Film rights to Disney)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-56349-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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