A revealing document about early American history.
A journalist and social historian explores how Benjamin Franklin “was fascinated by the fair sex but considered the currents between them as dangerous as electricity.”
Most people know Franklin as the scientist, statesman, and eminent man of American letters. But as Stuart, executive director of the Cape Cod Writers Center, demonstrates in this biography, beneath the distinguished façade was a man who “privately struggled with prudence and passion.” Born to a British “soap and tallow candle maker” and his New England wife, Franklin later fled to Philadelphia after breaking an apprenticeship contract with his brother, a master printer. Stuart argues that Franklin’s pragmatism accounted for the choice he made to wed Deborah Read, a wealthy carpenter’s daughter. For the duration of their common-law marriage, she managed Franklin’s business affairs, bore his daughter Sally, and raised the son he had by a different woman. “While not intellectually brilliant like Ben,” writes Stuart, “Deborah was an astute businesswoman and devoted helpmate who not only contributed to his early success but also attended to his complex business affairs during his years overseas.” His passionate midlife flirtations with a much younger family friend did not imperil their relationship; nor did Deborah’s decision to remain in Philadelphia while he traveled to Britain as a colonial agent. His motherly landlady, Margaret Stevenson, quickly became the unacknowledged “second wife” with whom he lived contentedly during his years in London. But neither of these “wives” was ever able to quell Franklin’s passions. His later years as senior statesman in France brought with them two intense—but ultimately unconsummated—simultaneous romances with a beautiful but married and possessive young aristocrat, Madame Brillon, and a much older “freewheeling” widow, Madame Helvétius. This readable, well-researched book will appeal to those interested in the unruly intimate life of archrationalist Franklin as well as students of the too-often-ignored roles of women in the historical record.
A revealing document about early American history.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1130-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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