An eclectic and enlightening look at the stories of women often ignored by history.
A collection examines overlooked figures from women’s history.
In this book, Ansary, the author of Jewels of Allah (2015), explores the problem of women’s stories being left out of the mainstream telling of history. Using Virginia Woolf’s well-known suggestion that many anonymous historical figures may well be female, Ansary digs into overarching trends in women’s history and provides a statistical analysis of the group’s social, political, and economic position in the 21st century. The book argues for the value of women’s contributions, using the concepts of yin and yang as a framework, and concludes that humanity as a whole loses when their stories are omitted from the broader narrative. The largest section of the text consists of capsule biographies of noteworthy but often little-known women, all born before 1900, from a variety of professions and geographic areas. The selection of the figures is wide-ranging, and while some (astronomer Maria Mitchell, peace activist Bertha von Suttner, aviator Bessie Coleman) may be familiar to history buffs, few readers are likely to know of Cleopatra Metrodora (an early Greek medical researcher), Liang Hongyu (a Song Dynasty general), or Eva Ekeblad (a Swede who discovered new uses for potatoes). The author makes an effort to draw connections between the historical figures and present-day trends (“Recent optimistic news that Metrodora would doubtlessly applaud: For the first time in US history, the number of women enrolling in medical schools exceeded the number of men”). But the women she profiles are intriguing on their own merits. Watercolor images by debut illustrator Dufkova add artistic interest to the text, and although the profiles are brief, they are well researched, with sources and citations provided in the endnotes. The book is clearly intended for a general audience, not for students of history, and it does an excellent job of capturing readers’ attention and providing sufficient but not overwhelming information. Fans of Rachel Ignotofsky’s Women in Science and Mackenzi Lee’s Bygone Badass Broads will enjoy this addition to the category of tales of overlooked women.
An eclectic and enlightening look at the stories of women often ignored by history.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9864064-4-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: Revela Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
