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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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