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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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