A fascinating portrait of a trailblazing reporter who was an eyewitness to history.
A biography of Sigrid Schultz (1893-1980), who reported from Germany from the 1920s to the end of World War II.
Toler, a translator and author of Heroines of Mercy Street, provides an adept, engaging portrait of her subject. Schultz was born in Chicago, the daughter of a Norwegian painter and his German-born wife. Brought up in a cosmopolitan community, she was fluent in French and German by the time her family moved to Europe in 1901. After a spell in Germany, where her father had several commissions, they settled in Paris. She traveled widely, attended classes at the Sorbonne, and added Norwegian and Italian to her stock of languages. In 1913, the family moved to Berlin. When World War I broke out, her father’s commissions dried up and she taught English and French to wealthy families to pay the bills. Then, in 1919, Chicago Tribune reporter Dick Little offered her a job as interpreter and cub reporter in the paper’s Berlin office. Schultz accompanied him to interviews, connecting with important people who became valuable sources when she began writing her own stories. She proved adept at dodging the gatekeepers—and later, the Nazi censors—to get the facts. In 1926, she was appointed chief of the Tribune’s Berlin office, a position from which she reported on the rise of Hitler. By 1941, the growing war forced her to return to Chicago. After D-Day, she became a war correspondent for McCall’s Magazine and was among the first reporters to see the concentration camps following liberation. After the war, she tried finding other writing work but never recovered her early success—partly because of poor health. Still, as Toler makes amply clear, she left a brilliant firsthand account of a dramatic era in 20th-century history.
A fascinating portrait of a trailblazing reporter who was an eyewitness to history.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780807063064
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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