A pleasant, affectionate portrait of a free spirit who pedaled her way out of Victorian constraints.
The adventures of the first woman to bicycle around the world, chronicled by Zheutlin, her great grandnephew.
According to the author, few benefited more from the invention of the bicycle than women. Condemned in previous generations to mere perambulation, by the end of the 19th century they were free to move rapidly, independently and inexpensively on two wheels. On June 25, 1894, inspired by the growing masses of lady cyclists, 23-year-old Annie Cohen Kopchovsky left her husband and three children in their Boston home and set off to find fame, muscle fatigue and mad confabulation. For the trip (and $100), she assumed the surname Londonderry and placed an ad for the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company on her rear wheel guard; her pseudonym had the added advantage of masking her Jewish identity. Annie, who learned to ride a bicycle just weeks before her departure, often claimed that she undertook the journey as the result of a bet made by two wealthy Boston businessmen—they wagered no woman could make the same voyage that Thomas Stevens had completed a decade earlier. But she wasn’t necessarily a reliable source: Feeding the voracious appetite of the popular press for information on her background, she variously claimed to be a physician, a Harvard student, a lawyer and an heiress. What appears to be true is that Annie, an ardent individualist, had a taste for fame and a talent for public relations; she invented whatever tale would best keep people’s interest. The woman behind the stories often seems an enigma in Zheutlin’s account. What it lacks in personal insight, however, it compensates for with discussions of public reaction to a female adventurer, the origins of sports endorsements and the debate over whether women should have been allowed to ride at all. For a time, special seats were constructed to ensure that they didn’t become sexually aroused by the act of bicycling.
A pleasant, affectionate portrait of a free spirit who pedaled her way out of Victorian constraints.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8065-2851-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
