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
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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