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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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