Cooke’s history of these uncelebrated heroines admirably fills in the gaps in the continuing story of women’s role in the...
British journalist Cooke recounts the stories of 10 women whose personal and professional lives shattered the common image of a repressed 1950s homemaker.
Though the seven chapters (one chapter weaves together the life stories of three women) can be enjoyed as stand-alone biographies, when read as a whole, the narrative creates a fascinating portrait of cultural life in post–World War II Britain. The war upended social roles in Britain. During wartime, women filled jobs men vacated, but at the war’s conclusion, the veterans wanted their positions back. How should the women who wanted to work outside the home during the 1950s pursue that goal? Cooke noted how, for women on a career path, the route forward was a fraught one. “Those who embarked on careers,” she writes, “had to be thick-skinned: immune to slights and knock-backs, resolute in the face of tremendous social expectation and prepared for loneliness.” The author’s subjects include a best-selling cookbook author, a magazine editor, a rally car driver, a writer and popular celebrity, an architect, a gardener, a director, a producer, an archaeologist and a judge. The author uses elements of published memoirs, diaries or letters, and she also interviewed numerous friends, relatives and colleagues of each of her subjects. Cooke includes two delightful bonus sections, adding another layer to her snapshot of the era. One discusses fashion in the ’50s, and the other lists “Some Good and Richly Subversive Novels by Women, 1950-60.” For American readers, many of these women will be unfamiliar, and some of the cultural reference points may not click. Regardless, each of the portraits illuminatingly details the struggles and triumphs of these women, who laid the groundwork for working women in the 1960s and beyond.
Cooke’s history of these uncelebrated heroines admirably fills in the gaps in the continuing story of women’s role in the workplace.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062333865
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
