Essential reading for women’s-studies courses.
Carefully constructed and thoroughly researched examination of the role played by Columbia University’s women in transforming a small, all-male, WASPy college into a diverse research institution and influential center for feminist scholarship.
Rosenberg (History/Barnard College; Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century, 1992, etc.) argues that the cosmopolitan nature of New York City, which offered an array of opportunities for women with training and talent, and the balkanization of Columbia, which grouped female students into separate schools with their own faculties, combined to provide a unique setting where women were able to challenge the status quo. When Columbia, long resistant to admitting women, finally acquiesced in 1889, it insisted they be kept in separate enclaves. The result was the nurturing of generations of female students by female faculty free of the masculine bias of conventional academic disciplines. From Barnard, Columbia’s all-female college, and from Teacher’s College and the School of General Studies came a corps of dedicated students who gradually gained entrance to the rest of the university. Using a wealth of sources, Rosenberg profiles the leading figures in the long struggle to achieve academic parity and to reshape thinking about gender, ethnicity, race, culture, and politics. She ranges from lesser-known reformers, benefactors, presidents, and professors to 15-minutes-of-famer Linda LeClair (who, in the 1960s, challenged the school’s housing rules by living off-campus with her boyfriend) to such well-known figures as anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Meade, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and feminist writer Kate Millett. The personal details are necessarily skimpy at times, since Rosenberg’s cast is huge and the span of years more than a century. Because of Columbia’s location in the country’s media capital, the women whose ideas and actions shook up the university received attention and gained influence far beyond Manhattan. Rosenberg includes an impressive list of Columbia women and their achievements that illustrates the breadth of their influence.
Essential reading for women’s-studies courses.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-231-12644-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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