The author struggles at times to maintain her focus—too much context obscures rather than illuminates—but she never loses...
Biographer and cultural historian Brandon (The People’s Chef: The Culinary Revolutions of Alexis Soyer, 2005, etc.) traces the lives of some 18th- and 19th-century governesses, whose lot was even bleaker than that of their counterparts in Victorian fiction.
The author begins with the statistic that in the 1851 census 25,000 English women, two percent of all unmarried females between 20 and 40, identified themselves as governesses. After declaring that the lives of most of these women were “little short of hellish,” Brandon zooms in closely on those who left behind sufficient documentary evidence. Most governesses had little time to keep reflective journals or write letters, the author notes, but among the handful of women whose lives she considers are some with high name recognition, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire Clairmont and Anna Leonowens (whose story eventually became The King and I). Wollstonecraft emerged from the child-care trenches to write the trenchant polemic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and some guides for the education of children. Her two sisters, Everina and Eliza, not so gifted, struggled much longer. Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Godwin Shelley (Wollstonecraft’s daughter), endured grim years as a governess after the Shelley-Byron flameout of the 1820s. Leonowens transformed her experiences in Bangkok into a U.S. lecture tour and a couple of books that treated Truth with an amiable disregard. And governess Anna Jameson became a successful writer, a friend of notables like Fanny Kemble. At times, Brandon burns, as well she should, with indignation at the procrustean male culture that denied so many women so much.
The author struggles at times to maintain her focus—too much context obscures rather than illuminates—but she never loses her profound empathy and passion for her subjects’ travails.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1630-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
In the latest leg of an idiosyncratic intellectual journey, Pellegrino looks at the stories of the Old Testament through the lenses of genetics, paleontology, and archaeology. Pellegrino (Unearthing Atlantis, 1990, etc.) has an autodidact's omnivorous curiosity to match his high-flying imagination. In this new hodgepodge, he expands on the speculations he put forward in his previous expedition into antiquity, in which he hypothesized that the volcano-buried Minoan city of Thera was the inspiration for the legendary Atlantis. Here he conjectures that when an eruption in the second millennium b.c. obliterated the Minoan civilization, its long-distance effects may have been responsible for the plagues of Egypt and the Aegean diaspora that brought the Philistines to Canaan. He also annexes other theories having to do with the contentious ``Mitochondrial Eve'' hypothesis (based on mitochondrial DNA research, it theorizes that genetic the mother of us all lived between 250,000 and 140,000 b.c.) and the Ark of the Covenant's wanderings. Using diverse scientific sources and historical perspectives—Sumerian clay tablets, Egyptian steles, the writings of Herodotus, and, naturally, the Bible—he ``telescopes'' anthropological and archaeological theories to fit Biblical myths like those of Noah and Nimrod, compressing patterns of history into oral tradition's legends. With a natural sense of storytelling, he blends theories of antiquity with the adventures of field work: He is best describing the modern difficulties of conducting digs in Gaza, Jericho, and Iraq (where he radically situates the Biblical Cities of the Plain destroyed by God's wrath). There is, however, a good deal of padding by this accidental archaeologist: reconstructed dialogue, digression, repetition, and flights of fancy that leave solid ground far below. For all its interdisciplinary breadth and originality, this reads like a beery breeze-shooting session with a college prof. (16 pages of b&w drawings, maps, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40006-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Roberti, a former Hong Kong correspondent for AsiaWeek, has followed the convoluted negotiations between China and Britain over the last few years and has produced a formidable narrative of high diplomatic deception and expediency. Britain took Hong Kong from China on a 99-year lease due to expire in 1997. But China has always tolerated this high-powered capitalist outpost not so much because of the technicalities of a lease as for the huge quantities of hard currency she derived from it. Roberti, like many, seems to think that the British had a shot at keeping Hong Kong out of China's clutches. But Britain wanted good relations with the Communist giant and was not prepared to sour them over Hong Kong. He also points the finger of accusation at Hong Kong's own commercial elite, who, he claims, wanted a no- fuss complicity with Beijing at the price of suppressing democracy: ``an unholy alliance of capitalists and communists.'' A colony lawyer named Martin Lee, however, had misgivings, aroused by the treaty signed by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang in 1984. ``One country, two systems,'' the promise of a democratic Hong Kong allied with mainland China, seemed unlikely. Giving a voice to Hong Kong's ordinary people, Lee organized vociferous protest against the British sell-out. In the process, he became ``more recognizable than the governor and more popular than many pop stars.'' But the pro-democracy movement has made no difference to the eventual outcome. And here there are unpleasant truths that Roberti seems reluctant to face. Were the British really ``forcing'' Hong Kong to live under a dictatorship? The reality, surely, was that the territory's residents no longer had the power to back their wishes up. The notion of a conspiracy, though, always makes for a better read, and Roberti is certainly deft in showing us one. A shame only that he could not come up with a better villain than poor old knock-kneed Britain.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-02621-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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