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
Imagine a collaboration between Arnold Toynbee and R. Crumb and you get a pretty good idea of Gonick's clever and ambitious comic book series. This volume should not be taken as some kind of Mel Brooksish joke. Gonick does his research and interprets his sources with scholarly care. Inspired by the educational comic books of Latin American artist RIUS, Gonick makes world history a blast— literally, with his predilection for onomatopoeic word balloons. In this second collection—the last left us with Alexander the Great schlepping toward Persia—Gonick takes us on a side tour through India and China. He integrates myth and history to establish the origins of sectarian conflict in India, and attends to migration patterns from the Middle East to China in order to explain the development of Buddhism and Confucianism. Dynamic intrigue and the threat of northern barbarians compete with periods of prolonged peace. This highly selective version of Chinese history, though full of diverting stories, will be a bit confusing to readers unfamiliar with the main players. Back in Rome, meanwhile, after the death of Alexander, the republic enters its period of glory, followed by the building of the empire. Problems of succession lead to lots of lurid anecdotes about perverse and insatiable emperors, violent entertainments, brutal conquests—all of which Gonick records with Mad-like irreverence. He equivocates, however, in telling the story of Jesus, ending up with an uneasy mix of canonical fact and outright heresy. His account of the historical rise of Christianity is superb and demonstrates an interesting parallel with China: In both cases alien cults from the edge of the empires eventually captured the capital cities. Gonick's humor is mostly visual and relies on the juxtaposition of comical images with his relatively sober text. Despite his lefty, multi-culty inclinations, Gonick maintains the high level of sophistication, skepticism, and just plain fun established by the first volume.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42093-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A spectacular, startling, and sometimes downright grisly chronicle, in words and pictures, of a bloody and tumultuous period. Alongside a stunning battery of photographs scoured from archives and collections throughout the former Soviet empire, the vast majority of them unfamiliar, Moynahan (Comrades, 1992) unfolds a history short on depth but told in crisp, imagistic (not to say strongly opinionated) prose. To his great credit, he persistently strives to include not only the obvious historical milestones— wars, revolutions, terror, famine, and the like (every horseman of the apocalypse gallops across the tortured steppes)—but also some sense of the evolving everyday sensory and emotional realities of Russian life under czar, dictator, and infant democracy. In this, he's not only immeasurably aided but inevitably outshone by the pageant of superbly reproduced photographs to which every reader will be immediately drawn and which, highlighting the human figure at the expense of landscape, run the gamut from imperial family portraits and staged Party propaganda scenes to snatched samizdat documents of ghetto and gulag, to the innovative high art of Rodchenko. Behind the familiar official faces of the masters- -Rasputin's manic stare, Trotsky's compelling gaze, Stalin's sly squint, Yeltsin's pugnacious querulousness—and the distortions of official history, both amply evidenced here, the photos unearth a vast parade of their nameless subjects (and, more often then not, victims)—``ordinary'' workers, peasants, soldiers, priests, shopkeepers. Too often it's a gallery of the unquiet dead: These pages are as corpse-strewn as the history they record—slain in purges, pogroms, insurrections, invasions, by starvation or single bullet, piled high by roadsides, dumped into mass graves, even, most shockingly and indelibly, filleted on the dining table of famine-stricken peasants driven to cannibalism. No mere coffee-table ornament, but a historical document of great drama and unusual intensity.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42075-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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