This thoughtful, well-written biography brings suffragist Lucretia Mott's fascinating younger sister to life.
An overlooked feminist pioneer gets her due.
In the pantheon of women's-rights activists, Martha C. Wright has been overshadowed in the history books by her sister, Lucretia Mott, and her friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Penney and Livingston (the latter of whom is one of Wright's descendants) redress the balance here. The authors have a firm grasp on the innumerable small incidents and anecdotes that make Wright's life a window into the reform culture of 19th-century America. As a prolific correspondent and a tart writer, she is easily recognizable as being of the same free-thinking generation as Emerson (whom she knew) and Melville (whom she read). Like Mott, Wright was raised a Quaker; however, at an early age she was expelled for marrying a non-Quaker. Her first husband, Captain Peter Pelham, from a Southern slaveholding family, died young, leaving her with a daughter to raise alone. Her second husband, David Wright, was a progressive lawyer (though not progressive enough to embrace all of Martha’s feminist ideas). Wright was ideally placed, through her family and social connections, to meet the entire network of Northern progressives: not only her feminist companions, but also Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison (whose son married one of Martha's daughters), Harriet Tubman, and others. After the Civil War (Martha, abandoning the principle of non-resistance, ardently supported the Union side, for which her son William fought in the Battle of Gettysburg), Wright became involved in the complicated factional politics that split the suffrage movement between moderates and radicals. For example, Wright had the following to say about free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull: "I don't understand Mrs. Woodhull's theories, but she has a right to her opinions and her expressions of them."
This thoughtful, well-written biography brings suffragist Lucretia Mott's fascinating younger sister to life.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-55849-447-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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
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