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THE BLUESTOCKINGS

A HISTORY OF THE FIRST WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

Vivid popular history illuminating some neglected feminist pioneers.

A lively group portrait of 18th-century Englishwomen who claimed a place for themselves in the nation’s intellectual life.

Most of these “bluestockings” (not a pejorative term until much later) were aristocrats, privileged enough to have leisure time to devote to reading and writing. Working-class poet Ann Yearsley, wife of a yeoman who had fallen on hard times, and playwright/religious author Hannah More, middle-class daughter of a schoolteacher, were the exceptions—and More’s patronizing treatment of Yearsley demonstrated that the bluestockings may have defied intellectual restrictions but did not question the class system. Gibson, the author of The Spirit of Inquiry, begins with Elizabeth Montagu, whose salon on Hill Street in London was a favored gathering place of intellectual women, equaled in brilliance only by Hester Thrale’s salon, which orbited around literary lion Samuel Johnson. Thrale and Montagu were friends, and most women in their elite orbit socialized with both, among them classicist Elizabeth Carter and Hester Mulso Chapone, who gained early fame for cautiously feminist letters written to Samuel Richardson in defense of a woman’s right to choose a husband. Gibson offers vivid sketches of all these women, and many others, in a loosely structured narrative that first introduces Montagu and other key players, then uses individual lives to explore common aspects of all female experience in chapters devoted to marriage, motherhood, friendship, and love, with a final chapter showing how some bluestockings maneuvered through social strictures to gain independence. The author does not scant the difficulties these women faced; the account of Thrale’s constant pregnancies (15 in 16 years) and the frequent deaths of her children (only three remained alive in 1776) is particularly grim. The author’s engaging account honors the determination and charm with which her subjects seized as much freedom as society would allow them.

Vivid popular history illuminating some neglected feminist pioneers.

Pub Date: July 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780393881387

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

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MARK TWAIN

Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

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A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.

It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.

Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

Pub Date: May 13, 2025

ISBN: 9780525561729

Page Count: 1174

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025

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THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

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