A fresh, edifying contribution to women’s history.
Birth stories from antiquity.
Making an enlightening and engaging book debut, Mulder, a scholar of classical and Near Eastern studies—and a midwife’s daughter—offers a feminist history of birth in the Roman Empire during the centuries that straddle the year 0. Drawing on letters, medical case histories, legal documents, poems, myths, funerary inscriptions, and archaeological findings, Mulder has pieced together the lives of particular women, whose experiences with conception, pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, delivery, and postpartum care anchor her chapters. Their stories reveal a patriarchal and misogynist society, in which male doctors increasingly encroached on an area in which midwives had dominated, melding practical, anatomical, and botanical expertise with superstition and magic. A woman who wanted to get pregnant might carry a uterine amulet, a small gemstone inscribed with religious formulas and figures. Spells or potions were believed to work as aphrodisiacs and to promote conception; one fertility remedy prescribed eating a hyena’s eye with licorice root and anise. At a time when women were pressured to marry young and bear children immediately and often, doctors contributed wildly inventive theories about women’s bodies (wandering, suffocating uteruses, for example) and the process of reproduction. The 2nd-century physician Soranus was especially influential in changing attitudes from seeing pregnancy as “healthful” to seeing it as “pathological.” Privileging men’s needs, he advised husbands to monitor and control their wives to make them ideal vessels to grow a fetus. Not surprisingly, since abortion deprived men of the heirs they desired, by the 3rd century it was prohibited by law. Mulder argues convincingly that when male medical practitioners engaged in “writing down and systematizing” gynecological knowledge, “the status of the fetus was raised, while that of the pregnant woman was lowered.” Illustrated with drawings by Hayley Monroe.
A fresh, edifying contribution to women’s history.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780520398740
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
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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