This book should be required reading until Alice Paul becomes a household name. She not only fought for voting rights and...
A remarkable tale of the woman who drove the fight for women’s suffrage.
Former Boston Globe journalist Cassidy (Jackie After O: One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams, 2012, etc.), now chief content officer for InkHouse, chronicles the life of Alice Paul (1885-1977), a Quaker from New Jersey who became one of the leaders in the struggle for women’s rights in the early 1900s—and beyond. She was the daughter of a wealthy banker and earned multiple graduate degrees. While she was studying social justice in Birmingham, England, she was profoundly moved by the “suffragettes” Christabel Pankhurst and her mother, Emmeline. Raised to expect equality for all, she stayed in London and joined the fight. She was arrested multiple times in six months, went on a hunger strike, and suffered permanent physical damage from force-feeding. Running parallel to Paul’s story, Cassidy gives us the background of the suffragist’s biggest stumbling block, Woodrow Wilson. Born in Virginia, his father, a minister, authored a booklet outlining his misguided argument for how the Bible condones slavery. Wilson’s outlook was firmly fixed along those lines, and he even said, “universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country.” He cast himself as a progressive, but that didn’t include women or blacks. Paul joined the fight for equality in America, a struggle that was not as confrontational as England’s but just as dedicated. While those in charge fought for states’ resolutions, she felt an amendment to the Constitution was absolutely necessary. To say Paul was the driving force is not an exaggeration. She was tireless, always sure of her tactics and willing to endure many setbacks, arrests, and Wilson’s continued obstinacy. Dedicated women like Inez Milholland, Alva Belmont, and Lucy Burns stood right beside her.
This book should be required reading until Alice Paul becomes a household name. She not only fought for voting rights and the 19th Amendment; she kept fighting for another 50 years.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7776-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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