Next book

A HISTORY OF WOMEN IN 101 OBJECTS

Filled with illuminating anecdotes, the collection is as entertaining as it is informative.

How women have lived, loved, and survived through the ages.

Hirsch makes an engaging book debut with a feminist chronicle of women’s lives from prehistoric times to the present. Focusing on women in the Western Hemisphere, the author presents 101 artifacts, featured in full-page illustrations, about which she offers richly detailed but succinct essays, smoothly translated by Updegraff. All of the objects, Hirsch explains, “have a bearing on women—the body, sex, love, work, art, politics” and “bear witness to the movements women instigated, and to all the myths to which they’ve been forced to conform since time immemorial.” The idiosyncratic compendium begins with a healed femur bone from 30,000 B.C., which has significant anthropological meaning; while other injured animals would die of starvation or be eaten by predators, human healing indicates caring—particularly, Hirsch argues, by grandmothers, who raised children while their daughters hunted with their sons and who “watched patiently over the injured until their bones had healed.” The author profiles iconoclasts, including novelist George Sand, represented by a replica of her right arm; Sojourner Truth, represented by a coin bearing her famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman”; mythological figures Isis and Athena, represented by a statuette owned by Freud; and other famous personalities, such as Greta Garbo, whose ballpoint pen represents “the influence not just of women who acted but also of women scriptwriters”: In the 1930s and ’40s, women on screen “were sassy, strong-willed, brave, sometimes even bad; they were incredibly quick-witted and didn’t take anything lying down.” Hirsch delves into popular culture (Aretha Franklin, Kim Kardashian), leadership (Golda Meir), philosophy (Hannah Arendt), fashion (perfumed gloves, metal corsets), and various women’s protest movements: suffrage, abolition, labor, and politics, including the iconic pussyhat from 2017.

Filled with illuminating anecdotes, the collection is as entertaining as it is informative.

Pub Date: March 5, 2024

ISBN: 9780593728758

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 62


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 62


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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 Yorker staff 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

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Close Quickview