Next book

THE COLOR OF TIME

WOMEN IN HISTORY: 1850-1960

A fresh contribution to women’s history.

A rousing celebration of women’s achievements.

British historian, journalist, and TV presenter Jones teams up with Brazilian artist Amaral to create a brisk, vibrantly illustrated panorama of women during a century of profound change. Each chapter features women from around the world who have made significant contributions in areas such as sports (including boxing, fencing, marathon dancing, and chess), education, the arts, entertainment, science, research, activism, and business. Some are unquestionably famous—Marilyn Monroe, Queen Victoria, Josephine Baker, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Mead—but readers are likely to find many new discoveries. There’s 1950s tennis star Althea Gibson, the first Black woman to win a Grand Slam title; pioneering balloonist Marie Marvingt, who also happened to be a mountain climber and adventurer; trapeze artist Maud Wagner, known as “The Tattooed Lady”; and Vesta Tilley, an acclaimed entertainer who, in the 1890s, was “the highest-earning woman in Britain: a singing, dancing, cross-dressing phenomenon whose songs were familiar to an entire generation.” Women were on the move as pilots and taxi, bus, and train drivers; they founded their own businesses (Coco Chanel, Helena Rubinstein, and German toy maker Käthe Kruse, among many others). Mary Baker Eddy created a religion, Christian Science. In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker overcame Jim Crow laws to become the founding president of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia. Women also fought against Fascists in the Italian resistance, served in guerrilla militias in Vietnam, and joined Mao’s People’s Liberation Army. Martha Gellhorn and Nellie Bly were pathbreaking journalists. Some women were queens (Isabella II of Spain, Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani); others, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Evita Peron, became powerful because of the men they married. Although the biographical sketches of each woman are brief, they are rich in detail, and Amaral’s deeply saturated colorized images bring to life a prolific number of portraits, snapshots, and historical photographs. The author’s capacious selection unsurprisingly omits many notable women, but the included profiles make for entertaining reading.

A fresh contribution to women’s history.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-639-36285-1

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 68


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
  • 68


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

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Close Quickview