Roosevelt’s advice may no longer be strictly relevant, but the book is still valuable as a historical document.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s first book, a tract of practical advice aimed at women, is back in print.
Roosevelt was known for many things: her writing, her activism on behalf of women’s rights and racial equality, and, of course, her long term as first lady of the United States, a role she redefined. “I shall have to work out my own salvation,” she said, realizing that she was too full of intelligence, energy, and vitality to sit by and host parties. Her first book was published soon after her husband took office. Written in the midst of the Depression, this new edition features an introduction by New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. With chapters on “Budgets,” “Family Health,” “Women and the Vote,” “Women and Working Conditions,” and “Women and Peace,” the volume spans both the private and the public spheres. Roosevelt discusses the importance of budgeting one’s time, finding inexpensive sources of recreation, and the viability of holding down a job while married. “The very best thing that comes to a woman with a job,” she writes, “is the fact that she has to use her brains in order to find time for both her job and her home duties. This keeps her brain from stagnating.” Whatever the topic, Roosevelt’s advice is insistently practical—e.g., the average family spends 38 percent of their income on food and 25 percent on rent, which is a fine guideline, but a budget should be adjusted to fit each family’s needs, since “every one’s needs are different.” Throughout, the narrative is wholesome and heartening if occasionally naïve: “I think before many years…we shall see very little difference in the earning capacity of women as compared with men.”
Roosevelt’s advice may no longer be strictly relevant, but the book is still valuable as a historical document.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56858-594-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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