A look at the friendship of two extraordinary women, leaders of the first wave of feminism, which produced women’s suffrage. Designed as the companion to a Burns (television’s The Civil War, Baseball) and Ward (The West, 1996, etc.) film scheduled for a fall showing on PBS, this volume focuses on the remarkable 50-year partnership between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. It was Stanton who launched the fight for women’s rights with the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, N.Y., and Anthony who focused on getting the vote as the issue that would give women the most leverage in gaining the economic, religious, legal, and moral independence espoused in the now famous document. Stanton, a dumpling of a woman with seven children, supplied “the philosophy and rhetoric”; Anthony, angular and a so-called spinster all her life, the “facts and statistics.” Together, with many others, including Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass, they fought year after year, speech after speech, polemic after polemic to free American women from subjugation to the fathers, husbands, and sons in their lives. Some of the battles were ugly: although the first wave of feminism was closely allied with abolition (and also temperance), both Stanton and Anthony opposed the 15th Amendment giving newly freed black men the vote, asserting that women (i.e., educated white women) deserved it more. Both Stanton and Anthony spent years criss-crossing the country, giving speeches urging women to free themselves from male domination, Anthony pounding on the issue of suffrage, Stanton on what would later be called consciousness-raising. They died years short of the 1920 constitutional amendment that would give women the vote, but they left behind women like Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who would push it through. Heads up for those who think the women’s movement started with a bra burning in Atlantic City. (150 color and b&w photos) (Book-of-the-Month/History Book club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40560-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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