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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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