A capable history that foresees a hard fight yet to come in the war for reproductive freedom.
A richly detailed account of the long struggle for women’s right to choose.
Health journalist Grant notes that every state in the U.S. had enacted criminal abortion laws by 1880, and “for the next one hundred years, abortion in America remained…underground, secret, stigmatized, and dangerous.” From the moment that Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized to overturn it, helped along by politicians in gerrymandered districts who used “majorities and supermajorities to pass abortion restrictions at an alarming pace and volume.” On the other side, Grant writes, activist groups have long organized to protect choice. In the wake of Dobbs, the battle for access to abortion has heated up—often illegally, in the case of states such as Texas that have banned the importation of abortion pills or travel to other states to obtain the medical procedure. Grant profiles activists at various stages of the battle, from first-generation feminists who linked access to abortion to the struggle for women’s liberation generally to modern-day advocates who, among other strategies, have internationalized the ability to obtain pills for “self-managed abortion,” creating a sort of “underground for the post-Dobbs world.” The battle is multifaceted and requires the commitment of a range of activists and allies—who, Grant allows, are sometimes given to fighting among themselves—especially as certain states enact more restrictive laws even to the point of bans. On which note, Grant writes, “Abortion bans have never and will never stop people from ending pregnancies; what they do is force people to resort to unsafe methods to end them.” Her narrative makes clear that the battle for access continues apace to advance the cause for choice against “the notion that a government can dictate if, when, or how its citizens manage pregnancy.”
A capable history that foresees a hard fight yet to come in the war for reproductive freedom.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781668053249
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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