Filled with illuminating anecdotes, the collection is as entertaining as it is informative.
How women have lived, loved, and survived through the ages.
Hirsch makes an engaging book debut with a feminist chronicle of women’s lives from prehistoric times to the present. Focusing on women in the Western Hemisphere, the author presents 101 artifacts, featured in full-page illustrations, about which she offers richly detailed but succinct essays, smoothly translated by Updegraff. All of the objects, Hirsch explains, “have a bearing on women—the body, sex, love, work, art, politics” and “bear witness to the movements women instigated, and to all the myths to which they’ve been forced to conform since time immemorial.” The idiosyncratic compendium begins with a healed femur bone from 30,000 B.C., which has significant anthropological meaning; while other injured animals would die of starvation or be eaten by predators, human healing indicates caring—particularly, Hirsch argues, by grandmothers, who raised children while their daughters hunted with their sons and who “watched patiently over the injured until their bones had healed.” The author profiles iconoclasts, including novelist George Sand, represented by a replica of her right arm; Sojourner Truth, represented by a coin bearing her famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman”; mythological figures Isis and Athena, represented by a statuette owned by Freud; and other famous personalities, such as Greta Garbo, whose ballpoint pen represents “the influence not just of women who acted but also of women scriptwriters”: In the 1930s and ’40s, women on screen “were sassy, strong-willed, brave, sometimes even bad; they were incredibly quick-witted and didn’t take anything lying down.” Hirsch delves into popular culture (Aretha Franklin, Kim Kardashian), leadership (Golda Meir), philosophy (Hannah Arendt), fashion (perfumed gloves, metal corsets), and various women’s protest movements: suffrage, abolition, labor, and politics, including the iconic pussyhat from 2017.
Filled with illuminating anecdotes, the collection is as entertaining as it is informative.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728758
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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