Review by New York Times Review
GINGERBREAD, by Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $27.) For her new novel - a meditation on family and what it means to be part of a community - Oyeyemi has taken old fairy tales, seasoned them with 20th-century history and pop-culture references, and frosted them with whimsical detail. I.M.: A Memoir, by Isaac Mizrahi. (Flatiron, $28.99.) Throughout this autobiography by one of America's most acclaimed designers of the 1990s, his innovation and confidence are evident, contrasting with an industry that, despite its superficial fickleness, can be deeply resistant to change. TRUTH IN OUR TIMES: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts, by David E. McCraw. (All Points, $28.99.) McCraw, the deputy general counsel of The Times, leads readers through some of his most memorable cases, particularly those involving Donald Trump. He expresses concern about the crisis of public trust, stating that "the law can do only so much." MADAME FOURCADE'S SECRET WAR: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, by Lynne Olson. (Random House, $30.) Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who fought the Nazis while enduring sexism in her ranks, is little remembered today. Olson argues that she should be celebrated. INSTRUCTIONS FOR A FUNERAL: Stories, by David Means. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Means's fifth collection, populated with adulterers and criminals, railroad bums and other castaways, suggests that beneath every act of violence there pulses a vein of grace. GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA, by Christos Ikonomou. Translated by Karen Emmerich. (Archipelago, paper, $18.) This collection of linked stories, set on an unnamed Aegean island and featuring a cast of wry, rough-talking Greeks reeling from the country's economic devastation, showcases Ikonomou's wit, compassion and infallible ear for the demotic. OUTSIDERS: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, by Lyndall Gordon. (Johns Hopkins University, $29.95.) Gordon links five visionaries who made literary history - George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf - through their shared understanding of death and violence. THE TWICE-BORN: Life and Death on the Ganges, by Aatish Taseer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Attempting to rediscover his traditional Indian roots through the study of Sanskrit, a journalist finds himself alienated from them. HOUSE OF STONE, by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. (Norton, $26.95.) This ambitious and ingenious first novel uses a young man's search for his personal ancestry as a way of unearthing hidden aspects of Zimbabwe's violent past. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Literary biographer Gordon (Lives Like Loaded Guns) brilliantly ties together the biographies of five women writers who bravely embraced outsider status and "summoned the will to explore oddity in ways that speak to us about our unseen selves." Gordon assigns each woman a primary role: Emily BrontA« (visionary), George Eliot (outlaw), Mary Shelley (prodigy), Olive Schreiner (orator), and Virginia Woolf (explorer). Painstakingly examining her subjects' diaries, letters, speeches, and novels, as well as their lives and times, Gordon draws close connections between them. All of them were passionate readers-Shelley, Eliot, and Woolf being particularly drawn to classical learning, which "epitomized the education closed to women"-and all five lost their mothers very early in life. Gordon also draws intriguing connections between individual figures, noting that Shelley and Eliot both scandalized sexual mores with their affairs with married men, and that Woolf and Schreiner both defied the political establishment by campaigning as pacifists during times of war. By addressing an almost inconceivably wide range of themes through the book's conceit-health, mores, politics, pregnancy, economics, sex, sexism, secrets, and silence-Gordon seduces readers interested in all that these fascinating women had to offer. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In chapters titled "Prodigy," "Visionary," "Outlaw," "Orator," and "Explorer," Gordon (fellow, St. Hilda's Coll., Oxford; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds) probes the lives of five groundbreaking authors: Mary Shelley (1797-1851), Emily Brontë (1818-48), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), George Eliot (1819-80), and Olive Schreiner (1855-1920). While Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney's A Secret Sisterhood explored the friendships among several of these same writers, Gordon's work emphasizes their isolation, revealing how each used this sense of exile-along with their shared experience of maternal loss-to invent her own unique voice. The narrative opens with the scandalous details of "prodigy" Shelley's elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley, immediately hooking readers before delving into her literary achievements. Gordon maintains this level of engagement throughout-a feat that becomes especially notable in the chapter on Brontë, about whom relatively little is known. The result is a fascinating study that fully supports the author's thesis. VERDICT Highly recommended for both academic and general readers interested in women's literature and history.-Jenny Brewer, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
