A sympathetic portrait of old age.
Feisty ladies of a certain age.
Award-winning memoirist and literary critic Gubar was 63 when, in 2008, she was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and given three to five years to live. After debilitating surgeries and chemotherapies, she enrolled in a clinical trial that proved successful, giving her an unexpected chance to experience old age—and to wonder how other women navigated this period of their lives. Although older women are stereotypically depicted as feeble, discountable, and unremarkable, Gubar has discovered that many found new bursts of creativity in the “grand finale” of their lives. As evidence, she offers succinct biographies of nine creative women—selected from a host of others appearing in the book—whose later years she groups under three categories: Lovers (writers George Eliot and Colette, artist Georgia O’Keeffe) who took younger men as companions; Mavericks (writer Isak Dinesen, poet Marianne Moore, artist Louise Bourgeois) who cultivated their idiosyncrasies; and Sages (jazz musician Mary Lou Williams, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham) who devoted themselves to the needs of their community. For Gubar’s stubborn mavericks, “roguish old age” offered a time “in which they flaunted their deeply eccentric spirits.” As different as they were from one another, Dinesen, Moore, and Bourgeois donned “odd outfits” and engaged in blatant self-mythologizing, leaning into their personas as “sly old ladies.” Gubar’s three sages were Black women influenced by religion, the Civil Rights Movement, and social injustice to find new outlets for their talents and new ways to engage with the world. Gubar cites many other aging women—artist Faith Ringgold and designer Iris Apfel, and writers Grace Paley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Ernaux, among others, to ring in on the lively possibilities—of productivity, connection, and reinvention—in one’s last years.
A sympathetic portrait of old age.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781324065647
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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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