10 New Books We Recommend This Week
April 15, 2021
Some readers are waiting for the next installment in Robert Caro’s multivolume Lyndon Johnson biography as avidly as George R. R. Martin fans eager for “The Winds of Winter” to arrive at last. (Some, I suppose, are at the edge of their seats waiting for both.) If you are among them, why not bide your time with Julia Sweig’s substantial new biography of Johnson’s wife, “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight”? Our reviewer, Mimi Swartz, calls it “a book in the Caro mold,” telling the story of America through its subject. That’s one of a passel of new biographies we recommend this week, including Blake Bailey’s long-awaited life of Philip Roth, Edward White’s tessellated study of Alfred Hitchcock and Dorothy Wickenden’s group biography of Frances Seward, Martha Coffin Wright and Harriet Tubman.
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(Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
âThe Agitatorsâ Review: Disturbers of the Peace
In the turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War, it could be said that the moral center of the nation rested in the Finger Lakes region of central New York state. The district was a hot spot of abolitionism and the fledgling women-rights movement.
Rochester, on the regionâs western edge, was home to Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and celebrated orator, who published his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in a church basement. The village of Seneca Falls, on Cayuga Lake, was the site of the first womenâs rights convention, in 1848, with its seminal Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. A medical school on Seneca Lake was the first to award a degree to a woman, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.
Book examines upstate NY women in abolition, women s rights movements uticaod.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from uticaod.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
While researching her 2011 book, Nothing Daunted, Dorothy Wickenden was told a story that stuck with her.
Wickenden was interviewing a descendent of Ros Underwood, who together with Dorothy Woodruff, Wickenden s grandmother, would leave behind her privileged life in Auburn to teach school in Colorado. The two women s adventure was the basis of Wickenden s New York Times bestseller, subtitled The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West.
Before they left Auburn, though, Ros and Woodruff shared a moment that would become family lore. The two were little girls, standing in front of the family home on South Street.
And there, Wickenden was told, they saw Harriet Tubman.