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Priscilla Kipp

NonfictionHistory

The Ship of Dreams

Review by Priscilla Kipp

More than a hundred years ago, on her maiden voyage from the United Kingdom to New York, the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank. Of the 2,208 people aboard the ship, 1,496 passengers and crew died, and 712 survived. Hundreds of books and articles, memoirs and interviews, two formal inquiries, several lawsuits, many movies and 10 suicides followed. It is a tragedy that has become a legend, a myth and a “synonym for catastrophe.” Is there still more to say?

In The Ship of Dreams, British historian Gareth Russell chronicles six passengers’ histories and fates, putting such a human face on the disaster—from the shipyard workers building the Titanic in Belfast, Ireland, to the grieving crowds in New York awaiting the survivors’ arrival aboard the SS Carpathia—that he proves Titanic’s story is very much worth rediscovering.

Because the Titanic carried many elite passengers, including British nobility and an American movie star, in addition to a global mix of immigrants in “steerage,” the ship has always conjured issues of class extremes. The Edwardian era, ending with the death of Edward VII and the ascension of George V, saw literal changes in the landscapes of England and Scotland, as centuries of landed gentry gave way to leaner, feistier times in an industrialized economy. Nevertheless, on the Titanic, kings of commerce like John Jacob Astor, John Thayer and Isidor Straus; a countess; and the “celluloid celebrity” Dorothy Gibson all sailed with the abundant trappings of the rich and famous, including one Pekingese dog named after China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen.

Russell concentrates on six such figures, colorfully detailing their wardrobes, meals and pastimes. Through survivors’ recollections, he follows the despairing Thomas Andrews as the ship he’d dreamed of and built surrendered to the sea, and leaves open to speculation exactly what Captain Edward Smith’s last words may have been. He also rigorously debunks darker rumors, painstakingly refuting, for example, the myth that stairways were blocked to prevent third-class passengers from reaching what few lifeboats were available. Russell even reaons that having more lifeboats may not have mattered after all.

Bacteria on the ocean floor may soon finish off the wreckage of Titanic, but her story, like Celine Dion’s Oscar-winning song from the movie, will go on. Gareth Russell does his best to tell it truly.

More than a hundred years ago, on her maiden voyage from the United Kingdom to New York, the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank. Of the 2,208 people aboard the ship, 1,496 passengers and crew died, and 712 survived. Hundreds of books and articles, memoirs and interviews, two formal inquiries, several lawsuits, many movies and 10 suicides followed. It is a tragedy that has become a legend, a myth and a “synonym for catastrophe.” Is there still more to say?

NonfictionAnimals

A Polar Affair

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The polar explorations of the 19th and 20th centuries are well-chronicled journeys to both the North and South poles, strewn with well-known names such as Shackleton, Peary, Scott, Nansen and Amundsen. Less well known is the first, albeit reluctant, penguin biologist, a British physician named Gregory Murray Levick who accompanied Robert F. Scott on his doomed attempt to reach the South Pole in 1912. This was a man who knew little about—and had even less interest in—studying penguins, preferring instead to eat them whenever necessary (which was often the case).

Yet according to his modern-day counterpart, fellow penguin biologist and author Lloyd Spencer Davis, the rather odd Levick would inspire Davis’ own career choice decades later. In Davis’ enthralling account, A Polar Affair: Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins, he grows to respect and admire Levick, afflicted though Levick was with the rigid Victorian values that put him uncomfortably at odds with the promiscuous Adélie penguins.

Levick, in fact, was so ambivalent about reporting what he observed in the subcolonies of breeding penguins—the “bawdy behavior of these ‘hooligans’”—that he pasted paper over certain passages in his journal, as if he were embarrassed by what he saw. His assumptions about those “prim and proper, monogamous little creatures that mate for life” were dashed. As for the explorers themselves, Davis quickly adds, “Sexual misdemeanors in the polar regions are not, it would seem, the province of Adélie penguins alone.” The valiant explorers and their many lovers, as Davis writes it, were no strangers to amorous discoveries. Shackleton, for example, “is probably more penguin than he is a man of his word when it comes to marital fidelity.”

With treacherous ice floes entrapping ships, invisible crevasses that became deathtraps, scurvy, frostbite and much, much more, Davis’ Antarctica is a vividly described, unforgiving world of ice and wind—where, by the way, freezing, starving men had to eat their dogs and ponies, and on Sundays gathered for Bible readings and hymns. But not all the dangers were weather-induced. Scott’s wife, Katherine, wrote and exhorted him to die, if necessary, to achieve his goal. Beaten to the pole by Amundsen and doomed by his many mistakes, Scott succumbed to the elements, his frozen body still clutching her letter. 

Somehow, Davis serves it all up with wit and a wry, irrepressible sense of humor, while imparting everything there is to know about penguins.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read about the 14 most interesting penguin facts from Lloyd Spencer Davis, author of A Polar Affair.

The polar explorations of the 19th and 20th centuries are well-chronicled journeys to both the North and South poles, strewn with well-known names such as Shackleton, Peary, Scott, Nansen and Amundsen. Less well known is the first, albeit reluctant, penguin biologist, a British physician named Gregory Murray Levick who accompanied Robert F. Scott on his […]
NonfictionEssays

My Time Among the Whites

Review by Priscilla Kipp

As Jennine Capó Crucet makes clear in her thought-provoking collection of essays, My Time Among the Whites, whether you are or are not white isn’t just the point—it’s everything. If you are white, the culture that absorbs you so easily may well be taken for granted. In this country, you’ve known little else. If you are not white, it’s the depth and breadth of that white culture that either pushes you to the side or inspires you to push back. For Crucet, there’s no question about which way to go, and in her exquisitely fierce way, she does. 

Born to Cuban American parents who were little help when it came to navigating the whiter world outside Miami, Crucet became her family’s cautious, always mindful pioneer. She learned fast—first at Cornell as an undergrad, later when she married (and then divorced) a middle-class white “dude” and finally as a tenured professor at the University of Nebraska. 

Like Crucet’s debut novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, the first essay in this book could serve as a primer for first-generation college freshmen. Crucet and her family drove from Florida to Ithaca, New York, to begin her first year at Cornell, a school she chose because she liked the fall foliage pictured on a brochure her high school guidance counselor was about to throw away. After orientation, her parents and grandmother didn’t know it was time for them to leave. There was only one Latinx professor (who became her mentor) in her time there. Her classmates struggled to comprehend the culture she wrote about in class. She became “the official Latinx ambassador . . . an unintentional act of bigotry [that] has a name: it’s called spotlighting.”

In the hilarious “Say I Do,” Crucet battles with Freddy, her mother’s choice for wedding DJ. His playlist catered only to her Cuban family, because “all those Americans . . . don’t dance. They don’t nothing.” In “Imagine Me Here,” as a guest speaker at a predominantly white Southern college, Crucet compelled the students to address the lack of color in their faculty. It did not go well.

“Is it uncomfortable reading all this?” Crucet asks in this timely, vital collection. “Does your answer depend on your race, on whether or not you consider yourself white?” Or “are you not yet uncomfortable . . . because, as a white person, you’ve gotten to be just you your whole life?”

As Jennine Capó Crucet makes clear in her thought-provoking collection of essays, My Time Among the Whites, whether you are or are not white isn’t just the point—it’s everything. If you are white, the culture that absorbs you so easily may well be taken for granted. In this country, you’ve known little else. If you […]
NonfictionMemoir

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Haben Girma was born deafblind in California, to refugee parents forced to flee war-torn Eritrea. While her mother and father struggled to cope as immigrants, Girma simply yearned to belong—“a deafblind girl in a sighted, hearing world.” As her vision and hearing continued to fade and her parents grew increasingly cautious, Girma fought for her independence. Against their wishes, she went to Mali to help build a schoolhouse, left home for college in Portland, Oregon, and moved across the country for Harvard Law School. Along the way, she found new ways to manage her disabilities, through technology, teamwork and self-education that included a “blindness boot camp.” Today Girma speaks from a global stage, advocating for improved access to education and services for disabled people. In her often hilarious and utterly inspiring memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, she shares her trials and triumphs.

Things get off to a riveting start when, at the age of 7, Girma is left alone on a plane after her father is forcibly taken off the aircraft. She cannot hear what the flight attendant is saying, and her vision is limited to a few feet. Her terror is palpable. Later there is a confrontation with a bull she cannot see, learning to salsa dance in Mali to music she cannot hear with a partner who is but a blur, and more—much more. Yet by the book’s conclusion, she has graduated from Harvard Law School and become an internationally acclaimed advocate for accessibility, lauded for her work by President Obama at the White House in 2015. 

While Girma’s narrative almost ends there (she adds a brief epilogue to bring her enthralled reader up to date), her mission continues. “A Brief Guide to Increasing Access for People with Disabilities” includes specific advice for the workplace and wisdom that comes from her own experiences of exclusion. “Disability,” Girma notes, “is part of the human experience.” Inclusion improves the world for everyone, she says, and she intends to make it happen.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Haben Girma.

Haben Girma was born deafblind in California, to refugee parents forced to flee war-torn Eritrea. While her mother and father struggled to cope as immigrants, Girma simply yearned to belong—“a deafblind girl in a sighted, hearing world.” As her vision and hearing continued to fade and her parents grew increasingly cautious, Girma fought for her independence. Against their wishes, she went to Mali to help build a schoolhouse, left home for college in Portland, Oregon, and moved across the country for Harvard Law School. Along the way, she found new ways to manage her disabilities, through technology, teamwork and self-education that included a “blindness boot camp.” Today Girma speaks from a global stage, advocating for improved access to education and services for disabled people. In her often hilarious and utterly inspiring memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, she shares her trials and triumphs.

NonfictionSocial SciencePhotography

Dignity

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In 2011, Chris Arnade was growing stressed and weary. His long walks through familiar city neighborhoods made him second-guess his profitable, comfortable Wall Street career as a successful trader. Warned not to go to areas like Hunts Point at the tip of the South Bronx—deemed too dangerous, too poor and too black for a white guy—he chose instead to arm himself with a camera and notebook and learn about the people who lived there. A cross-country exploration of “back row” America came next, when he “wanted to see if what I had seen . . . was representative of the rest of the country.” In down-and-out cities from California to Alabama to the Midwest to Maine, Arnade spent time with addicts, prostitutes, the homeless and the jobless. Many shared their stories and allowed his camera to capture much more than their words. One hundred and fifty thousand miles later, the result is Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, a photo-filled chronicle that is both heartbreaking and humanizing.

What makes Dignity so compelling is Arnade’s thread of introspection: As he reached out to strangers, he dug inward, seeking to understand what effect his path to the “front row” of America had on his assumptions, judgments and perceptions. Coming to recognize and shed the blinders of his economic and ethnic class, he found a new capacity for empathy and understanding. In storefront churches, abandoned buildings and, over and over again, inside inner-city McDonalds, Arnade saw the fault lines of the country that had done so well by him. Racism, implacable poverty, failed social services and educational dead ends vanquished the American dream for many of his subjects, yet their resilience often held off utter defeat.

After five years on the road, what has Arnade learned, and what does he think should be done? Equipped with new respect for the “back row,” daunted by the complex issues that created and continue to crush it, he calls for empathy: Listen to and try to understand one another, and try not to judge. Otherwise, “we have denied many their dignity, leaving a vacuum easily filled by drugs, anger, and resentment.”

In down-and-out cities from California to Alabama to the Midwest to Maine, Arnade spent time with addicts, prostitutes, the homeless and the jobless. The result is Dignity, a photo-filled chronicle that is both heartbreaking and humanizing.
NonfictionFood & Drink

Eat Like a Fish

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Author Bren Smith declares, “I have the heart of a fisherman and the soul of a farmer,” and in his memoir, Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer, he proves this to be true over and over again. Starting off on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, he passed through Massachusetts (and through its jails), climbed onto lobster boats, plied his way north again to Alaskan fisheries and finally landed on the Thimble Islands off the New England coast. The salty adolescent who loved the company of fishermen and could swig and swear with the best of them evolved into an expert ocean farmer, pioneering the “climate cuisine” industry and promising an innovative way of feeding our beleaguered planet. Take a new look at what’s for dinner: seaweed.

As Smith scales up from his 20-acre vertical ocean farm, he births an industry that must struggle to avoid the “sharks”—and mistakes—of globalized big business, and he hooks celebrity chefs like Mark Bittman and Rene Redzepi. Kelp noodles soon take center stage on the plates of upscale New York and Las Vegas restaurants, and Google starts serving them in innovative offerings in their employee cafeterias. For those who wonder about ingredients, Smith includes recipes like Shrimp Fra Diavolo with Kelp and Barbecue Kelp and Carrots, along with where to find the goods.

Smith is an articulate, very human ambassador for sustainable, ethical and environmentally beneficial mariculture, weaving his plea for changing the way we eat with solid proof of why it’s so necessary. He includes a global history here as well, spanning coastal cultures from China and Japan to Scotland and Atlantic Canada, all rich with best practices and viable traditions.

Calling for “all hands on deck” to achieve survival as climate change continues to alter our natural resources, Smith urges that we learn to eat what the ocean can grow instead of growing only what we are used to eating. He offers ways to help like cooking and fertilizing with seaweed and shellfish and supporting local “sea trusts.” And GreenWave, the company he helped found, provides an open-source farming manual for building your own kelp hatchery. If this new age of “climate cuisine” needs an introduction, Eat Like a Fish is surely it.

If this new age of “climate cuisine” needs an introduction, Eat Like a Fish is surely it.
NonfictionMemoir

The Light Years

Review by Priscilla Kipp

There is a saying: If you remember the 1960s, you must not have been there. If you were, and went on to enjoy—or survive—their segue into the ’70s, Chris Rush’s mesmerizing memoir, The Light Years, may cause some fine flashbacks. But if you know those drug-addled days only by reputation and the sounds of their haze-spawned music, Rush’s detail-laden account of his turbulent adolescence will be quite an eye-opener.

The middle child of seven in a well-off New Jersey family that knew how to party, Rush was an artistic, sexually conflicted misfit. His alcoholic father loathed him, his mother protected him, and his older sister introduced him to marijuana and LSD by the time he was 12—“sacraments,” she called them, not to be confused with heroin or cocaine, which would come later. Rush remembers his acid trips with poetic clarity. Watching an American flag-clad Frisbee player at a party, he saw “stroboscopic trails” following him, “frame by frame by frame. I began to think of the awfulness of the [Vietnam] war, of dead bodies piled in the sun. Maybe the glitter-acid was coming on a little too strong.”

After his father threatened to kill him, Rush left the private school where he was peddling drugs and followed his sister out west—California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming—and into the business of storing and selling drugs. Living in “stash houses” and partaking of the inventory, Rush grew to love tripping in the wild of the mountains, adding hashish to his repertoire, spending months alone and sketching his drug-fueled fantasies. He came down into the hill towns to call his mother collect, to let her know he was alive and to be cautioned not to come home. Lovers and friends along the way seemed as lost as he was.

Today a celebrated Tucson artist, Rush recounts his troubled journey not as a cautionary tale but as a testament to a time when finding a place in the real world could be life-saving. For him, it was learning to bake a pie and sharing it with a friend. For his reader, this redeeming affirmation comes as both revelation and relief.

Chris Rush’s mesmerizing memoir, The Light Years, is a detail-laden account of his turbulent adolescence in the 1960s.

Nonfiction

Mama’s Last Hug

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In 2016, the 80-year-old biologist Jan van Hooff visited his old friend Mama, a dying 59-year-old chimpanzee matriarch. Their videotaped emotional reunion was seen around the world. In Mama’s Last Hug, Frans de Waal begins with that endearing goodbye, then dives into his decades of experience studying our fellow hominids.

With wit and scholarly perspicacity, the renowned primatologist and ethologist offers an abundant study of animal and human emotions, urging a kinder, gentler approach to those with whom we share our planet, from apes and rats to plants and single-cell organisms. Citing a wealth of experiments and studies, the genial scientist raises new awareness of our shared evolutionary history and suggests that a strictly behavioral model is no longer accurate or adequate. In fact, de Waal writes, previous theoretical constructs were largely based on assumptions (made by men) about male dominance. The matriarchal society of bonobos offers a conflicting example. These primate hippies make more love than war and are pros at peacemaking. Perhaps we humans are more like them—or should be.

Chief among de Waal’s studies are animal emotions: who has them, how they work and why humans should care. De Waal provides examples of a full range of emotions experienced by our fellow hominids like empathy, sympathy, disgust, shame, guilt, fear and forgiveness. He proves that rats enjoy being tickled; chimps and elephants can console, conspire and retaliate; and plants release toxic scents to protect against predatory insects.

We are all animals, de Waal reminds us, and he has provided a rich perspective on—and an urgent invitation to reconsider—every aspect of life around us. 

In 2016, the 80-year-old biologist Jan van Hooff visited his old friend Mama, a dying 59-year-old chimpanzee matriarch. Their videotaped emotional reunion was seen around the world. In Mama’s Last Hug, Frans de Waal begins with that endearing goodbye, then dives into his decades of experience studying our fellow hominids.

NonfictionEssays

The Book of Delights

Review by Priscilla Kipp

If timing is indeed everything, what better time than now, here in deep winter, to seek—and find—solace in the delightful but often elusive moments of the everyday? In The Book of Delights, poet and avid gardener Ross Gay sets out, beginning on his 42nd birthday, to write “a daily essay about something delightful” for one year. The result: 102 essays with curiosity-provoking titles like “Tomato on Board” and “Hole in the Head.” Gay writes, “[M]y delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

Gay leads us on a merry walk through the mundane, illuminating moments of his day with intense, exquisitely detailed observations: a morning stop at a fragrant bakery; a glimpse of two strangers sharing their shopping bag handles; a grateful kiss planted on a blooming flower in his garden. He is mesmerized by the moment when the natural world meets the human eye, as when a praying mantis perches on an empty pint glass and transforms it into “a gorgeous transparent stage for this beast to perform on.”

Nor does he shy away from the reality of being black, that constant third rail embedded in our country’s history. The color of his skin shadows and illuminates his existence, causing both delight (when a “phenotypical” flight attendant calls him “Baby” and bestows him with extra pretzels) and angst (he has reason to note that “the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering’”).

Gay’s journey ambles back and forth in time. He feels his losses but imbues them with gratitude; people here and gone remain his delights. They are all here, stuffing this slim book with their abilities to delight the author. Yet humans are far from the only objects of Gay’s insights. Hummingbirds, cardinals, pigeons, skunks and bumblebees are all worthy of a moment’s glee, and he shares them all—delightfully, of course—with us.

If timing is indeed everything, what better time than now, here in deep winter, to seek—and find—solace in the delightful but often elusive moments of the everyday? In The Book of Delights, poet and avid gardener Ross Gay sets out, beginning on his 42nd birthday, to write “a daily essay about something delightful” for one year. The result: 102 essays with curiosity-provoking titles like “Tomato on Board” and “Hole in the Head.” Gay writes, “[M]y delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

NonfictionBiography

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In 1881, Edgar Degas revealed his wax sculpture of an odd-looking young dancer at a Paris exhibition, a piece that caused controversy, revulsion and disgust among viewers. Today, Degas’ dancer is on display in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and it is regarded as a treasure and a breakthrough work of realistic, multidimensional art. In Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, author Camille Laurens attempts to place both the artist and the child who served as Degas’ model, Marie van Goethem, in context, yet much of the mystery surrounding them remains, haunting writer and reader alike.

Marie was born into a family of Belgian refugees, who were barely surviving in the slums of Paris. Managed by her mother, she became a “rat,” one of many young children who scurried across the dance floor in Paris Opera productions. The girls attracted the interest and desire of unscrupulous, lusty, upperclass male patrons. Paris in the 1880s had yet to address child labor protections; rehearsals and performances were grueling and often led to prostitution or, as with Marie, modeling, with its implied intimacies. Yet the work also paid better than most jobs children could physically do. At 14, Marie became a model for the eccentric, solitary Edgar Degas.

Degas’ life and art become familiar in Laurens’ detailed telling, but his relationship with Marie and her ultimate fate remain obscure. Laurens hints at many possibilities, admitting that she is haunted by this child of wax, whose insides Degas filled with the flotsam and jetsam of his cluttered studio. Comparing Marie to the tragic figure of the exploited Marilyn Monroe, who once posed next to the sculpture, and today’s Syrian child refugees working in Turkish textile factories to support their families, Laurens believes Degas sculpted “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” to communicate that “his own present time is universal, that he projects it into all times, that he informs the future with his hands.”

In 1881, Edgar Degas revealed his wax sculpture of an odd-looking young dancer at a Paris exhibition, a piece that caused controversy, revulsion and disgust among viewers.

NonfictionBiography

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The 107th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has become an unlikely icon, a tiny-but-titanic 85-year-old whom popular culture has dubbed the “Notorious RBG.” She is showcased on everything from T-shirts to comedy sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” Lest this giant of jurisprudence lose her gravitas amid such fame, Jane Sherron De Hart does a daunting job of restoring Ginsburg’s impressive roots in Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. Hart’s biography is a studious walk through Ginsburg’s own keen recollections, arm and arm with explorations of many landmark cases, as well as their historical, social and political landscapes. Ginsburg’s colleagues on the Supreme Court, including the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and her fellow opera lover, the mercurial Antonin Scalia, are here as well, coloring the historical record and shedding up-close-and-personal light on the daily work of the court.

During her first year at Harvard Law School in 1956, Ginsburg was one of nine females in a class of 552, and the dean routinely asked her, “Why are you . . . taking a place that could have gone to a man?” Later, despite a stellar academic record, she had trouble landing a job. As she noted, “To be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot” was “a bit too much” in 1959.

By the time Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980, her record of advocating for equal rights for women and men had made her a hero among feminists. Nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, she has served since as a strident voice on both liberal and conservative courts. She is known for distilling legalese into language the press and public can understand, and her opinions and dissents have buttressed groundbreaking cases that involve such issues as abortion, immigration and gender equality.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” De Hart leaves no doubt that, in Justice Ginsburg’s hands, that arc will undoubtedly continue to bend.

The 107th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has become an unlikely icon, a tiny-but-titanic 85-year-old whom popular culture has dubbed the “Notorious RBG.” She is showcased on everything from T-shirts to comedy sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” Lest this giant of jurisprudence lose her gravitas amid such fame, Jane Sherron De Hart does a daunting job of restoring Ginsburg’s impressive roots in Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life.

NonfictionWomen's History

Pure

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Refugees from the “purity industry,” which had a heavy influence on evangelical youth in the latter years of the 20th century, may recognize themselves in Pure, Linda Kay Klein’s eye-opening study of what went wrong when strict interpretations of biblical Scripture became cultural touchstones.

In the evangelical community, sexual shaming and a focus on purity were used to promote strict sexual abstinence before marriage, especially for girls. Girls raised within this culture knew little about their own sexualities and were discouraged by parents and pastors from questioning the biases of their gender roles. If boys were tempted by a girl, or even if she was raped, it was her fault: She became a “stumbling block,” and her body became a shameful inspiration toward sin. If a woman managed to save herself for marriage, she was expected to know how to fulfill her husband’s desires, and if she could not and he left or committed adultery, this was also her fault; she had failed to satisfy him in her wifely duties. 

Klein experienced all of this firsthand, and she bears the scars. She was raised in this culture but began to question its focus on female sexual purity when a youth pastor in her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a child. Klein has since spent years interviewing many women about their church experiences, and their accounts are strikingly similar, graphic and disturbing. The “nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia” they suffered amounted to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: “We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.” For many, the results were, and continue to be, devastating.

Klein’s research supporting the need for reform is compelling, and she makes it clear that sexism and sexual shame directed toward women and young girls are endemic in our society. Today, more enlightened and inclusive church communities are led by youth pastors who are comfortable exploring the larger issue of sexual ethics and decision-making. For those who seek spiritual community without gender bias, Klein offers empathy and new choices. 

Refugees from the “purity industry,” which had a heavy influence on evangelical youth in the latter years of the 20th century, may recognize themselves in Pure, Linda Kay Klein’s eye-opening study of what went wrong when strict interpretations of biblical scripture became cultural touchstones.

NonfictionHistory

The unsung pioneers of aviation

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The thrills of air racing, so popular in the 1920s and ’30s, are now mostly forgotten, along with the names of the aviators who risked their lives for huge crowds, three-foot trophies and, of course, the cash prizes. Lost with them was the story of the “Powder Puffs,” women who defied the time’s rampant gender discrimination and triumphed in (or plummeted from) the sky. Of these pioneer breakers of the ultimate glass ceiling, perhaps only one name has stayed familiar: the beloved and doomed Amelia Earhart. Keith O’Brien’s spectacularly detailed Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History changes all that, re-creating a world that can still inspire us today.

Meet Louise Thaden, a married mother of two; Ruth Elder, a beautiful Alabama divorcée; Ruth Nichols, a woman unhappily born into wealth; and Florence Klingensmith, whose promising aviation career ended in tragedy. True resisters, they were empowered by their recently gained right to vote and inspired by aviation’s rising popularity. Charles Lindbergh’s recent solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 was an achievement that begged for a female challenger, and it had one soon enough.

O’Brien keeps a sharp eye on the planes as well. The flimsily built early aircraft regularly lost their wings, shed their wheels and exploded in flames, sometimes miraculously leaving their pilots alive and eager to fly again. Men found financial support—and better planes—much easier to come by than women, who routinely faced reporters asking why they weren’t at home cooking dinner. Elder and Klingensmith tried to dodge the husband question, while Earhart allowed her husband, prominent New York publisher George P. Putnam, to be her relentless PR man who “probably saved her from becoming a nice old maid.”

The women of aviation were “friendly enemies,” competing for speed and distance records while supporting each other on the ground and in the air. Known collectively as the Ninety Nines, they encouraged young women to aim high. As Earhart said, a woman’s place “is wherever her individual aptitude places her.”

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The thrills of air racing, so popular in the 1920s and ’30s, are now mostly forgotten, along with the names of the aviators who risked their lives for huge crowds, three-foot trophies and, of course, the cash prizes. Lost with them was the story of the “Powder Puffs,” women who defied the time’s rampant gender discrimination and triumphed in (or plummeted from) the sky. Of these pioneer breakers of the ultimate glass ceiling, perhaps only one name has stayed familiar: the beloved and doomed Amelia Earhart. Keith O’Brien’s spectacularly detailed Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History changes all that, re-creating a world that can still inspire us today.

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