We are frequently reminded that there are many silences in our history, some of them involving women who were so appalled by what they had got themselves into that they made no report at all. For those who want to make a deeper investigation of some of these matters a generous eighty-seven pages of notes and bibliography are provided. The hundreds of mysteries, puzzles, enigmas, conundrums, and ambiguities which litter our historical landscape are not all going to be tidily resolved by Ms. If one paragraph can accommodate two such diverse pieces of information, how much pith can we expect 450 pages to yield? Gail Collins of course is well aware that she is practicing bullet-train history.
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Collins informs us that during World War II female aviators risked their lives pulling targets for unpracticed gunners to shoot at-the same females were subject to arrest if they tried to leave the base after dark wearing slacks. And then, same paragraph, hardly pausing for breath, Ms. In only the third paragraph we learn that Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy, was so miserable as First Lady that she spent much of her time eating chocolates, although as a diplomat’s wife and a young mother she had crossed Russia during the Napoleonic Wars in a carriage with her young son. If the juxtapositions she throws up sometimes seem capricious, the facts are mostly fascinating. Collins has produced a rapid, readable, polyglot history of womenfolk in America, a book that seethes and bubbles with information. The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it.Īnimated by that tension and willing to dramatize it in a multitude of examples, Ms. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothea Dix. Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested-they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. The history of American women is all about leaving home-crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own. She herself gets to the point ASAP on the opening page of her long, ambitious history of America’s women: All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.As editorial editor of The New York Times Gail Collins is responsible for seeing that writers get to the point and get to it quick-ASAP, as the current lingo would have it.
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LADY SINGS THE BLUES MOVIE
We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit” with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more) and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation-a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David Ritz
![lady sings the blues lady sings the blues](https://cdns-images.dzcdn.net/images/cover/ba10ce5cc2c3b797fc85a44c6e537121/500x500.jpg)
Perfect for fans of The United States vs.