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Scarlet Sisters (2014)

by Myra MacPherson(Favorite Author)

3.42 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1306743397 (ISBN13: 9781306743396)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Twelve

review 1: The history in this book is thorough, entertaining, and relevant. However, some periods of the sisters' lives are somewhat hastily drawn. And the politics expressed in the epilogue are debatable (Would the ladies have supported same-sex marriage? Not necessarily). Still, this is a vastly entertaining feminist revision of the history of two pioneers of what would eventually become second-wave women's rights.
review 2: Fascinating subject matter -- I really wanted this to be great! It got rave reviews from some pretty impressive people, including Jim Lehrer and Carl Bernstein. The story definitely grabbed my attention -- the lives and times of two sisters who challenged the beliefs of the world and paved the way for some major social and political changes, refu... moresing to let the hypocrites of their day continue on with business as usual. But with so many characters, events, and years to cover, this story needed a much more coherent framework than Myra MacPherson offered. She jumps around in time and among so many different narratives that I found it difficult to keep track of what was happening. In addition, some of her prose was so convoluted that I found myself rereading passages several times, in some cases only to discover that she had not written sentences by any stretch of the grammatical imagination. The really glaring weirdness of the work, though, is the over use of quotation without attribution -- one has to wade through almost 50 pages of notes in order to find the origin of quoted text, and I'll be honest: I didn't. I found it disconcerting to have so much quoted text make up the body of the work without any grounding context. No introductions to long, rambling sentiments expressed by others. No way to reasonably keep track (while reading) of which quotes had a trustworthy provenance. Because of the convoluted story telling, it is hard to feel that you ever become intimate with the subjects of the work, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. The difficulty may be that, as is expressed in the work, it is hard to judge who they really were and what they really believed. But rather than a definitive work on these two intriguing sisters, MacPherson's tome is more of a giant combination of conflicting quotes and speculation. It is hard to believe that this author has really added any wealth of understanding to these two controversial figures from history. And that is a shame, because what she did write made me hungry to learn more. After 323 pages, I feel I have had only a paltry appetizer and I am hungering for a main course that is not forthcoming. less

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