Well, this book is an alright-type of book. I would recommend this book- if you want to read with your children.

This is not a book for children - even though children may certainly enjoy it.

The equisitely beautiful and sometimes quietly eerie black & white photography generates a mystical and almost dreamlike voyage for the mind's eye of the viewer. Children as fairies and dense twisted trees, soft light and dark shadow, all meld into one - creating an adult longing to return to the mysterious but inviting woods that lie beyond the backyard of a long forgotten childhood and possilby a long forgotten mythology.

This is foremost a history, and has a focus rather more restricted than its title would suggest, surveying the careers and lives of thirty women and thirty (male) ministers involved in the "feminization" of northeastern Victorian America. The author convinced me in arguing for the significance of said feminization, but I felt burdened by all the biographical minutiae. One has to ignore reams of trivia to grasp the larger themes hinted at in the titles of the chapters (e.g., "The Escape From History," "The Domestication of Death). Where the author breaks the tedium with an impassioned commentary, she seems to be writing a different book altogether. But Douglas's treatment of the theme is original and even-handed, and her short biography of Margaret Fuller compensates for the tiresome church histories.

One can only imagine the work that has gone into this tremendous piece of intellectual history - whose axis is the unforeseeable and fateful rise of the female public in American intellectual life, and contemporaneously the collapse of the old, muscular style of Protestant religiosity and intellect - from the kind and number of sources the author uses. She has apparently trawled through reams and piles of obscure newspapers and magazines, familiarized herself with writing most of us would be glad to avoid, learned to distinguish the various strands of an intellectual and publishing life which is, to modern America, as alien as imperial China or early Sumer. The result is tremendous: not only a resurrection of a past age that does it honour and justice (if anything, one seems to perceive, in this female scholar, a certain sympathy - even nostalgia - for the utra-male, activist, iron-faced world of the old Puritan thinkers, post-Jonathan Edwards and his likes), but a flood of light on the origins of our (not exclusively American) world and society. This simply cannot be praised too much; future historians will not be able to prescind from it.

This book is a waste of money. I received it as a gift so I couldn't return it. It is full of historical mistakes and careless errors. It is not worth taking the time to point them out.

Remarkable book. My only complaint is that sometimes the details become overwhelming and the book loses its focus. That seems to be the product of its (maybe overly) ambitious scope. It bites off a lot but it also delivers a lot.

I don't know why this awesome book has negative reviews here. It is a little difficult true. But for a New Yorkphile, like me, it can't be beat, if you want to know New York in the 1920's, and to a lesser degree the nation. All the familiar names are covered: Scott and Zelda, Woolcott, Parker, Gerstein Stein, Freud,Jazz and Ellington among many others. New York as a huge rush for outsiders from their first sight. The skyscraper boom, and builders and architects. The movie industry.The extreme dangers of transatlantic flights, and coast to coast mail deliveries. The Harlem Renaissance, basically the city as a reinventing, percolating tornado.FDR, Damon Runyan,Irving Berlin,WEB Dubois,Singing the Blues, Mary Pickford, Babe Ruth, Jimmy Walker (the fun loving mayor with questionable morals)the Great White Way, the Cotton Club...It is just about an endless ride thru this great town in the 1920's and beyond, including the aftershock of the 1930's...Sometimes a little difficult, but you can browse through the index too and find hundreds of worthy subjects to check out...One of the best journeys through a time and place that I know!! Also with some interesting photos too.

The book is a personal account of Ann Lehtmets' deportation from Estonia (not Latvia) to Siberia in 1941. It accounts from the time she was taken from her home at gun-point by the NKVD (KGB), and for her first 2 or 3 years of her 17-year stay in a Siberian labour camp.

As a foreign-born Estonian, I took particular interest in this book- as my family chose to flee the country rather than to risk suffering the same fate (the second round of mass deportations happened in 1949).

In all, it was an interesting book. However, it was "slow" at times and I felt the ending was sort of incomplete. Her leaving Siberia and being re-united with her family after 17 years was barely mentioned in a breif 3 pages.

But a remarkable story none the less, and a highly reccomended read for all people of Estonian heritage.

I bought this expecting it to be about life in the gulag labor camps. That's not exactly what it was, but it didn't matter. I really enjoyed it regardless. It is the story of a Latvian woman who is taken from her home, sent to a village in Siberia, and forced to work at backbreaking jobs to survive. Not forced at gunpoint, but, rather, in order to earn enough food to eke out a subsistence (barely) level of survival. She manages by sheer courage, creativity, wits and backbone, while many others starved and froze to death around her. Read it if you want a story of what people can do to survive, if the have the will and the strength. An amazing woman with an amazing story.

While vastly inferior to Jane Austen, who followed a few years later, Rowson does stand out as one of the better early-American writers. In a style foreshadowing Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rowson shows how life punishes vice. The second book, Lucy Temple, is less pedantic and more entertaining. This book is best for enthusiasts of early American Literature.