GOOD READING
by Barbara Klaw
Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control
by Madeline Gray
Richard Marek Publishers 13 photographs, 494 pages, $15.00
Margaret Sanger’s stunning achievement is indisputable. For forty years she fought for women’s right to control the number of children they would have. And she won. An admiring doctor once said of her, “How many people start a crusade and finish it in their own lifetime.” She was a brilliantly effective speaker, a canny publicist, and she could wheedle and charm money out of a stone.
She was also difficult. Just how difficult becomes clear in this revealing new biography. Madeline Gray, quoting extensively from previously unpublished letters to Sanger’s husbands and lovers, shows how vain and egotistical she could be. She neglected her children, she lied whenever it suited her, she was repeatedly unfaithful to both her husbands, and she was livid if any other star emerged in the birth-control movement. For instance, her sister once received such sympathetic publicity when she went on a hunger strike in prison that Margaret thereafter excluded her from the movement, announcing that the sister’s health had been permanently impaired.
But Margaret was honest and tender with Havelock Ellis, who loved and advised her. He persuaded her to stick to birth control and not mention abortion, which she also favored. And he taught her to dress decorously: “The more radical one’s cause, the less flamboyant one should look.”
Margaret Sanger’s tangled life—both radiant and mean—makes a fine story.
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Native American Art in the Denver Art Museum
by Richard Conn
The Denver Art Museum 100 color and 400 black-and-white photographs, 351 pages, $40.00 hardbound, $20.00 paperback
Indian art was utilitarian, but it was certainly not primitive. This selection of 500 objects from the Denver Art Museum’s vast holdings of native art, arranged by region and generously captioned, shows how various and ingenious the artists were. No object was too ordinary to decorate. A baby’s cradleboard is intricately carved at the top. A spoon has a fox-head handle. Even a horsewhip has a beautifully beaded wrist strap. This is a feast of a book—riches for the mind, splendor for the eye.
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Saved: The Story of the Andrea Doria—The Greatest Sea Rescue in History
by William Hoffer
Summit Books Approximately 16 pages of photographs, 256 pages, $11.95
There was no single glaring error that caused the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, both equipped with radar, to collide in the fog off Nantucket on the night of July 25,1956. Rather, a series of small mistakes of judgment aboard both vessels interacted terrifyingly to cause the disaster. The Andrea Doria, completed only three years earlier, was certified unsinkable. But it is clear from this scrupulously researched account that the rescue of 1660 of the 1706 people aboard the Italian liner was due more to the proximity of the Ile de France and other ships that responded promptly to the SOS than to the safety features or procedures of the stricken ship.
Through interviews with survivors and the official records, William Hoffer has reconstructed what happened—a child miraculously scooped from her bed on the Andrea Doria and lodged alive in the shattered prow of the Stockholm; a captain who unaccountably gave his passengers no instructions; crew members who shoved passengers aside to jam into the first lifeboats; and a bartender who cajoled, organized, and eventually saved everyone in his area.
This exciting, moving book is a natural for a movie, another A Night to Remember with a happier ending.
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