With the shogunate abolished and the “restoration” of 15-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito to the Meiji throne in 1868, Japan recognized that it would need to embrace Western ideas and technology in order to compete in the civilized world, and that would include a Western education for both men and women. Japan required educated mothers to raise standards, and thus the first batch of girls to be sent to study in America for an allotted period of 10 years was recruited from highranking samurai families who had fallen out of favor and could spare some mouths to feed at home. Of these five young women sent across the seas in 1871, the two eldest, at 14, did not fare well and were sent back within a few months. The remaining three experienced transformative home-sharing and education opportunities in America and became fluent speakers of English. Nimura concentrates on the stories of these three singular young women: Sutematsu Yamakawa, at 11, lived with the prominent Bacon family in New Haven and eventually attended Vassar; Shige Nagai, who had arrived at age 10, also attended Vassar and ended up marrying a fellow Japanese who had studied at Annapolis Naval Academy; Ume Tsuda, at barely 7, grew up in Georgetown and graduated from Bryn Mawr. All returned to Japan to marry, yet they carried on teaching and even founded an English school for girls. From clothing to manners to speech to aspirations, Nimura shows how the meeting of East and West transformed these select young women. An extraordinary, elegantly told story of the beginning of Japan’s education and emancipation of its women. (8 pages of illustrations; map)
VISIONS AND REVISIONS
Peck, Dale Soho (224 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 7, 2015 978-1-61695-441-3
Witness to a transformative decade in gay history. By the time novelist and critic Peck (The Garden of Lost and Found, 2012, etc.) came out in 1987, a potent drug cocktail had emerged that controlled the course of HIV, lessening its likelihood to lead to full-blown AIDS and certain death. He recounts the effect of that discovery on gay culture, on America’s attitudes toward homosexuality and on his own experiences. Woven through the book are references to serial killers of gay men, about whom Peck reported early in his career. Cobbled together from revised essays and articles, the memoir sometimes lapses into repetition and shows its seams. The author, who has honed a reputation for scathing critiques, offers a withering indictment of Andrew Sullivan, whose revisionist gay history demonized pre-AIDS gay culture “as a nonstop party” that he believed would be reincited by the development of combination therapy. Peck also dismisses some queer theorists whose “performative modalities...often seemed like experiments in egotism and anomie.” He effusively praises Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham and Tony Kushner, whose 76
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Angels in America (2003) contributed to making gay activists “more visible, more capable of influencing the things said about us on a national level.” As a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power when he was in his early 20s, Peck stood proudly among those activists, attending meetings and marches, helping out with mundane office work, preparing clean needles for addicts, and reading everything he could find written by a gay man, lesbian or transgendered person. Literature, he writes, “happened to get better in response to AIDS, at least for a while,” since it reflected the visceral rage and despair of the time. He is despondent, though, about a tendency to normalize and distance AIDS. Instead, he calls for narratives that force readers “to find the existence of the epidemic unbearable.” Raw and heartfelt—though uneven—Peck’s hybrid memoir contributes to that goal.
HISSING COUSINS The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth Peyser, Marc; Dwyer, Timothy Talese/Doubleday (352 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 31, 2015 978-0-385-53601-1
A journalist and the CEO of an education advisory company unite to tell the story of the famous first cousins who occupied very different positions on the continuum of political belief. Former Newsweek and Budget Travel deputy editor Peyser and School Choice International CEO Dwyer have quite a story to tell, one that drips with the intrigue of political power and the venom of personal jealousy, copious tears, regret, loss and betrayal. The more famous of the Roosevelt cousins (now and then) is, if course, Eleanor (1884-1962), who married FDR, tolerated his various romantic liaisons, helped with the treatment of his polio and outlived him to become a liberal icon. Alice (18841980), a daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was friendly and affectionate with Eleanor early on, but they both flirted with Franklin, and the more attractive Alice did not take the loss lightly. Though she married Nick Longworth, Alice remained as sexually frisky, and otherwise mischievous, as a libidinous teen, engaging in multiple affairs over the years. Alice also was “ever the guttersnipe,” write the authors, who seem sometimes uncertain of their ultimate opinion of her: Was she a jerk? An opportunist? A happy hedonist? When FDR began his rise, Alice was not aboard. She planted herself firmly on the other side, as a moderately popular newspaper columnist and a highly quotable critic. (Readers might imagine an Ann Coulter with more self-restraint.) The authors’ admiration for Eleanor is patent, and they fully chronicle her human rights advocacy, her tireless travel to experience the lives of others, her prodding of FDR to do something about civil rights and her own popularity (far beyond Alice’s) as a newspaper columnist. The authors, understandably, have occasional trouble shoving aside the looming men to let us see the women. |