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It's feels weird to describe a 700 page book as the very beginning of a conversation, but this is, and I think the authors meant for it to be. I haven’t read anything in a long time that stirred so many questions up in my mind and also gave me such hope for humanity's future. I'm also frustrated because so many of the questions I now have don't yet have answers. (Also, I realize I need to read up on feminist anthropologists' theories about the origins of patriarchy--which is at the heart of this book even if it isn't explored in depth--and that will be a big project.)

The book is repetitive and intimidatingly long. I am open to rebuttals of its points, and I am not knowledgeable enough to know if the authors' interpretations are correct (though they seem well-argued to me). But I loved reading this book, and I really hope Graeber and Wengrow are right.

I received an ARC from the publisher. (Though it didn't arrive till after the publication date!)

A well-researched and well-written overview of many of the significant female members of the English branch of the Rothschild family. It's a bit overwhelming in both length and scope, but the writing is readable and engaging enough that it never feels like a chore to get through. It's really quite impressive how much the whole thing hangs together instead of feeling choppy or cobbled together.

The women of the Rothschild family, both those born into it and those who married into it, were interesting, vivid people, and their personalities are well drawn in this book. Livingstone is even-handed and clear-sighted about her subjects and about their (often complicated) relationships and foibles as well as their strengths and accomplishments.

The book ends up portraying the trajectory of possibilities for upper-class women through the 19th and 20th centuries. The women start out being bound by domestic concerns, then becoming society and (increasingly) political hostesses, pulling strings behind the scenes. They take on charitable and outright political work of the temperance/suffrage/poor relief kind, moving more and more center stage instead of behind the scenes. The 20th century women finally got to pursue careers; while Nica's role as a patron of American jazz is flashier, I was more impressed by Miriam's wide-ranging interests and accomplishments and Rosie's feminist criticism.

There's the usual stuff you can expect from family biographies of this sort--marriages both good and bad (though mostly bad, to be honest--whether they were arranged or chosen didn't seem to make much difference), tragedies and triumphs, feuds and forgiveness. It was sometimes difficult to hold who was who in my head as we moved from one generation into the next (and it was always difficult to keep any sort of understanding of the family tree!), but that was a necessary evil for a book with a scope as large as this one.

The question of the women's relationships to their own Jewishness surfaces and submerges throughout the book; I would have loved more of that, but given the lacuna in the records, that probably wasn't possible. I'm going to be spending a lot of time pondering the ways in which they were just like their Christian peers in the upper echelons of British society--and all the ways in which they very much were not.

I received a free copy in a giveaway this book!

A meticulously researched if somewhat dry account of one of the earliest experiences of sub-arctic Europeans trying to explore--and survive--in polar regions. If you want a blow-by-blow of sea voyages and days trying to survive in extreme conditions, this book is exactly what you're looking for.. If you're looking for something psychologically rich, this isn't the book for you.

The first third of the book was the background of the original voyages and as such wasn't of much interest to me. I don't really care to read day-by-day accounts of setting up and then going on a sea voyage. Pitzer did do a good job of grounding the entire expedition in the context of the emergence of the Dutch Republic, but I found the first third slow going.

Finally in the second third we reached the actually ship-getting-bound-in-the-ice of the title and the ensuing survivalist stuff and things picked up. We had the usual suspects threatening the survival of the crew (extreme temperatures, scurvy, polar bears--so many polar bears!--malnutrition, the crew's total and complete lack of understanding of polar conditions). The last third was about the journey in two small rowboats hundreds of miles through polar seas back to safety. Perilous stuff.

The reason I found the book so dry, though, is because unlike most polar exploration/surviving-in-extreme-temperatures books I've read, this one doesn't even really try to communicate the emotional cost of the adventure. We'll get sentences like, "and then these scurvy-ridden men who hadn't eaten in three days had to drag their whole ship hundreds of yards across ice, and it was harrowing," and...that's it. I'm into this genre for the psychological stuff, and that was almost entirely missing here.

However, I both understand and respect why it wasn't present. Unlike all the Victorian/Edwardian primary sources for most polar exploration books, the sources here were all Renaissance-era and decidedly less emotional. All that "madhouse at the end of the world" stuff just isn't present in the original sources and I respect that Pitzer didn't try to invent it. She kept strictly to what the sources actually told us, so the dryness of the book wasn't Pitzer's fault.

But because this book wasn't what I wanted in a polar exploration story, if the book had been much longer, I might have struggled to finish it. As it was, the book was short enough and readable enough that it was an easy read. And a shout-out to whoever agreed to include so many maps. They were so helpful!


[As an aside, what is it with men and violently reacting to every new thing they encounter? They didn't have to attack every single polar bear they ever saw! They didn't have to try to kill walruses they weren't even going to eat! What is their deal?]