The title is a pun: in 1676, Cornelia van Nijenroode married Johan Bitter in “Batavia” (then capital of the Dutch East Indies, now Jakarta) and thereafter tried unsuccessfully to break the bonds of matrimony, first in Indonesia and then in the Netherlands.
The story is such a page-turner because it links Dutch sources in both Indonesia and the Netherlands with material from Japan (where Cornelia was born to a Japanese mother and a Dutch father).
It includes a family portrait from 1663, in which Cornelia stands proudly beside her first husband, a prosperous Dutch official, with their two daughters (left in the family portrait) and two of their enslaved people (right). This book tells her astonishing life story from penury (as an orphan) to wealth and then (thanks to her Bitter experience) back to penury.
In 17th-century Batavia, Cornelia von Nijenroode, the daughter of a geisha and a Dutch merchant in Japan, was known as ""Otemba"" (meaning ""untamable""), which made her a heroine to modern Japanese feminists. A wealthy widow and enterprising businesswoman who had married an unsuccessful Dutch lawyer for social reasons found that just after their wedding, husband and wife were at each other's throats. Cornelia insisted on maintaining independent power of disposal over her assets, but legally her husband had control over her possessions and refused to grante her permission to engage in commerce. He soon began using blackmail, smuggling, and secret…
Born in 1947, the author is four years younger than me. Although she grew up as a girl in the US, not as a boy in the UK like me, I was spellbound by the chapters about her participation as a young student trying to desegregate the South, starting in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.
I bought the book on the strength of a single sentence quoted in a review. She described how, as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, she watched on TV as the police brutally dispersed the first march in Selma: “From that moment, I knew I had to do something. If I did not stand up, if I did not act after witnessing this, I would be ashamed forever.”
From that moment, I knew I had to buy her book. I have no regrets.
A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions―not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives.
A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of…
I knew the names of the nine already: the scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Eugene Wigner; the photographers Robert Capa and André Kertesz; the film-makers Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and Alexander Korda (The third man); the writer Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon).
I did not know that they were all Hungarians who fled to Britain and America because they were all Jews (albeit lapsed).
Isolated by both language and ethnicity, they learned early that their choice was “innovate or die” – and their innovations would shape the world in which we live.
Marton, herself a Hungarian exile, uses her language skills and her insights to provide a riveting collective biography of the nine and their breathtaking journey from Budapest to the Anglo-Saxon World. Hitler shook the tree, and we picked up the fruit.
Author Kati Marton follows these nine over the decades as they flee fascism and anti-Semitism, seek sanctuary in England and America, and set out to make their mark. The scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner enlist Albert Einstein to get Franklin Roosevelt to initiate the development of the atomic bomb. Along with John von Neuman, who pioneers the computer, they succeed in achieving that goal before Nazi Germany, ending the Second World War, and opening a new age. Arthur Koestler writes the most important anti-Communist novel of the century, Darkness at Noon. Robert Capa is the first photographer…
Global Crisis examines how a fatal synergy between climate change and human inflexibility eradicated one-third of the planet’s human population and unleashed an unparalleled spate of wars, invasions, and revolutions. Personal accounts and scientific data alike show how extreme weather disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests, bringing hunger, malnutrition, forced migration, and disease, and then, as material conditions worsened, precipitated economic chaos, political anarchy, and social collapse.
Although humans played no part in causing this episode of climate change, they still suffered and died from the primary effect: a 2ºC fall in global temperatures. The fact that today we face an increase of 2ºC will not reduce either the extreme weather events associated with changes of this magnitude, or the adverse consequences for humanity.
