Source:Hertog, Susan. Dangerous Ambition

Summary

Born in the 1890s on opposite sides of the Atlantic, friends for more than forty years, Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West lived strikingly parallel lives that placed them at the center of the social and historical upheavals of the twentieth century. In Dangerous Ambition, Susan Hertog chronicles the separate but intertwined journeys of these two remarkable women writers, who achieved unprecedented fame and influence at tremendous personal cost.

Review

Although Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) and Rebecca West (1892–1983) knew each for more than 40 years, Hertog (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1999) has more on her mind than their friendship. She’s not even all that interested in their careers, which would have been considered extraordinary under any circumstances but were particularly remarkable for women born duringthe Edwardian era. Thompson, the first female head of a news bureau, was one of the earliest journalists to sound the warning against Hitler’s megalomaniacal plans and remained a respected and influential figure through the end of World War II. West was a feared book critic and essayist who set new standards for long-form journalism with her New Yorker reports on the Nuremberg trials and a lynching case in Greenville, S.C., as well as her esteemed book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These achievements get almost as much attention as West’s tortured affair with H.G. Wells, which produced an embittered-for-life son, Anthony West, and Thompson’s tortured marriage to Sinclair Lewis, which produced an embittered-for-life son, Michael Lewis. In Hertog’s view, “neither Rebecca nor Dorothy knew how to be a woman,” and though she is careful to preface this judgment with the qualifier, “within their contemporary gender stereotypes,” a queasy mix of feminist jargon and women’s-magazine psychologizing can’t disguise the author’s punitive attitude toward these admittedly less-than-perfect wives and dreadful mothers. Their impact on the political and cultural discourse of their times is far more important than their inadequacies as human beings, but Hertog fails to provide a balanced perspective. Pretentious and poorly written, this irritating joint biography squanders a great subject. ~Kirkus Review, 1 Sep 2011

Data Details

• Genre/Form: Biography
• Named Person: Rebecca West; Dorothy Thompson
• Material Type: Biography
• Document Type: Book
• All Authors / Contributors: Susan Hertog
• ISBN: 9780345459862 0345459865 9780345529435 034552943X
• OCLC Number: 701810273
• Description: xv, 493 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm