Visionary Women

Unburdened by traditional thinking and guided by intuitive insights, four women--Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters--reshaped the public's thinking on the environment, urban planning, primate behavior, and diet, respectively. This book offers clear and concise yet illuminating biographies of each. Cassandra Campbell offers an easy-on-the-ears reading. Her voice virtually revels in the women's accomplishments and shares their frustration with outdated thinking, primarily male. The only drawback is in the Goodall section, when numerous letters are quoted. The attributions are awkwardly placed, which makes the reading slightly choppy at times. But this minor flaw doesn't distract from the overall work. R.C.G. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

February 15, 2018

In this highly readable collective biography of four women who transformed American life during a period of cultural, political, and social change, Barnet (All-Night Party) uses primary and secondary sources to demonstrate how these "accidental revolutionaries," despite working in different fields, influenced values and priorities during the 1950s. With Silent Spring, Rachel Carson effectively began the modern environmental movement. Citizen activist Jane Jacobs condemned the overdevelopment of American cities, and through her work in historic preservation, extolled the virtues of human-scale neighborhoods. Jane Goodall introduced the scientific community to little-known aspects of primate behavior, challenging the notion that animals existed only to be harnessed to serve human needs. When Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA, she altered American eating and created the farm-to-table movement with her celebration of local cuisine. Although none of these women knew one another, Barnet skillfully analyzes the overlapping patterns in their ideas. She uniquely separates their voices from the feminist movement of the period, arguing that, instead, they were trying to save endangered aspects of our culture. VERDICT For informed readers interested in the lives of women and cultural changes of the mid-20th century.--Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2018
A group biography of women who created profound cultural changes.Journalist Barnet (All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930, 2004) focuses on four women who became famous in the 1960s for iconoclastic work in different fields: Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring became a bible of the environmental movement; Jane Jacobs, critic and activist, who championed the cultural richness of city life; Jane Goodall, who shocked anthropologists by discovering chimps using tools; and Alice Waters, who inspired the sustainable food movement with her Berkeley, California, restaurant Chez Panisse. Drawing on the many "superb individual biographies" of these women, who did not know one another, Barnet offers an overview of their lives to point up the "striking overlaps and consonances" in their thinking and "the extent to which these four pioneers were channeling the anxieties of their particular moment." The overlaps seem predictable: like many successful women, each was hardworking, determined, strong-willed, and intelligent. Encountering derision by powerful men, they "tenaciously stood their ground." However, their personalities were vastly dissimilar, and Barnet strains to find convergences. They were all nurturers, she argues, but "instead of material expansion, each emphasized quality of life, the public good, what was sensible and ethical." Moreover, Barnet insists that their perception of the interconnectedness of the living world is a distinctively female predilection for bonding and community; citing one study, she asserts that under stress, women "respond with a desire to connect with others." Goodall "neither envisioned nor experienced the natural world as a hierarchy in which mankind stood at the top, separate and superior." Similarly, Carson and Jacobs experienced their own environments as "an organism that pulsed with life." Barnet deeply admires her subjects, which colors her portrait of the "elfin" Waters, "a remarkable character by any measure," whom she interviewed for this book, and she fails to examine the self-absorption that seems to have fueled Waters' personal and professional conflicts.Informative biographical essays of influential women.

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Starred review from March 1, 2018
Barnet maps the shared ethos that propelled four visionaries whose efforts alerted people to the dangers of unbridled technology, consumerism, and industrial assaults against nature and the human ecosystem, and who offered a new, more holistic way to think about the world, and a more benign way of living in it. Founding modern environmentalist Rachel Carson, city advocate and master strategist Jane Jacobs, born naturalist and primate expert turned global ambassador for the living world Jane Goodall, and Alice Walker, a natural collaborator and pioneering organic restaurateur and sustainability activist, were or are acutely observant and intuitive, recognizing the crucial interconnectedness of life, cherishing beauty, and understanding the deep significance of community. Raised by intellectually nurturing mothers, all four original thinkers and risk-takers can be described as impassioned and tenacious, sharply attuned to the threats of their time, and deeply concerned about the future. With both resonant detail and purposeful distillation, Barnet tells their dramatic stories within the context of the counterculture of 50 years ago, charts the ongoing vitality and influence of their compassionate visions, and asks if we will yet accomplish what these four accidental revolutionaries call on us to do to preserve the web of life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)