“The Cure for Women,” by Lydia Reeder (St. Martin’s Press)
In 1871, Horatio Storer, a prominent antiabortionist and anti-feminist, published “The Origins of Insanity in Women.” He noted that removal of the ovaries would cure women who “have become habitually thievish, profane, or obscene, despondent of self-indulgent, shrewish or fatuous.” He also found them too incompetent to become doctors.
Storer was not alone, as Denver author Lydia Reeder writes in her groundbreaking book “The Cure for Women.” Medical schools refused admittance to women. (Harvard didn’t change its policy until 1945.) Medical associations refused to recognize them. Hospitals turned down their applications to practice.
Female patients themselves were subjected to degrading treatment. Even women with gynecological problems were examined through their clothes. They were subjected to quack cures, such as the infamous “rest cure,” where a wife might be institutionalized at the whim of her husband. Painful treatment was common. As the cursed descendants of Eve, women deserved it. One slave woman was operated on 30 times.
Into all this came Mary Putnam Jacobi, whose lifelong struggle to practice medicine opened doors for others of her gender. Jacobi came to understand that “female inferiority was a fiction propaganda devised to keep women isolated and bound to a domestic sphere of existence,” Reeder writes in this superb biography of Jacobi, set against a background of women’s 19th-century fight to practice medicine.
In mid-life, Jacobi met a doctor as accomplished and as liberal as she was. But even then, she faced prejudice. When children arrived, he expected his wife to put aside much of her work to stay at home.
“Cooler Than Cool,” by C.M. Kushins (Mariner Books)
Casual readers of Elmore Leonard may be turned off by the minutia in this biography of the popular American writer. But true Leonard fans will love the heavily detailed account, with page after page of facts about the author’s 45 books, countless movie scripts and short stories.
From the time he read his first Hemingway novel, Leonard was obsessed with writing fiction. He worked full-time as a Detroit advertising agency copywriter and later executive. Still, he got up early every morning to write and kept a yellow pad in his desk drawer at the office to jot down ideas or sentences. He began writing Westerns for pulp magazines, then graduated to novels. When interest in Westerns waned, Leonard turned to crime stories. His fans ranged from Quentin Tarantino, who shoplifted a Leonard novel when he was a teenager, to Elton John.
Leonard was an alcoholic whose drinking began in high school. Alcohol played a part in ending his first marriage. His second wife helped him sober up. After she died, Leonard took a third wife. That marriage ended in divorce 10 years later. By all accounts, Leonard was close to his five children. One typed his manuscripts; another became a novelist.
Kushins gives glimpses into Leonard’s work habits, including a list of his 10 rules for writing. Among them: “Never open a book with weather.”
“Bone Hash,” by Skye Griffith (Artemesia Publishing)
Archaeologist Aideen Connor is awakened in her hotel room by a man who demands the return of a photo he left on the nightstand the night before. The following day, as Aideen travels from her dig on the Hopi mesas to Taos, she encounters the threatening man again. He forces her off the road and is ready to kill her when she’s rescued by local Indians.
Frightened, Aideen returns to the dig. She’s just discovered a 1,000-year-old bone hash, a collection of fractured bones that suggest cannibalization. But when she returns to Hopi, she finds the cache has been stolen. The bone theft causes Aideen to lose her job, a blow to the young archaeologist, who is just recovering from the tragic death of her husband. What’s more, she discovers the photo that the man who tried to kill her is after is of a recently murdered Hopi woman — his wife — and he’s still determined to get it.
All this is connected, of course, in a mystery by Denver author Griffith. “Bone Hash” offers more than just a whodunit. Griffith writes in detail about the Hopis, their history and legends. She touches on the clash between Hopis and Navajos when she introduces a Navajo lawman who sets out to investigate the attempted motel break-in but ends up protecting Aideen. Griffith also describes in vivid detail the desolate Hopi landscape and the villages atop the three mesas.