Eminent Bostonians - Thomas H. O'Connor

Eminent Bostonians - Thomas H. O'Connor
Harvard University Press (November 1, 2002)
320 str. ; 24 cm. (15,8 x 3 x 24 cm)
ISBN: 9780674009424
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JEZIK: Engleski


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OPIS:

The history of Boston is inseparable from the life stories of its people--from the Puritans and Native Americans of the seventeenth century to the civic leaders and celebrities of today. In Eminent Bostonians, Thomas H. O'Connor, the preeminent historian of Boston, offers a personal selection of entertaining and enlightening brief lives of notable residents of the city.

Eminent Bostonians includes some 130 figures of local and national significance from the arts, literature, religion, politics, science and medicine, business, education, and sports. Some would be on every list of prominent Bostonians, and some will come as a genuine surprise. As at a large dinner party, part of the fun is seeing who is seated next to whom: the fictional Proper Bostonian George Apley, a creation of John P. Marquand, followed by Anthony Athanas, the Albanian immigrant owner of Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant, followed by Crispus Attucks, a victim of the Boston Massacre in 1770. Or Lucy Stone, a pioneering feminist, next to Gilbert Stuart, the eighteenth-century portraitist, next to John L. Sullivan, the early-twentieth-century champion boxer. Or the Red Sox legend Ted Williams between Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century African-American poet, and the Puritan founder John Winthrop.

And so it goes, from Abigail Adams to Leonard P. Zakim: a gallery of Brahmins and immigrants, workers and scholars, reformers and reactionaries, dreamers and schemers. Eminent Bostonians introduces longtime residents and newcomers alike to their neighbors--those who made Boston what it was and what it is today.

Boston College historian O'Connor knows Boston better than probably anyone else alive today--he's written more than 10 books about it. This time, he gives us an encyclopedia of the men and women who have shaped the city. The usual suspects, such as Cotton Mather, Ted Williams, Julia Child, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, appear next to the more obscure--James Brendan Connolly, America's first Olympic gold medalist; suffragist Julia War Howe, who wrote the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic"; and civil rights activist Melnea Cass. (Greg Lalas Boston Magazine 2002-11-01)

An eclectic collection...arranged alphabetically (from Abigail Adams to Leonard P. Zakim), it provides, as O'Connor puts it, "the pleasures of serendipitous association," with the poet John Boyle O'Reilly standing between Frederick Law Olmstead and Bobby Orr. And it's a collection with its author's heart on his sleeve. (Michael Kenney Boston Globe 2002-11-17)
Review

Eminent Bostonians is a pleasurable book that has the same feel for the city and its characters that O'Connor showed in Boston A to Z. One may dip into the book at random and be drawn into the story of any number of distinctive figures from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. The reader will find the mix satisfying and stimulating because O'Connor has transcended barriers of time, race, gender, ethnicity, and class to present a varied portrait of diverse elements of the city's past and present. This work is inclusive and thoughtful and bears the mark of fine judgment by one well qualified to tell Boston's story. (Lawrence W. Kennedy, author of Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston since 1630)