Wall Street Journal Calls Harriet Reisen’s Alcott Bio one of 2009’s “Standout Selections” that “Amazed and Impressed Reviewers”
The Journal’s December 18th article quoted Melanie Kirkpatrick’s review of Harriet Reisen’s “enchanting portrait of the author… who exhibited many of the qualities that have made her best-known work so beloved: such old-fashioned virtues as selflessness, self-control and duty to family.”
Bookpage lists Alcott book in Top Ten Nonfiction Books of the Year
This year’s picks include a little of everything, with an emphasis on memoir—it was a good year for getting personal.
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Alcott biography on New Hampshire Public Radio’s List of the Year’s Best
Alcott biography on New Hampshire Public Radio’s List of the Year’s Best
Booklist calls Alcott film “clever… stunning… entertaining & instructive”
Booklist 11/15/09
Booklist’s starred review says “magnificent” biography brings Louisa “to whirling life.”
Reisen’s love for Little Women and curiosity about the author became a grand obsession, inspiring her to write the screenplay for the first Alcott documentary and this uniquely vital and dramatic biography. Reisen’s cinematic eye brings Louisa to whirling life as a coltish, fearless girl of “explosive exuberance” and sharp intellect, while she portrays Louisa’s parents with compassion and criticism: blue-blooded Abigail, continually pregnant, impossibly burdened, yet resilient and innovative; utopian Bronson, famous for his progressive ideas, infamous for his incompetence. Alcott inherited her mother’s pragmatism and courage and a touch of her father’s vision and madness and bravely struggled through a crazy-quilt childhood of wretched poverty and social privilege—their closest friends were the luminaries Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, whom Alcott loved. She supported the family, laboring as a laundress, teaching, and serving as an army nurse in the Civil War while “training herself as a businesswoman as well as a fast, versatile pen for hire.” Reisen analyzes Louisa’s great pleasure in writing lucrative pulp fiction, her sacrifices, adventures, and brilliant career. Here, finally, is Alcott whole, a trailblazing woman grasping freedom in a time of sexual inequality and war, a survivor of cruel tragedies, a quintessential American writer. Reisen’s magnificent biography will be in high demand when PBS premieres her American Masters documentary. — Donna Seaman
People Magazine asks, “Who Knew?”
“The Little Women author smoked hash, had a crush on Thoreau and may have been manic depressive,” says People’s November 23, 2009 issue.
“Who knew?”
Washington Paper Lauds Biography
“Ms. Reisen is a master storyteller, enthused Marion Elizabeth Rodgers of The Washington Times about the author of Louisa May Alcott. “With compassion and insight, she propels readers on to the next adventure, sacrifice, tragedy and triumph… .that happy sense of discovery is your reward in reading this masterful work by this talented new biographer.”
Birthday Book Give-Away
Enter for your chance to win a signed copy of “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women”.
Wall Street Journal: Reisen’s “full and vivid portrait”
As Harriet Reisen’s enchanting biography reminds us, Alcott patterned the March family on her own and Jo on herself . . . . [Her life] is richly examined in Ms. Reisen’s full and vivid portrait.”—Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal
