Simon Cordery

Although this is the newest book on Mother Jones, and thus takes advantage of all the research to come before it, the book reads like a first draft. The author clearly did his homework and has a lot of good information to share, and a good story to tell, there's quite a few things that a good edit would have fixed.

One is musings over how Mother Jones would have felt about X, Y, or Z. Without documentation, the author is only relying on stereotypes of women to infer how Jones dealt with the loss of her children or the motives that led her to become "Mother." Some speculation can be insightful in areas we don't understand, but in this book it was excessive and not always clearly noted as speculation.

Another is the repetitiveness here. Most chapters begin by repeating the same paragraphs that closed the chapter before. The author's theories (useful) are repeated both before, after and during events.

I've got to give this a low rating because of the writing/editing, but I don't doubt the factual information in this book. The author's contribution to the study of Mother Jones is a scouring of newspaper reports surrounding events of her life. Cordery does a good job of weighing the truthfulness of reports with their bias and effect on public perception. With this he's able to draft a human portrait of a woman who portrays herself as a mythical figure.… (mehr)