Lara Feigel

A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women Rachel CuskThe five of them - Stella, Priss, Kay, Helena and Polly - met at university, their lives full of lazy afternoons and late nights. Friendship seemed simple and there was such pleasure in the endless talk and in just living alongside each other.Now the women are turning forty and theyre finding that a shared past can sometimes be a burden. Theyre all struggling to navigate the ways in which their lives have differed from the plans they made themselves and the hopes they had for each other. In the past, solidarity came easily, but now they compare lovers, husbands, jobs, children and sofas, asking how the choices theyve made or failed to make hold up. As marriages end and secrets emerge, they wonder whether these people, the ones who know so much about them, are really the ones they can confide in.

A GREAT ROAR OF A BOOK Sunday TimesWe think that our children belong to us, but families are fragile things. Every day, for over a century, children have been moved between homes because of law cases that decide their fates. Yet child custody is curiously absent from history books and from how we generally understand our world. Lara Feigels groundbreaking book shows the fraught, complex territory of child custody to have been one of the vital battlegrounds of modern history and culture. Custody is the story of seven women Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna OBrien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of matrimony in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts. Its a book of dramatic storytelling, and of blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation. Each chapter immerses the reader in the life and times and struggles of these fascinating, charismatic, complex women and their children. All of these women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too writers, lovers, or activists and they and their children were punished for these attempts. Feigel has been deep in the archives, looking into thousands of other cases in each place and time, and shes been sitting in on the family courts in the present. So alongside these central figures, the book presents a teeming picture of fractured family life in Britain, Europe and North America across two hundred years, offering a major new interpretation of how our modern culture has evolved. And Custody is an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care. This book is of urgent interest to anyone concerned with womens roles in the world and how institutions fail them. Ultimately its a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet. Custody cases can seem in these chapters to be quintessentially tragic, but the stories of these passionate, conflicted women also make us want to figure out how to do things better.

Una brillante y novedosa visión del proceso de desnazificación de Alemania después de la segunda guerra mundial.El amargo sabor de la victoria narra la fascinante historia de cómo algunos de los escritores y artistas mas imaginativos del siglo xx afrontaron una de las mayores catastrofes historicas de su tiempo. Tras la rendicion de Alemania en 1945, y de forma paralela al proceso de reconstruccion del pais iniciado por los aliados, estos sintieron la necesidad de reconstruir la cultura y la historia alemanas, de las que los nazis se habian apropiado. Este reinicio tenia que ser intelectual, ademas de material: la desnazificacion y la reeducacion iban a ser centrales para la futura paz, y las artes se hicieron cruciales para modelar una forma de vida alternativa menos basada en el militarismo.