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Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed Hopes
Review: As an avid reader of history and an Indianapolis resident, I had high hopes for learning more about Madame Walker and the choices that led to her extraordinary success. Lowry clearly did a considerable amount of research, but it rarely translated into a story that captured my imagination or motivated me to finish the book. This was one of those few books that I simply couldn't finish because it was so tedious. You quickly realize the challenges a biographer faces in researching a marginalized black woman in the late 1800s when Lowry painstakingly provides information gleaned from marriage licenses, home ownership records and newspapers of the time. Given the paucity of detail around Walker herself, Lowry could have provided more historical perspective on the cities and times that Walker lived in. When she does, this book becomes interesting (the description of how much work it took to do 18th century laundry was exhausting just to read), but she quickly returns to outlining the train rides Walker might have taken to get from city A to city B, the difficulties she might have had with her spoiled daughter, and when she may or may not have lived or married or divorced husband #1/2/3. In short, a disappointment. Admittedly, I didn't make it to the point where perhaps more of Walker's history was known after she became successful, but no reader should have to struggle through 200-300 pages of hypotheses leavened with the occasional dry fact to get to the meat of a book. If you are interested in learning more about Walker, who had to have been an amazing woman, buy this book used or check it out of the library to see whether you agree with my jaundiced opinion. I'm beginning to realize that the number of used books available (and the price range) on Amazon is a vote-with-your-feet measure of what readers really think of a book.
Rating: 
Summary: A triumph of biography, history, and storytelling.
Review: Beverly Lowry's Her Dream of Dreams is a bold and stunning adventure of mind and spirit-a white woman's attempt to know a black woman born just after the Civil War in the troubled part of the country where she herself came to awareness some seventy years later. Lowry invites her readers along on a process of discovery, an exploration of the fragmentary record that remains in courthouses, libraries, folk memory, music-the record of an unlettered girl, the daughter of slaves, who became the most famous and affluent black woman in America. Such is Lowry's integrity that she never lets us forget how hard, ultimately, it is to know another person, however fiercely we try, but her admiration for Sarah Breedlove, a.k.a. Madame C.J. Walker, never flags. The South is in the pulse of Lowry's blood, and so, while illuminating otherwise dry pieces of information like the layout of Vicksburg, she explores her own heritage of racial burden. Her reader therefore emerges with a more nuanced sense of what it has meant to be black-and white--in America, whether in the Deep South, where Sarah Breedlove spent her formative years, or in the border regions of St. Louis and Indianapolis, or in Harlem, where Madame C.J. Walker was a star. Her Dream of Dreams is exhaustively researched, wonderfully written, and in the end a tribute to a woman of unusual courage and persistence.
Rating:
Summary: This book is a TRAVESTY.
Review: I am not surprised at all by the patronizing tone used by such reviewers as the person from "Houston, Texas USA" (probably a relative of Beverly Lowry) who complains that "It is a little bizarre to read reviews complaining that a second book about Madame C. J. Walker has been published. One of the measures of an individual's importance is the number of books they inspire..." The Houston reviewer continues in the same condescending tone about Alelia Bundles "whining" and asks, "Is there a rule that white guys can have a hundred books about them but Black women only get one each?" No, but thanks for your concern about black women and our history. The goal for any writer or scholar is to write a book when you have something to add to the information that is already available. It doesn't mean that you pretend that Madam Walker's biographer, her journalist great-great granddaughter Alelia Bundles, doesn't exist. The bottom line is that the definitive book on Madam C.J. Walker (On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker) has already been written and Lowry has not contributed to our understanding of this pioneer. Also, to add insult to injury, she manages to cast two other black women pioneers, Ida B. Wells and Mary McLeod Bethune, as women with "skin color like milk with a little tea in it. Their noses are aquiline, and some have soft hair." Mary McLeod Bethune had light skin and soft hair? Oh, okay! Lowry finally had to admit that her description of Bethune was "exaggerated", but still insisted that brown-skinned Ida B. Wells was "lightskinned" in the the Sept-Oct 2003 issue of Black Issues Book Reviews where she admitted to other mistakes in her book. Bundles book was a bestseller and she has no reason to be "jealous" of Lowry's sloppy scholarship, which is surprising considering her other work. Even though a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal thanked Lowry for "bringing Madam Walker back to us" and marveled that it was "astonishing that her name is all but forgotten today", Madam Walker has NEVER been "forgotten" by African-Americans. The only thing that should be forgotten is this book.
Rating:
Summary: More Is Better!
Review: It is a little bizarre to read reviews complaining that a second book about Madame C. J. Walker has been published. One of the measures of an individual's importance is the number of books they inspire, and by that measure Sarah Breedlove (later Madame C. J. Walker) deserves to be the subject of many books, articles, dissertations and term papers. That this is, apparently, only the second major life of Breedlove is proof -- as if we needed it -- that there is a centuries-long history of discrediting and erasing (1) women of achievement (2) Blacks of achievement (3) Black women of achievement. It is exciting to find this book enthusiastically reviewed in the Wall Street Journal as a book about a business pioneer. It is disheartening to me as a feminist and a researcher to read in a later issue of the same paper a whining letter from A'lelia Bundles, complaining that Lowry's book is unnecessary because her own book preceded it. Is there a rule that white guys can have a hundred books about them but Black women only get one each? Lowry's obvious admiration for and liking for the subject of her book is very welcome in an age where biographers sometimes seem so hostile that you wonder why they spent years studying their chosen person. The enthusiam also makes the reader want to know more, and Lowry provides an impressive and generous list of sources she consulted, including the jealous Bundles. Also, there is an honesty in Lowry's book that is refreshing in a time when some important biographies (such as "Dutch," about Reagan) include invented scenes and material. The reader always knows exactly where the writer is coming from. I liked that.
Rating: 
Summary: The best Walker book yet
Review: There have been other books about Madame C.J. Walker but this one is the best. It's not a romance and it doesn't offer a glossy,worshipful picture either. This solid biography tells the story of one woman who triumphed over incredible adversity. In a time when most black people were miserably poor Madame Walker built a fortune. The book tells what Madame did right and what she did wrong and it's the only one that really gets into what went wrong with her daughter and where the money went after Madame's death. Some people have objected to the book because the author is not black but what does that have to do with the ability to produce good scholarship? If you're interested in this fascinating woman and the turbulent times she lived in, give this book a chance.
Rating:
Summary: A triumph of biography, history, and storytelling.
Review: Think you wouldn't be interested in a book about a woman who got rich selling black hair care products? Guess again. This book does not immerse the reader in cosmetics but is about hard work and its rewards, the attainment of wealth by a woman who had nothing, and the ways she spent her money, showing off as well as trying to help her race. The book traces the career of Madam C.J. Walker, child of former slaves, from Mississippi washerwoman to nationally known businesswoman and philanthropist. The author, Beverly Lowry, locates this life amid the customs, economy, and politics (black and mainstream) of the years between 1874 and 1920. She invites the reader to join her on the trail of her subject, about whom much is known but much is unknown, and in parallel keeps us abreast of the state of race relations from the annual number of lynchings to the attitude of whoever was president at the time to the changing role of black women in business. The book is full of word pictures. Where Walker can be definitively placed at a particular time, Lowry gives us a clear view with enough details to put us at the scene. We see, for example, the week-long laundry process of the 1880s, what the regimen was when she stayed at the Battle Creek Sanatorium (founded by J. Kellogg of cereal fame), her travels in the automobiles of long-gone makes that she drove for hundreds of miles at a time promoting her products, and we stand with her when Booker T. Washington visits, the culmination of years of effort to be recognized by him as an important businessperson and "race woman." These are swift strokes, enough but not too much, and then Lowry moves on. Her Dream of Dreams is a perfect marriage of imagination and research--facts unearthed by painstaking attention to detail, and conclusions drawn in just the right narrative tone. Lowry's is a voice of rich language and metaphor, a voice resonant with appreciation of Walker's character and achievement that does not fail to mark her limitations. Overall, Her Dream of Dreams is a good read--a triumph of biography, history, and just plain storytelling.
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