From New York Times bestselling author Helen Rappaport comes a biography of Mary Seacole that is testament to her remarkable achievements and corrective to the myths that have grown around her.
I salute Helen Rappaport for taking us to this place so completely with all her imagination, research and thinking ... This is an astonishingly rich story ... Rappaport refreshingly doesn’t claim to know everything. We share her frustrations when the trail runs cold ... This wonderfully informative book presents Seacole in all her roundness: a ministering angel who was no angel; a driven woman who basked in adulation, and was forgotten for 90 years after her death.
... well-researched ... Rappaport leaves no shred of evidence unexamined — her bibliography is 19 pages long with another 47 pages of notes — which allows her to shade the contours of Seacole’s history with facts, details and color. And her work pays off; the Crimean section of In Search of Mary Seacole is the book’s beating heart ... Most interesting is Rappaport’s exploration of the relationship between Seacole and Nightingale ... a comprehensive and much-deserved tribute to an incredible life. Still, the author spends too much time fact-checking The Wonderful Adventures, labeling the memoir a brilliant piece of public relations and a self-promotional travelogue, full of gaps, puzzles, faux-modest evasions and glaring omissions. And at some point Rappaport’s exhaustive research turns exhausting — even to the author.
Rappaport’s book is crisply and intelligently written. She weaves her own research process into the narrative ... In focusing on the gaps in the record, Rappaport arguably skirts around some of the more uncomfortable elements in the story – elements it is important for us to confront more squarely if we are fully to understand the ways in which structural racism worked in the nineteenth century.
