RaveThe Los Angeles TimesMapping women along a loose timeline, Hessel covers huge swaths of history in lively, lucid prose, positioning these artists within (or against) dominant genres. She documents not just what they created but also the obstacles they surmounted in doing so ... Almost every piece Hessel references appears in a photo, most in color and some in luscious, two-page spreads ... Hessel’s sweeping (though Western-heavy) 500-year-history is free of both academic jargon and essentialist rhetoric ... But in her (generally effective) effort to condense, Hessel occasionally drops key plot points ... Even so, what Hessel achieves here is extraordinary ... [A] spellbinding book.
Katie Hickman
PositiveThe Los Angeles Times... riveting ... Hickman’s writing is exquisite; her background as a novelist brings these women into dramatic relief. She has a keen eye for detail ... And yet, the logic of whom she includes is perplexing. Some of these women’s sagas are already well-documented...With a clearer through-line, these stories might offer a stronger antidote to the calcified mythology that gave us Gunsmoke and Yellowstone or, failing that, a better sense of how they helped shape our national identity ... Even so, this is an irresistible crazy quilt of Western history. A meticulous scholar, Hickman draws on diaries and memoirs to immerse us in these women’s lives and offer important correctives. Brave Hearted is an alternate history of a frontier that was home for some and a fantasy for others — a liminal space that existed in fact and folklore long after the Census Bureau decided it was gone.
Catherine McCormack
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksThe subject could fill an encyclopedia; in Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies, historian Catherine McCormack narrows it down to women in art history and visual culture ... While her analysis of historical painting and sculpture is whip smart and probing, her modern corollaries are oddly random ... In the end, my frustration with these oversights won out, not least because I would have enjoyed seeing where McCormack, an astute critic, would go if her book hadn’t topped out at 223 pages.
