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4.39 AVERAGE
4.39 AVERAGE
I spent a month every evening learning about Alii. At the end of this month and the book, I feel like part of my soul is missing. Her life was so interesting. She was such a trickster. I think the story itself was very long and not tied together really at all. I still loved everything I learned about her.
I wanted to like this book more than I did, but still a fascinating story. It started to drag toward the middle, and by the time it picked up at the end, I was ready for it to be over. Will definitely pick up a book of Tiptree stories soon, I've only read a couple.
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
Moderate: Colonisation
Minor: Ableism
As others have pointed out, Phillips fails her subject in some spectacular ways--but Sheldon's life is so damned fascinating that I almost didn't mind.
A fascinating read. I haven't read any of Tiptree's work but I'll try extra hard now to get my hands on it. Alice B. Sheldon lived an extraordinary life, made all the more interesting by her ability to view herself and the world around through a critical lens that offered much insight. Julie Phillips was able to get first hand reports from many of the people in Sheldon's life which make this as 'complete' a biography as you could wish for. She also writes with sensitivity, compassion and great skill. I personally like reading SF (and feel I don't really read enough) but I would recommend this book to anybody wanting to read about, and be inspired by, an incredible life.
Fascinating biography of James Tiptree, Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, whose colorful life and inscrutable, gender-obscuring career as an award-winning SF author, and finally tragic suicide give an incredible amount of insight into her work. Very readable and interesting bio.
I've never been a big reader of biographies; it's fiction that has always turned me inside out, held up the mirror and made me look long and hard at myself and the world. I never expected to find that sliver of kinship-feeling in this kind of a work. Julie Phillips is masterful in her exploration of Sheldon/Tiptree's life; she's helped make sharply tangible the shapes I'd felt under Tiptree's prose when I first read it. One of the best things I've read in the past few years.
This is an amazing biography about an extraordinary woman. I have too many feels that I can't coherently express.
Julie Phillips spent ten years researching to bring us the definitive story of Alice Bradley Sheldon, AKA Racoona Sheldon, AKA James TipTree Jr., AKA several other alias' over the years. In short, Phillips does an amazing job of presenting Sheldon in a way that is sympathetic without pulling punches, that paints a picture of a woman in all her complexity and lets us consider the mystery of a person who could never really figure out herself who or what she was.
Sheldon lived a long, fascinating life - from her early days as a painter in a disasterous, abusive marriage, through working for military intelligence through WWII, to working for the new post WWII intelligence agency just being set up, the CIA.
What she is most well known for however is for impersonating a man for ten years, carrying on correspondance relationships with some of Science Fiction's greatest writers, and writing stories herself that place her firmly within the top tiers of the canon, Phillips covers this time in her life especially with a discerning eye and lots of quotes from letters and diary entries.
The book flows so beautifully, it would be easy to overlook the amount of work and love that has been put into it, making sure this complicated, haunted and tragic woman was fairly and fully painted. The book is a delight to read, by turns inspiring, depressing, horrifying and astonishing.
Highly recommended to all lovers of Science Fiction history, or with an interest in the issues a brilliant woman had to face living in the 20th century, and what she could achieve in spite of them.
Sheldon lived a long, fascinating life - from her early days as a painter in a disasterous, abusive marriage, through working for military intelligence through WWII, to working for the new post WWII intelligence agency just being set up, the CIA.
What she is most well known for however is for impersonating a man for ten years, carrying on correspondance relationships with some of Science Fiction's greatest writers, and writing stories herself that place her firmly within the top tiers of the canon, Phillips covers this time in her life especially with a discerning eye and lots of quotes from letters and diary entries.
The book flows so beautifully, it would be easy to overlook the amount of work and love that has been put into it, making sure this complicated, haunted and tragic woman was fairly and fully painted. The book is a delight to read, by turns inspiring, depressing, horrifying and astonishing.
Highly recommended to all lovers of Science Fiction history, or with an interest in the issues a brilliant woman had to face living in the 20th century, and what she could achieve in spite of them.
This is one of the best biographies (and specifically writer biographies) that I've read in quite some time. It contained a lot of interesting food for thought about gender, sexuality, writing, science, and mental illness...in no particular order. I'm really looking forward to reading her fiction. I think I'm going to take a few weeks before I do, though, to put some distance/a filter between what I read about her writing and my own future thoughts on it.