One
of 12,000 female naval and marine enlistees during the First World War that
freed up more men for shipboard duty, Handel’s mother, Florence Gluck, was both
a feminist pioneer and an unabashed patriot. Although the Navy desperately
needed stenographers, typists, translators and other office help to deal with
the huge amount of war- generated paperwork, they had a problem. Every enlisted
yeoman had to be assigned to a ship and women were not allowed on ships. In
grand bureaucratic fashion the Navy solved their problem by assigning all
12,000 women to a sunken tugboat from the Civil War era. Thus the title of the
book! For more of my review go here: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2013/02/tugboat-warrior-by-ruth-d-handel.html
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Thursday, February 28, 2013
Review of Tugboat Warrior by Ruth D. Handel
Ruth
D. Handel, in her book of poems Tugboat Warrior, reframes her mother’s historic
life in a series of personal, sometimes achingly personal, poetic fragments,
each one set at a slightly different angle. The collection expresses a line of
narration that Ernest Hemingway would call, “one true sentence.” Its multiple
facets of heartfelt observation, positive and also negative, deliver this
truthful sense of a heroic, flawed, and driven woman.
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