Wall Street Journal Calls Harriet Reisen’s Alcott Bio one of 2009′s “Standout Selections” that “Amazed and Impressed Reviewers”
The Journal’s December 18th article quoted Melanie Kirkpatrick’s review of Harriet Reisen’s “enchanting portrait of the author… who exhibited many of the qualities that have made her best-known work so beloved: such old-fashioned virtues as selflessness, self-control and duty to family.”
Harriet Reisen reveals tribulations of narrating Alcott audiobook
Inside the Audiobook Studio: Harriet Reisen
Louisa May Alcott’s biographer gives her own voice to an audiobook that brilliantly reveals the woman behind novels that have so strongly influenced generations of readers.
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Bookpage lists Alcott book in Top Ten Nonfiction Books of the Year
This year’s picks include a little of everything, with an emphasis on memoir—it was a good year for getting personal.
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C-SPAN interview with Harriet Reisen
Author Harriet Reisen talks about her book, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. Watch the C-SPAN Interview
Alcott doc voted Top Video 2009
Alcott doc voted Top Video 2009 by ALA’s Booklist editors
Alcott biography on New Hampshire Public Radio’s List of the Year’s Best
Alcott biography on New Hampshire Public Radio’s List of the Year’s Best
Cultural Critic Julia M. Klein calls book “intimate…moving and sympathetic”
“In Little Women, the autobiographical classic sobbed over by generations of young girls, Louisa May Alcott softened her family’s tribulations to suit Victorian sensibilities. Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (A John MacRae Book/Henry Holt and Company) fills in the rest of the picture, describing a life more complicated, unconventional and tragic than Alcott’s fans might have imagined.” – Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
Booklist calls Alcott film “clever… stunning… entertaining & instructive”
Booklist 11/15/09
Booklist’s starred review says “magnificent” biography brings Louisa “to whirling life.”
Reisen’s love for Little Women and curiosity about the author became a grand obsession, inspiring her to write the screenplay for the first Alcott documentary and this uniquely vital and dramatic biography. Reisen’s cinematic eye brings Louisa to whirling life as a coltish, fearless girl of “explosive exuberance” and sharp intellect, while she portrays Louisa’s parents with compassion and criticism: blue-blooded Abigail, continually pregnant, impossibly burdened, yet resilient and innovative; utopian Bronson, famous for his progressive ideas, infamous for his incompetence. Alcott inherited her mother’s pragmatism and courage and a touch of her father’s vision and madness and bravely struggled through a crazy-quilt childhood of wretched poverty and social privilege—their closest friends were the luminaries Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, whom Alcott loved. She supported the family, laboring as a laundress, teaching, and serving as an army nurse in the Civil War while “training herself as a businesswoman as well as a fast, versatile pen for hire.” Reisen analyzes Louisa’s great pleasure in writing lucrative pulp fiction, her sacrifices, adventures, and brilliant career. Here, finally, is Alcott whole, a trailblazing woman grasping freedom in a time of sexual inequality and war, a survivor of cruel tragedies, a quintessential American writer. Reisen’s magnificent biography will be in high demand when PBS premieres her American Masters documentary. — Donna Seaman
