This is an interesting history/biography that’s both accessible and scholarly. Ulrich uses the bare-bones journal of a midwife in early New England, kept from age about 50 through her late 70s, to illuminate the social history of early Maine, as well as Martha Ballard’s own life and family drama. Ulrich clearly digs deep, cross-referencing many sources including official documents and other diarists from the area. The result is surprisingly rich, and includes some major events (a backwoods rebellion, a mass murder) as well as the details of Ballard’s life (visiting neighbors, gardening, delivering babies, marrying off her daughters and left in old age unhappily relying upon her son). Some of the information is surprising or illuminating: for instance, that 40% of first babies were conceived out of wedlock (overwhelmingly the parents soon married, however). Some of it seems fairly obvious now, though perhaps less so 30 years ago when this book was published: for instance, the fact that the women of Ballard’s small farming community had independent social and economic lives, typically visiting separately from their husbands and carrying on their own small-scale transactions with their neighbors. Meanwhile, Ballard had an eventful career in midwifery, often rushing from one home to another when multiple women were in labor at once, walking across frozen rivers or canoeing across partially-frozen ones to reach her patients. Ulrich presents her as part of a complicated network of “social medicine,” which ranged from neighbor women who showed up to assist at births or sit with the sick, through midwives who also acted as doctors, nurses, apothecaries and morticians depending on the situation, up through physicians, who were only beginning to monopolize the practice of medicine. In Ballard's lifetime doctors and midwives seem to have worked together mostly harmoniously – she witnessed several autopsies at the doctors’ invitation – though they sometimes butted heads. I would have liked to see a little more analysis of the medical techniques Ballard used. She was pretty clearly a practitioner of traditional rather than experimental medicine, but she also had a fantastic success rate for the time, losing only 5 mothers out of 1000 births. (Contrast with hospitals in London and Dublin, which had far higher maternal death rates, one as high as 1 in 5.) Ulrich mostly dismisses this with the notion that birth is a natural rather than a medical event, over-dramatized in fiction (though, 1 in 24 of the babies Ballard delivered were dead at birth or soon after). But what could those hospitals have been doing so badly wrong? Perhaps New England's colder climate and sparser population, making the spread of disease more difficult, was a major factor here? Overall Ulrich is more focused on the role of women in medicine than the effectiveness of the medicine, but I don’t think discussion of the latter would have undermined the impressiveness of the former at all. Yes, Ballard’s treatments included things like putting onions on people’s feet, but this was a time period when the most celebrated treatment promoted by the male medical establishment was bloodletting, which goes beyond just ineffective to be actually harmful. Overall, I would definitely recommend this to those who are interested as a strong piece of original scholarship that’s also quite interesting and accessible to those who enjoy popular history. Ulrich’s ability to draw meaning out of what might first appear to be a dry and abbreviated record is nothing short of impressive.

'Loving Her Alphas' by Ari Thatcher.
Rayne Alder has inherited Shady Pines Lodge from her grandfather after his death. Rayne hasn't been back there since she was younger and heads there now. Rayne had thought to turn into a Modern Day Resort. But on her drive there she is attacked by a Wolf and almost killed if not for another Wolf. Rayne made her way to a nearby cabin that belongs to the Whitmores brothers, Caleb, Nick, and Dalton. Jagger and his pack of brothers and the Whitmores had all agreed that they didn't want normal humans around and that they would scare Rayne away. But Jagger and his group too it to far...they actually tried to kill her and not just send her running. But now the brothers get to Know Rayne while they take care of her and they learn that she is their mate.
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If journalism is the first draft of history, then Andy Beckett's description of Britain in the early 1980s is history version 1.5. Using a range of memoirs, contemporary accounts and personal interviews with man of the key individuals from the era, he offers a idiosyncratic description of the period that is leavened with his own memories of his life in Britain during that time. His argument is a somewhat contrarian one: that these years were not just the beginnings of a lurch rightward as has often been relieved, but a time of dynamic change in many other respects. In Beckett's view people like "Red Ken" Livingston and the Greenham Common protestors were in every respect as much an embodiment of the transformation taking place as was Margaret Thatcher, and with a legacy nearly as important to making Britain the country it is today. His analysis is provocative, as is his highlighting of how much of this change was built upon the achievements of the previous decades rather than reflecting a rejection of them. For anyone interested in learning ore about the history of Britain during this era this is an excellent book to read, one that hopefully Beckett will build upon with a successor volume that describes further how the decade unfolded from this provocative start.

The use of Stanton, De Pizan, and Woolf to tie everything together is great.  I would argue about her definition of well behaved as it applied to Judith Shakespeare, but still an interesting read.

Few prime ministers loom as large in the British historical imagination as does Margaret Thatcher. Idolized by her supporters and demonized by her detractors, her historical image is as much myth as it is reality, one created in part by Thatcher's own efforts to shape her public profile in politically appealing terms. One of the great achievements of John Campbell in his excellent first volume of his biography of Thatcher is his success in separating the myths from the story of her life and assessing their contribution to defining her image.

This Campbell does starting with the image from the subtitle, that of 'the grocer's daughter'. He skillfully deconstructs this legend, noting that Margaret Roberts's upbringing was neither as humble nor as idyllic as she made it seem and that her father, Alfred was not the hero she would later make him out to be. What emerges instead is a hard-working and determined young woman who pursued politics from a young age. Her career was facilitated greatly by her marriage to Denis Thatcher, who provided emotional and financial support that was indispensable to her rise in politics.

Thatcher's work ethic and drive soon won her office in Edward Heath's cabinet as Secretary of State for Education. Here she gained firsthand exposure to the Whitehall bureaucracy for the first time, an experience that left her less than impressed. Yet even after Heath's defeat in the two successive elections of 1974, his position appeared secure enough to make a challenge to his leadership of the Conservative Party seem foolhardy, and Thatcher's challenge came after more prominent Tory leaders passed on the opportunity. Yet her campaign tapped a deep vein of resentment, and she triumphed against all expectations.

Throughout this, Campbell notes the fortuitous confluence of events that aided her rise. This was best illustrated by her assumption of the Conservative Party leadership at the moment when an opening for her ideology emerged with the breakdown of the democratic socialist consensus. With unemployment swelling to levels not seen since the 1930s, Thatcher was able to exploit the inability of the Labour government to grapple with the problem. The book ends with the Conservative victory in the 1979 general election and Thatcher embarking on her transformative 11-year premiership, the subject of his next volume.

Impressively researched and absorbingly written, Campbell's book is a triumph of the biographical art. He succeeds in presenting a judicious portrait of Thatcher, one that approaches her with skepticism yet never fails to giver her her due. It is the indispensable starting point for understanding this complex and controversial figure, one that is unlikely to be bettered for its description of Thatcher's early years and their role in her political legend.