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Informationen zum Autor Ilyon Woo holds a B.A. from Yale College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the humanities, among many others. She lives with her family in Manhattan. "Modern Americans, bombarded with stories of celebrity divorces, probably assume that the tabloid breakup is a recent phenomenon. This lively, well-written and engrossing tale proves them wrong."--"The New York Times Book Review" "Woo captures the drama and many ironies of Eunice's story, admiring her courage without adopting her view of the Shakers as unmitigated villains."--"The New Yorker" "Provocative...Woo vividly tells the story of the Chapmans' broken family, beginning with a dramatic sentence worthy of Stephen King...Woo tells [this story] in nuanced and absorbing detail."--Elaine Showalter, "The Washington Post" "Ilyon Woo's "The Great Divorce" is much more than a fascinating account of a woman's trailblazing battle for her children. By delving so deeply into the sources, Woo brings the past to life in all its wonderful strangeness, complexity, and verve. This is what history is all about."--Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the National Book Award-winning "In the Heart of the Sea" "Ilyon Woo has taken the stuff of obscure history and transformed it into a gripping drama that resonates with our own world. Though she lived in the 19th century, Eunice Chapman reminded me of Erin Brockovich--a woman on a mission who fights like a tigress for what she believes in. Woo has an eye for the telling detail, and a prose style as elegantly spare as a Shaker chair. The result is a heart-warming, finely written story of one woman's battle against fanaticism, a story that has particular resonance today."--Simon Worrall, author of "The Poet and the Murderer" "American history, law, religion, and politics all come alive in this poignant account of an abandoned woman's rescue of her children in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Ilyon Woo gives us the unfolding drama of the first and only legislative divorce in the history of New York as part of a larger struggle for civil identity and women's rights. It is not enough to say that th ...
About the author
Ilyon Woo holds a B.A. from Yale College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the humanities, among many others. She lives with her family in Manhattan.
