[Margolick] tells a story that is almost novelistic in its complexity. . . . Someday
Elizabeth and Hazel will be a textbook. Long before, on the civil rights bookshelf, it will be considered a classic.-Jesse Kornbluth,
Headbutler.com, Huffington PostThe remarkable story of a historic civil-rights photograph and the intertwined lives of its subjects.-
The Daily BeastA patient and evenhanded account of their messy relationship over the decades. . . . Margolick proposes no fairy-tale resolutions to such moral impasses. To his credit, he spares us none of the unruly facts as his subjects, still wrestling with history, wander off message.-Amy Finnerty,
The New York Times Book ReviewA patient and evenhanded account. . . . Margolick proposes no fairytale solutions. . . . To his credit, he spares us none of the unruly facts as his subjects, still wrestling with history, wander off message.-
New York Times Book ReviewSurprising, disturbing, occasionally inspiring, often baffling, and ultimately sad. . . .
Elizabeth and Hazel represents, in microcosm, the debilitating power of race that remains powerful 50 years after that photo. . . . An amazing story, told with brio.-
Boston GlobeFor
Elizabeth and Hazel, it would have been simple enough to turn their stories into a 'where are they now' piece. But Margolick is after something bigger. Through Eckford and Bryan's tangled lives, he hopes to capture the complexity of race, forgiveness, and reconciliation in modern America.-Kevin Boyle,
Washington PostMargolick, rather than sanitizing it, captures the full fraught sweep of history-with wounds so deep that friendship may never be possible.-Elizabeth Taylor,
Chicago TribuneElizabeth and Hazel documents not only a poisonous moment in American race relations, but what happened to the two central characters in that famous photograph after the shutter had clicked. It is, at first glace, a thing premise -- but David Margolick's reporting develops this small idea into a small triumph . . . he allows us to see [Elizabeth] Eckford and [Hazel] Bryan not as figurines, but as they really are: two flawed misunderstood women who were caught in a moment that outgrew them.-Ed Caesar,
Sunday TimesUtterly engrossing, for it touches on a variety of thorny, provocative themes: the power of race, the nature of friendship, the role of personality, the capacity for brutality and for forgiveness.-Publishers Weekly
There are volumes of scholarly works on the Civil Rights Movement, but this book is different. By tracing the two women's journeys, . . . often in their own words, Margolick artfully lays bare [their] emotional and mental wounds and struggles, [and] also places the women in the context of the wider civil rights era and beyond. . . . This work is simply a must-read.-
Library Journal, starred review
David Margolick interviews both women and has provided a patient and evenhanded account of their messy relationship over the decades. He proposes no fairytale resolutions to their moral impasses. And to his credit, he spares us none of the unruly facts as his subjects, still wrestling with history, wander off message.-Amy Finnerty,
International Herald TribuneChristian Science Monitor, A Top 10 Nonfiction Book for 2011
David Margolick's dual biography of an iconic photograph is a narrative tour de force that leaves us to grapple with a disturbing perennial-that forgiveness doesn't always follow from understanding. I read
Elizabeth and Hazel straight through in one sitting.-David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
W. E. B. Du BoisThe iconic photograph of Hazel Bryan and Elizabeth Eckford has now riveted us for more than fifty years. David Margolick's effort to bring the photo to life is equally riveting. It makes for a deeply compelling story of race and our ongoing efforts at understanding.-Julian Bond, Chairman Emeritus, NAACP
Elizabeth and Hazel is a story that has been crying out to be told ever since two teenaged girls stumbled into history on a street in Little Rock, more than a half-century ago. Once again, Margolick, one of our best reporters, reveals his remarkable gift for uncovering intimate disputes that illuminate an epoch.-Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama; The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
The story of Elizabeth Eckford, the heroic poster child of the struggle to desegregate Little Rock's Central High, which so many have forgotten, and her tormentor, Hazel Bryan, which so few ever knew, needed to be told. David Margolick has done so masterfully, in a narrative so gripping that one has difficulty putting down his book before arriving at the last page. His Elizabeth and Hazel is required reading for every American who wants to understand why the wounds inflicted by the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow remain unhealed.-Louis Begley, author of Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters
As surprising and unusual as its two protagonists, Elizabeth and Hazel-densely-researched, empathetic, measured, revelatory-not only lets us live, as completely as we would in a novel, the confrontation in Little Rock and the creation of an iconic photo, but lets us hear the central figures as they work, for the subsequent half-century, to come to terms with what has happened to them. David Margolick has written a beautiful and moving meditation on race, struggle, and the forgiving and unforgiving passage of time.-Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting
Margolick's unforgettable new book,
Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, takes as its touchstone a famous civil rights-era photograph. . . . eloquently chronicl[ing] their lives since that iconic photo was taken.-Kate Tuttle,
TheAtlantic.com -- Kate Tuttle * TheAtlantic.com *
A patient and evenhanded account of their messy relationship over the decades. . . . Margolick proposes no fairy-tale resolutions to such moral impasses. To his credit, he spares us none of the unruly facts as his subjects, still wrestling with history, wander off message.-Amy Finnerty,
The New York Times Book Review -- Amy Finnerty * The New York Times Book Review *
The iconic image of Elizabeth and Hazel at age fifteen showed us the terrible burden that nine young Americans had to shoulder to claim our nation's promise of equal opportunity. The pain it caused was deeply personal. David Margolick now tells us the amazing story of how Elizabeth and Hazel, as adults, struggled to find each other across the racial divide and in so doing, end their pain and find a measure of peace. We all need to know about Elizabeth and Hazel.-President Bill Clinton -- President Bill Clinton
As David Margolick's brilliantly layered exposition reveals, plumbing 'the depths of the depths' of race and racism is a most complex exercise. And as I plumbed the depths of his narrative, I found it at once painful, as well as elevating, and unlike anything I've ever read on the subject. It should be required reading for a nation still struggling with what Margolick refers to as 'the thicket of race.'-Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of
In My Place -- Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Surprising, disturbing, occasionally inspiring, often baffling, and ultimately sad. . . .
Elizabeth and Hazel represents, in microcosm, the debilitating power of race that remains powerful 50 years after that photo. . . . An amazing story, told with brio.-
Boston Globe * Boston Globe *
An amazingly intimate portrait. . . . The lesson of
Elizabeth and Hazel may be that we shouldn't define other people's lives by one single moment. Instead, we can use their actions to define other lives-our own.-
Christian Science Monitor * Christian Science Monitor *
In his engrossing new book Elizabeth and Hazel, David Margolick expands the frame to consider the difficult lives of its two central figures, their attempt at reconciliation, and the fact that they don't speak now. . . .
Elizabeth and Hazel raises the specter that some damage doesn't heal. It is a notion profoundly unsettling to the story we Americans tell about ourselves.-Karen R. Long,
Cleveland Plain-Dealer -- Karen R. Long * Cleveland Plain-Dealer *
Intricately woven and deeply affecting. . . . [Margolick's] choice to broaden and complicate the narrative - to include the larger minefield of race matters and honest discourse - is what makes this book salient, not sentimental. Elizabeth and Hazel's winding, rocky relationship, then, is a much more fitting and accurate metaphor for the country; this book, an attempt at a different, lasting after-image - this time in words.-Lynell George,
Los Angeles Times -- Lynell George * Los Angeles Times *
Judicious and bittersweet. . . . Margolick excels at framing the intimate details of each woman's life with a half-century of social and cultural upheaval....The deeper motives and psyches of the protagonists remain as elusive as any resolution to their story-and, perhaps, just as tangled. Nonfiction, as with photographs, can only do so much-though in
Elizabeth and Hazel, it does more than enough.-Gene Seymour,
Newsday -- Gene Seymour * Newsday *
For
Elizabeth and Hazel, it would have been simple enough to turn their stories into a 'where are they now' piece. But Margolick is after something bigger. Through Eckford and Bryan's tangled lives, he hopes to capture the complexity of race, forgiveness, and reconciliation in modern America.-Kevin Boyle,
Washington Post -- Kevin Boyle * Washington Post *
