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Dorothy L. Wake,
the author of this book defines Mother Jones as the most significant
and relevant political voice for the working class to ever
emerge from within the United States. Although Mary Harris
"Mother" Jones identified herself as a socialist,
her politics coincided with revolutionary syndicalism. The
duality of Socialism and Syndicalism defined her role as a
leader of labour and social reform during the late 1800s and
early 1900s, and structured her beliefs and attitudes about
women, which paralleled her general perceptions of class warfare.
Jones has been dismissed as being simply a "hell-raiser"
or reduced to a "folksy" or "colorful"
old woman who endeared herself to the miners by taking up
their cause. Most who wrote about her diminished or eliminated
her historical and political significance by failing to establish
that she changed the face of labour in the United States forever.
Some have even resorted to writing malicious and unprovable
accusations about her. Ms. Wake´s extensive research
brings to light the impact Mother Jones had on the labour
movement for nearly half a century and reveals Jones as an
intellectual and a feminist voice.
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In March 1953 Maurice
Wilkins of King's College London announced the departure of
his obstructive colleague, Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish
Laboratory scientist, Francis Crick. But it was too late.
Franklin's unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA
had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge
University lab. With the aid of these, plus their own knowledge,
Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the molecule
that genes are composed of - DNA, the secret of life. Five
years later, and more brilliant research under Bernal at Birkbeck
College, at the age of thirty-seven, Rosalind died of ovarian
cancer. In 1962 Wilkins, Crick and Watson were awarded the
Nobel prize for their elucidation of DNA's structure. Franklin's
part was forgotten until she was caricatured in Watson's book
The Double Helix. In this full and balanced biography
Brenda Maddox has been given unique access to Rosalind's personal
correspondence and has interviewed all the principal scientists
involved, including Crick, Watson and Wilkins. (Brenda Maddox,
HarperCollins, ISBN 0 00 257149 8)
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