Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business--and Won! Hardcover – Illustrated, July 8, 2014

Overall, this book is a very readable story of Ida Tarbell, a women whose life deserves to be known. My only complaint is that, especially late in the book, I thought the author inserted too much of her own opinions about changes in the status and practice of women in America. To be fair, the author does, I believe, accurately report, to the extent the sources allow, Ida Tarbell's thoughts and reasoning on woman's suffrage and the role of women. However, I found it distracting the way the author seemed to stand on a pedestal looking down at Ida Tarbell because the author thinks Ida was wrong. There was no humility in this writing, no questioning how our world might be different if Ida's views had prevailed. Considering America's problems with marriage, the divorce rate, children without parents etc., I think Ida's thoughts should have been considered in that light.

While I had hoped for a scholarly treatment of Tarbell's success in her journalistic assault on Standard Oil, I thought this book was better suited for a high school audience. Allowing that may have been the author's intended audience I can have no complaint other than my disappointment. No disrespect toward Emily McCully is intended.

Daughter read fit or History paper. She liked it.

An important person in American history. Most people don't understand that without the muckrakers, capitalism would run wild.

Ida Minerva Tarbell was born on her maternal grandparents farm in Hatch Hollow, PA on 11/5/1857 and died of pneumonia in Bridgeport, CN on 1/6/1944. Both of her parents were literate, having each been schoolteachesr for parts of their respective lives. So the idea of educated women was not as novel in the Tarbell household as it was in most other families of the era. Ida grew up near Titusville, PA where the first oil well was discovered in 1859 and her father was later in the oil business as an independent producer, meaniong he didn't belong to any compaies owned by John Davison Rockeller whose Standard and Excellsior OIl Works was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1860.. This later morphed into the Standard Oil Trust [1882] and today is known as EXXON. By 1877, Rockefeler controlled 90% of all the oil production in AmericaIda attended Allegheny College in Meadville, PA from 1876 to 1880 and accepted the job as the prioress or headmistress at the Poland Union Semenary in Poland, OHio as her first job after graduation. After two years, she left and began her writing career in earnest, first doing free lance work in Paris and later being hired as a staff writer and finally senior edition for McClure's Magazine when it was an investigatgive journal and not the romance magazine of the mid 20th century. She found time early in her career to write a well received biography of Abraham Lincoln, before embarking on her true passion, which was exposing what she considered to be the illegal and immorl business practices of Rockelfeller and his business partner, Henry Flagler which was entitled THE HISTORY OF STANDARD OIL.Although she and Teddy Roosevelt were somewhat friends they disagreed sharply on what Ida wrote, as Roosevelt thought she should accentuate the positives of life at the time rather than raking up the muck and thereby causing a big stink as the man did in John Bunyan's classic novel, PILGRIMS PROGRESS did, according to Roosevelt.. Ida openly challenged Roosevelt that he had misinterpreted the novel, which certainly did not further any amicability towards one another.Ida also was not a friend of the suffragette and feminsit movements of her time or today, as she felt women would be more easily corrupted by being allowed to vote and that although she was a working woman herself, she felt the place of most women was in the home taking care of their families.The sentence structure throughout seems age approprite with a most liberal sprinkling of black and white photos to illustrate many of the points and show Ida from her time as a young gril until just before her death. A well written book with a quite liberal bent to it. Definitely worth the read for the young adult group for which it is intended.

This is the story of Ida Tarbell who became one of the first investigative journalists, a field that emerged during the Progressive Era. McCully’s book is full of detail about Tarbell’s life, starting in her childhood when she experienced first-hand the human health and environmental problems caused by oil drilling and refining. Years later she became widely known when she took on John D. Rockefeller who made his huge fortune from oil. She revealed his corrupt business practices. She became a prominent Progressive era “muckraker,” a term she disliked.McCully does a good job of tracing Tarbell’s beginnings and her career in investigative journalism. The book has many photos from the era to illustrate the text. My concern, and the reason this book gets four stars instead of five, is that sometimes the details become somewhat overwhelming without sufficient context to understand the significance of different events. Most notably, Tarbell was always a champion for the poor and downtrodden, and for the workers and their struggles. However, Tarbell had a blind spot about the emerging women’s rights movement and the struggle for women’s suffrage. Frankly, it’s hard to understand this. The author was not able to contribute much insight. It would have been interesting to know if other women who had “made it in a man’s world” in other professions might have had the same attitude….or not…toward women’s rights. It’s an interesting topic that could be explored further.