A rollicking account about marriage in books, movies, and culture, told with authority and genuine warmth.
A comprehensively researched, wry examination of the many dimensions of marriage and how it has evolved.
Baum begins with the odd assertion that there has not been much intellectual analysis of marriage, and she proceeds to round up the work of philosophers, novelists, filmmakers, and even comedians on the subject. It makes for fascinating reading, and the author punctuates the story with vignettes and commentary about her own marriage, which gives the research a personal touch. She brings an engaging element of humor to the proceedings; in fact, her sense of fun was revealed in her 2017 book, The Jewish Joke. As a professor of literature, she seems to have read everything connected to marriage, from Shakespeare's tragedies to Nora Ephron's novels. She organizes the book in sections dealing with marriage as an ongoing conversation, marriage as entertainment, the religious underpinnings, and the tricky subject of divorce. The institution of marriage goes back centuries, and although it has sometimes been attacked as a way to lock women into a cage of domesticity, it continues to thrive. Matrimony is a life goal for most people and is widely seen as the best structure for a family. A problem is that it is a long-term commitment, and when the early glow of romance fades, the participants realize there is a long road ahead. Some people can travel it successfully, while others cannot. One thing is certain: It never turns out to be like a rom-com; it is always messier and harder and involves more housework. Still, Baum accepts that it is for her (she is married to director and screenwriter Josh Appignanesi), and for many others. Marriage, she concludes, “continues to carry and shape our human story,” and “we are likely to see it remaining with us long into the future, until death do us part."
A rollicking account about marriage in books, movies, and culture, told with authority and genuine warmth.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780300271935
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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