Wide-ranging and surprisingly thoughtful.
The early days of Hollywood stars, gossip and damage control.
Blogger and first-time author Petersen (Film and Media Studies/Whitman Coll.) revisits several of Hollywood's well-known celebrity scandals and tells how the movie studios manufactured both stars' images and the public's desires. She opens with the obvious truism that a star's "actions, behavior, or lifestyle choices are never de facto scandalous; rather, they become scandalous when they violate the status quo in some way”—which is true for everyone. The author follows with an examination of the old-school "studio system," which created actors' names and biographies, as well as a host of "management strategies" (i.e., coverups) for actors' off-screen improprieties that entertainment publicists still use today to protect their investments—though the public at midcentury was far more gullible and easily manipulated. After this slow start, Petersen keenly analyzes the roles celebrities played—and still play—in our lives. She examines how the public allows “stars to take on our personal anxieties and shun[s] them when they fail to embody them in ways that please us." Chapters serve as case studies exploring and supporting the book's dual themes: that stars' images are "pliable…to our whims, hopes and fears" (particularly about class, female desire and gender roles) and how actresses were often presented and celebrated for appealing to men's sexual desires, then castigated for their brazen, unconventional behavior. In sections recounting the careers of stars who flamed out disastrously, including Dorothy Dandridge and Montgomery Clift, she incisively remarks on, especially, how Judy Garland's life—her studio controlled not only her public persona, but her romantic relationships and even her physical size during her teen years—"suggested hope and despair in equal measures," served up for the public's consumption. Not merely a rehash of salacious old Hollywood gossip, Petersen revivifies flattened images of Hollywood icons, including Fatty Arbuckle, Mae West, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando, among others.
Wide-ranging and surprisingly thoughtful.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-218067-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
