Hu’s study of Korea’s beauty cult is fascinating and disturbing, woven with threads of dark humor and personal experience.
The host of “TED Talks Daily” and host at large for NPR shines a bright light into the shadowy world of manufactured beauty and endless “self-improvement.”
There is a Korean phrase, bbali bbali, which means fast, fast. Hu, a winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award, among others, believes it sums up South Korea’s rush into hypermodernity. When she arrived in Seoul in 2015 to establish a bureau for NPR, she was stunned by the cult of beauty that grips Korean women. The aim of Western cosmetics is often to accentuate natural features, but in South Korea, the goal is skin that seems so perfect it needs nothing else. The beauty industry in Korea relies on intensive research and marketing by the skin care firms, which provide a continuing procession of products. The author also looks at the massive business of cosmetic surgery, which can amend any part of the body. This is less about self-expression and more about an aspiration toward perfection: blemish-free skin, long, shining hair, a narrow nose, anime-size eyes, a delicate jawline, and legs shaped to meet a mathematical formula. It ultimately leads to a sameness of look, but Korean women see it as a necessary investment for social success, and the few who buck the trend face ostracism. Looking at this endless commodification of the female body, Hu asks: “Where do we draw the line on appearance work when the work gets less and less invasive and previously impossible changes become possible?” She also notes that some women, accustomed to the filtered images on Snapchat and Instagram, want to be “improved” to look like their digital images. These trends, exacerbated by social media and Korea’s export marketing machine, are having a global impact, including in the U.S. Hu is unsure about how these issues will play out, but she hopes that there will be a turn away from relentless superficiality. She is a capable guide to the current fraught landscape.
Hu’s study of Korea’s beauty cult is fascinating and disturbing, woven with threads of dark humor and personal experience.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780593184189
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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