This book is courageous, revealing, and occasionally painful, and Atlanta writes with verve and authority.
When an expert in the beauty business surveys the field, she finds a bleak and frightening landscape.
Atlanta, who has long been a figure in the beauty industry as a writer, editor, and brand consultant, deftly gauges and examines the pressure on young women to be constantly beautiful, fresh, and fashionable. She is brave enough to recount her firsthand experience with beauty culture and supplements her investigation with interviews with influencers, researchers, and young women who religiously follow the trends. She even spent time with Kylie Jenner, the source code for much of the modern beauty business, who in person turned out to be much more ambiguous and uncertain than her social media profile suggests. For many young women, beauty has become an obsession, and they spend much of their life (and money) on skin care routines, diets, and surgical enhancements. Atlanta acknowledges that beauty has always had a commercial aspect, but social media has taken it to a new, ultracompetitive level. Filters and software apps mean that a digital image can be endlessly improved and perfected, to the point that reality has become detached from what is presented on the screen. The result of all this is stress, depression, and heartache for millions of women worldwide. Far from freeing women, beauty has become another tool of manipulation, and Atlanta concludes that the cycle must end. In the closing chapter, she offers useful advice on breaking the addiction, and it begins with true self-awareness. “You do not owe anyone perfect, and you don’t owe anyone pretty,” she writes. “Remove the glossy filter that smooths out any negativity, resist the feminine urge to lighten the mood, or to make others comfortable [and] practice radical honesty with yourself and others.”
This book is courageous, revealing, and occasionally painful, and Atlanta writes with verve and authority.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250286222
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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