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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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