A sexy heads up for young women who may not grasp how culture and media continually manipulate women into thinking that what...
A fun and enlightening guide detailing the multifaceted ways women can integrate an inclusive mode of feminism into their lives without compromising their ideals and giving up their lip gloss.
Co-founders of the blog SexyFeminist.com, Armstrong and Rudúlph examine their individual journeys to becoming feminists and why they wrote this book: “We want to help other women find their own feminism, just as we found ours.” The authors aim to “show young women how fun, empowering and, yes, sexy it is to fight for women’s rights and choices.” After a minihistory of feminism, they cover a variety of topics, including Brazilian wax jobs, plastic surgery, vanity and makeup, dieting, fashion, dating, the conundrum of working women, female friendships and feminism in the bedroom. The chapter on plastic surgery decodes the different types of procedures, followed by a Sexy Feminist Action Plan, titled “Invest in Yourself, Not New Boobs.” Armstrong describes her personal experience in “What I Learned from a Laser Facial Peel.” Though the tone is light and playful, there is plenty of information packed into each chapter. Most include follow-up questions for further exploration. The afterword, “Real Ways To Fight For Feminism,” lists feminist charities and pointers on becoming literate in politics and media. The appendix includes resources for sexy feminists, and the book serves as a quick and satisfying read for women of a certain age who might need a refresher course.
A sexy heads up for young women who may not grasp how culture and media continually manipulate women into thinking that what they have and how they look are never quite good enough.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-73830-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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