A hopeful celebration of women’s friendships.
A journalist examines the nature and impact of the friendships women form with each other.
Society traditionally views female friendships as competitive and transitory. Schaefer argues that more women than ever are actively working to reclaim their relationships with each other from negative stereotyping. Drawing from popular culture, interviews with a wide range of successful female professionals and her own life, the author suggests that current trends stem in part from generational changes. A product of mid-20th-century culture, Schaefer’s mother lived during a time when adult female relationships with anyone beyond children and husbands were considered “nice, but not essential.” On TV and in film, bonds between women—e.g., those between the main characters of the 1980s blockbuster show Dynasty—were characterized as catty and vindictive, with women ruthlessly fighting each other over men. In the 1990s, developments like the Riot Grrrl movement and films like Thelma & Louise attempted to inspire female empowerment, but “mean girl” stereotypes—which the author found herself playing into—continued to flourish and undermine more positive depictions of female bonding. As a young career woman in the early 2000s, Schaefer, who preferred male friendships, was uninterested in “helping any other women through their lives.” Her awakening came in her early 30s when she decided against marrying a long-term boyfriend. She realized that her strongest allies were other single, motivated women who were also “striving to do good work.” Looking around her, she saw young women like singer Taylor Swift and Olympian Kim Vandenberg extolling female friendships and social media trends like #squadgoals and #girlsquads honoring the help and support women could give each other. Though the author focuses mostly on bonds between white females, it is still a welcome reminder during a time of political backlash against women that females are continuing to insist on “changing the rules themselves.”
A hopeful celebration of women’s friendships.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98612-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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