A quirky, earnest guide to regaining self-esteem for the modern woman.
A self-help book for women who consistently find themselves in bad relationships.
Frankel (I Wore a Thong For This?!, 2004, etc.) offers another title in the relationship advice genre, declaring that the reader must love herself in order to find healthy, lasting relationships with others. She sets out to help readers identify their self-destructive relationship habits, kick them and replace them with constructive personal habits. Before finding Mr. Right, readers are encouraged to learn how to stop finding Mr. Wrong. Skeptical readers may find it hard to get into the book until Chapter 2, when Frankel shares an anecdote about one of her own unfortunate relationships. These anecdotes, sprinkled throughout the book, prove to be the most engaging sections—in particular, the account of her spontaneous trip to Kilimanjaro is laugh-out-loud funny. Frankel uses her stories to help readers recognize similarities in their own lives. The advice following these anecdotes is friendly, with a humorous and self-deprecating tone. The book moves from identifying a pattern of bad relationships to planning exit strategies and getting over bad relationships; the rest of the book focuses on boosting self-esteem and improving life. Without being a scold about it, she encourages readers to take responsibility for their own happiness. Some readers may find the metaphors and jokes to be cheesy—“There was a time, B.C. (Before Crappy)…”—but there are some great practical suggestions for scrubbing a bad ex from your life and starting fresh with healthier habits, even if readers familiar with self-help books may not find anything radically new. There are a few less practical suggestions, such as starting a “Lysistrata Group” with the women in your life for sharing in “the collective female spirit.” Later chapters could have used more anecdotes and fewer metaphors, and it would have been especially motivational to see more anecdotes showing how Frankel used her own suggestions in her own life. Still, the main truth the book is built on, that self-esteem and self-worth are crucial to relationship success and a happy life, is an important one that readers will appreciate.
A quirky, earnest guide to regaining self-esteem for the modern woman.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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