With an investigative eye and a sense of humor, Petersen sheds needed light on a key part of the social media landscape.
A deep dive into the ever growing “momfluencer” culture.
Being a mother has always been an extremely difficult job, but it has become even more so in the age of social media. Petersen, a journalist who has been studying and writing about mommy blogging since the early days, introduces us to the more recent phenomenon of momfluencers, who present their role as mothers on various sites—mainly Instagram—to sell sponsored products or sometimes their own product lines. Their mothering lives look perfect: clean and stylish houses, cute and well-behaved children, handsome and affluent husbands. The images and the accompanying stories set standards that few women can achieve, though many women want to. Petersen admits to being of two minds about momfluencers. As a mother of three, she finds it hard to resist the allure of domestic perfection, but she readily acknowledges that the picture has more to do with marketing than reality. Within the burgeoning industry, there are numerous types of momfluencers, such as the “trad mom,” the “cool mom,” and the “minimalist mom.” As the author notes, “the single feature that unites most of them is a celebration of the nuclear family and traditional gender roles.” The industry is also predominantly White, which has led to a backlash. Petersen looks at several sites developed by women of color aimed at presenting a more realistic picture as well as sites for women to share snarky comments about momfluencers. In the final pages of the book, Petersen stumbles upon the best way to escape from the momfluencers and their envy-generating performances. On a holiday with her happily imperfect family, she deleted the Instagram app. She did not want to know, “and the not knowing was bliss.”
With an investigative eye and a sense of humor, Petersen sheds needed light on a key part of the social media landscape.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780807006634
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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