Sharp and savvy.
In a sequel of sorts to Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994), the author asserts that pop culture sends out the false message that women’s liberation has been accomplished and that feminism is now old hat.
Douglas (Communication Studies/Univ. of Michigan; Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, 1999, etc.) analyzes the way females are presented on television and in movies, advertisements and the press, and she is not happy with what she sees. She argues that pop culture is guilty of a backlash against feminism that objectifies women’s faces and bodies, exploits and punishes female sexuality and divides women against each other by age and class. This phenomenon, which she terms “enlightened sexism,” had its beginnings in the early ’90s, and is really just “old-fashioned grade-A patriarchy.” Citing dozens of examples from the media, Douglas demonstrates how female accomplishments have been exaggerated at the same time that old stereotypes of women as bimbos have been reinforced. The author’s zippy prose—“So, what might you get if you combined the six-foot fearless, alligator-wrestling, unsmiling crime fighter Janet Reno with the statuesque, gorgeous, dark-haired super model Cindy Crawford? One delicious answer might be Xenia: Warrior Princess—makes this mostly an entertaining read. Besides a host of familiar characters from movies and television, she draws on such figures as Lorena Bobbitt, Anita Hill, Sarah Palin, Amy Fisher and Hillary Clinton to make her points about attitudes toward women. Although the examples become repetitious, the author’s takes on the media’s obsession with the foibles and pregnancies of celebrities and the biased news coverage of prominent successful women have the ring of truth. Her message is that ordinary women face everyday problems such as salary inequities, maternity leave and child care, many of which are ignored in the media, and that it is up to women to change this. Her epilogue presents two alternative scenarios of the future and urges women to take action to make the preferable one come true.
Sharp and savvy.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8326-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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