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WHERE THE GIRLS ARE

GROWING UP FEMALE WITH THE MASS MEDIA

The author of Inventing American Broadcasting (not reviewed) takes a long, hard look at the pop culture that fed women of the baby-boom generation with images that simultaneously acknowledged a blossoming feminist awareness and reinforced sex-role stereotypes. According to Douglas, conventional cultural history says that boys were portrayed as having a serious impact as political revolutionaries and alienated rebels in films like Blackboard Jungle, while girls merely represented ``the kitsch of the 1960s'': teased hair, Beatlemania, bare breasts at Woodstock, Gidget. But there is more to this story, argues Douglas (Media and American Studies/Hampshire College). Her reexamination of popular culture shows that female baby boomers grew up hearing that they were significant and equal from sources as diverse as JFK, who encouraged them to join the Peace Corps; Helen Gurley Brown, who made being single sound exciting; and the Shirelles, who in songs like ``Will You Love Me Tomorrow'' gave voice to the issue of teenage sex and suggested that girls had choices. But while all this was going on, young women were also urged to be ``as domestic as June Cleaver, as buxom and dumb as Elly May Clampett, and as removed from politics as Lily Munster.'' Example after example demonstrates how this type of ambivalent representation helped make women the ``cultural schizophrenics'' they are today, from those who endorse many equal-rights goals but wince at the label ``feminist'' to the apparently confident souls who would ``still rather have a root canal than appear in public in a bathing suit.'' Sharp reflections on everything from Bewitched (women's power was too frightening to portray realistically) to Phyllis Schlafly (who makes ``the Wicked Witch of the West look like Mary Poppins'') ring funny and true. A witty, insightful romp through the last four decades- -especially nostalgic and enlightening for readers raised on Charlie's Angels and the Mashed Potatoes.

Pub Date: May 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8129-2206-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Times/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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