A thoughtful, well-grounded cultural history.
A wide-ranging study of self-creation.
Burton, a novelist, scholar of theology, and essayist, examines the idea that we have the power “to remake ourselves and our realities” to reflect our desires. Organized chronologically, from the Renaissance to internet influencers, the author’s investigation charts “an increasingly disenchanted world” in which humans lost faith that God created each individual’s unalterable personality. Rather, they came to believe in their own power of self-transformation. Burton cites German painter Albrecht Dürer, for example, as an artist who “forged a personality that sustained and advertised his work, even as his work— constantly emblazoned with his trademark—advertised the man. “Dürer-the-artist, Dürer-the-portrait, and Dürer-the-advertiser all mutually reinforced one another.” In Regency England, the “middle-class upstart” Beau Brummell saw fashion as a means to social and political influence. “The perception of the right people at the right time,” he understood, “was at the heart of this new avenue toward power. Perception was something that the clever and intrepid could learn how to shape.” Rather than reflect social station, fashion came to express individual personality as well as political identity. In 1859, acclaimed orator Frederick Douglass lectured on the “Self-Made Man,” asserting that work was the key to remaking the self. Burton’s well-populated history features figures such as Thomas Edison, “one of the canniest self-promoters”; the outrageous Oscar Wilde; and writer Elinor Glyn, inventor of the term it, defined as “a blend of raw sex appeal, Wildean dandyism,” and “quasi-magical personal magnetism.” The quality of “it” lay at the heart of a burgeoning celebrity culture. Perhaps the oddest group of self-creators are extropians, “interested in optimizing every aspect of human existence, transforming the body into the best possible machine” through technology. The author concludes that our search for self-definition is ultimately a search for what it means to be human: vulnerable and inextricably interconnected.
A thoughtful, well-grounded cultural history.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781541789012
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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