A lively look at the role models provided by women in film and fiction, with unexpected exegeses from a bestselling novelist (Red, White, and Blue, 1998, etc.). L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy and Jane Austen’s Emma—in both original and modern interpretations—are “brave dames”; Sandra Bullock in Speed, although her character was the driver of the rampaging bus, and Anita Hill, testifying about long-past transgressions, are “wimpettes.” Even the feminist icons Thelma and Louise and biblical mother Eve get ambivalent reviews here. Think about it, says Isaacs: Thelma and Louise would rather drive off a cliff than take responsibility for their actions; Eve knuckled under to the serpent rather than take a stand in the cosmic battle between good and evil. Brave dames are “passionate about something besides passion,” are resilient, competent, moral, and “a true friend.” In literature, Jane Eyre is the bravest of dames, along with the spider Charlotte of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. The author’s TV heroines include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena (although production values are seriously deficient, Isaacs admits); films offer Auntie Mame, G.I. Jane, and Clarice Starling of The Silence of the Lambs. Wimpettes, on the other hand, are invested in masochism, subterfuge, low ethical standards, and men who will give them identities. Holly Hunter’s character in The Piano is a wimpette par excellence’she betrays her husband (and daughter) because she “just needs to get laid.” Other mothers, sisters, and friends fare slightly better but fail the “brave dames” test because their lives are defined by men. Isaacs falters on her own test when she sets males as the standard in comparing buddy films, e.g., Midnight Cowboy vs. Thelma and Louise. A lightweight overview of women in film, fiction, and video, but the author offers a challenge: Look closely. Is driving a bus over the speed limit really an example of the best a woman can be? (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-345-42281-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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