A personal and passionate story about making a world “that is nourished, healed, and flourishing.”
The actor and director candidly discusses her turbulent personal evolution within a changing American society.
For Tamblyn (Any Man, 2018, etc.), America’s current “existential crisis and…questioning of its own values and future” is a manifestation of a new social awareness, especially where gender inequities are concerned. Drawing from her experiences in an industry infamous for its racism, sexism, and misogyny, the author traces the “ignition” of her own feminist consciousness. In 2008, the then-25-year-old author dreamed of creating a film version of the Janet Fitch novel Paint It Black. But in an industry that routinely snubbed the efforts of female directors, Tamblyn did not know how she could transform her dream into reality. The same year, she campaigned for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose efforts symbolized the ongoing female battle to break through the glass ceilings of power. In the difficult, rejection-filled years that followed, Tamblyn forged ahead with the attitude that if the mostly male creative decision-makers in Hollywood would not allow her to get a foot in the door, then she would “build my own goddamn house.” The author eventually succeeded in making a generally well-reviewed film and distributing it through a small woman-owned company. Just as Tamblyn began to feel empowered for her achievements, she witnessed Clinton’s second defeat, this time to a man who exemplified the toxic masculinity she spent so many years fighting against. In the aftermath, Tamblyn, now a mother to an infant daughter, became keenly aware of the impact misogyny had on the female body and mind, including her own, which suffered from lingering postpartum inflammation. She questioned her own privilege as a white female, embraced intersectional feminism, and co-founded Time’s Up, a movement dedicated to helping women “be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces.” Though prone to digression and occasional political overzealousness, the book offers illuminating insights into the changing face of feminism and the continued struggle to overcome the hardening lines of gender injustice.
A personal and passionate story about making a world “that is nourished, healed, and flourishing.”Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984822-98-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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