Prime sartorial satire for fashionistas aching for a dose of comic relief. Few write as bitingly about pop culture as Wilson.
Irreverent, outspoken culture critic Wilson (Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny, 2008, etc.) charts the “discovery of my own fashion evolution” through an American road trip.
Armed with her unique talent for biting observational wizardry, the author embarked on a cross-country walkabout to gain new perspectives on fashion’s impact “with as little an impression as possible going in.” She approached this journey with the same modest naiveté as when perusing uptight Soho and Madison Avenue boutiques to offer an outsider’s perspective for the New York Times “Critical Shopper” column. Before decrypting the unique couture dress codes throughout America’s “belt regions” (Cotton, Rust, Bible, etc.), Wilson offers background on her formative years growing up in the 1970s on a houseboat in the Bay Area, where her artistic appreciation for the punk scene and the “magic of garments” was born. Fitted into her finest black, monotone clothing, Wilson’s first stops included Washington, D.C., where restrictive, formal business wear and “confrontational cleanliness” rules; high-end consignment shops in modestly draped Salt Lake City; and one of the author’s funniest inspections (aside from a piece relentlessly dehumanizing Los Angeles culture): the mini-monokini versus moneyed white-jeaned aesthetic of Miami Beach, where “the only good iguana is a pink belt.” Midway through, Wilson digresses to address the 2009 fiasco surrounding a painfully honest yet offensively inciting column she wrote criticizing a new J.C. Penney flagship store for manufacturing polyester clothing “five times larger than any large you’ve ever seen.” The article’s backlash seemingly fueled her anxiety about traipsing further into Midwestern states like Iowa and camouflage-heavy Kansas. Ultimately, there’s an undeniable sense that little falling outside of Wilson’s own gothic “crypto-sadist” uniform is deemed passable, with the remaining scraps merely fashion roadkill. Nevertheless, her deliciously snarky ode to American fashion is unceasingly entertaining.
Prime sartorial satire for fashionistas aching for a dose of comic relief. Few write as bitingly about pop culture as Wilson.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08189-3
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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