An exuberant celebration of empowered women.
A history of women who held prominent positions in Hollywood from 1930 to 1950.
In a fresh, lively examination of women’s places in film history, Smyth (History/Univ. of Warwick; Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance, 2015, etc.) has uncovered abundant evidence for their significant roles as producers, writers, agents, editors, designers, union leaders, and, of course, performers. Besides focusing on a few well-known actresses—e.g., Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn—the author brings to light scores of women whom many film critics and historians have relegated to “obscure footnotes.” By focusing on “director-auteurs and glamorous stars,” these critics fail to account for the diverse, collaborative nature of film production. “Nearly two dozen women worked as producers or associate producers,” writes Smyth, and more than 60 as film editors. They served on executive committees of the Screen Writers Guild (where they made up a quarter of the membership), the Academy’s Board of Governors, and the Women’s Press Club, among other organizations. The author identifies many women whose influence was well-known by their contemporaries: in 1938, newspaper columnist Ida Koverman, feisty assistant to Louis B. Mayer at MGM, was “one of the most powerful personages in the entire motion picture industry; when she pulls the strings, world-famous stars dance, like puppets.” In 1942, prolific screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr. was elected as president of the Screen Writers Guild, where she demonstrated “a take-no-prisoners commitment to collective bargaining.” Fired from Warner Bros., where she was one of only two women writers, she happily moved to Columbia Pictures, where Harry Cohn eagerly promoted women’s careers “at all levels of production.” Although the infamous “casting couch” and sexist attitudes posed challenges, the women Smyth profiles “proved that Hollywood was not a man’s world and that hard work, mental toughness, and professionalism were not inherently masculine.” The studio system offered “a negotiable artistic hierarchy” in which women’s perspectives were welcomed and rewarded. Even “classic patriarchs” like Sam Goldwyn admitted “Women Rule Hollywood.”
An exuberant celebration of empowered women.Pub Date: April 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-084082-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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