by Jenna Weissman Joselit ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 2001
Useful reading in a time when, for Americans of whatever age, the rule of attire seems to be anything goes—and the sillier...
Fashion meets politics—and gets a little frayed in the encounter.
Cultural historian Joselit (The Wonders of America, not reviewed) examines American clothing styles from 1890 to 1930 as an expression not merely of the individual, but also of the body politic. With the advent of mass-produced garments and the decline in the domestic arts of sewing and mending, ready-to-wear clothing became the norm during this time, she observes, and with this norm came normative propaganda that proclaimed that “what one wore was a public construct, bound up with an enduring moral order.” This propaganda was generally mild and approving during an age when men could be expected to don their silk foulards and women their fox-skin gloves without protest, but it took on more strident tones when, in the 1920s, they began to experiment with odd colors and ever-higher hemlines, exciting prurient interest and theological condemnation in roughly equal measure. (Some years later, she writes, a Catholic priest even developed a line of clothing that, he argued, the Virgin Mary herself might wear were she to reappear on earth.) Drawing on insights from American and cultural studies, Joselit offers an account that is full of fascinating asides and historical oddments, one that gives due consideration to contemporary working-class and minority interpretations of just what constituted acceptable fashion. (As it happens, African-American and Jewish immigrant leaders, among others, urged their followers to dress respectably as a means of gaining status in the larger society.) Her study is marred somewhat by the author’s portentous and sometimes self-important tone—a characteristic of academic work in the field that is likely only to annoy general readers.
Useful reading in a time when, for Americans of whatever age, the rule of attire seems to be anything goes—and the sillier the better.Pub Date: June 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-5488-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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