An informed reassessment of Brown’s public life, more satisfying as a cultural study than as a biography.
Scanlon (Gender and Women’s Studies/Bowdoin Coll.; Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture, 1995, etc.) examines the significance of second-wave feminist Helen Gurley Brown, longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and author of the classic Sex and the Single Girl (1962).
The author argues that, despite her notoriety during the movement’s most turbulent decade, Brown “has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism’s emergence and ascendance.” This book—part biography and part cultural history of Brown’s role in shaping contemporary ideas of career women and their sexuality—serves as a corrective to that historical omission. Narrating Brown’s life story—from her impoverished youth as a “Depression-era child raised by a depressed mother” to her commercial success as an author, cultural spokeswoman and the editor of one of the nation’s most visible fashion magazines—Scanlon explores the tension between Brown’s surprisingly traditional marriage and her advocacy of sexual exploration for ambitious young career girls. Her early writings gave single women advice on how to conduct mutually satisfying affairs with married men and suggested that bachelors “must recognize that part of the price of their freedom and privilege is…paying for women.” Yet it was a point of domestic pride that she cooked meals for her husband during their married life. Scanlon successfully places Brown in the larger context of the era and reveals how her brand of feminism influenced mass-media portraits of single career women from the Mary Tyler Moore Show to Sex and the City. However, the complexities of Brown’s character remain largely unexplored. Scanlon provides only passing references to her husband’s financial control of her royalties, to her fixation on remaining “ultra-thin” and to her role in the internal gender politics at Cosmopolitan.
An informed reassessment of Brown’s public life, more satisfying as a cultural study than as a biography.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-534205-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
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
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