A fascinating study of an icon and the era that created her.
Neuffer offers a study of Helen Andelin, author and founder of the controversial Fascinating Womanhood movement in the 1960s and ’70s.
In 1961, discontented Mormon housewife Andelin discovered a set of advice booklets written in the 1920s. Called The Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood, they advised women to fulfill traditional gender roles in order to find happiness in love and motherhood. Andelin credited them with saving her marriage, so much so that she repackaged them as Fascinating Womanhood, a book that went on to sell 2 million copies (as Neuffer notes, Andelin never admitted to copying the booklets). Andelin and her movement became cultural phenomena of the 1960s and ’70s, a counterbalance to the second-wave feminism of Betty Friedan. Despite harsh criticism from many of her contemporaries, Andelin’s ideas would shape succeeding generations of female commentators, including Phyllis Schlafly, Laura Schlessinger, and comedian Rosanne Barr (who appropriated, albeit satirically, Andelin’s ideal of the “Domestic Goddess” for her stand-up routine). Neuffer demonstrates how “the views and goals of both Andelin and her FW movement were both more complex and more distinct than her critics conceded. Moreover, they endured. In fact, Andelin built a substantial and lasting following simply by addressing the immediate, felt needs of many women at a crucial moment in history when other reform movements did not.” Raised in the Mormon Southwest during the height of the movement—her mother was, for a time, a teacher of FW classes—Neuffer was granted unprecedented access to Andelin in the last decade of her life; in addition to Andelin’s personal papers, Neuffer’s interviews with Andelin make up the bulk of the book’s sources. While Neuffer is appropriately skeptical of Andelin’s teachings (and willing to present evidence that suggests Andelin plagiarized most of her material), she treats her subject with patience and respect as she attempts to accurately describe the deeper causes and effects of Andelin’s career. “An understanding of Andelin’s wide appeal as both a religious and political leader can augment the fast-expanding discussion about women’s strategies to cope with—and shape—political and social change,” she writes. Indeed, Andelin’s story has much to teach us about dissenting voices in the pursuit of progress.
A fascinating study of an icon and the era that created her.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60781-327-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Utah
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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