Though critical, this provocative book’s greatest strength is the author’s positive call to action to help Miss America...
The winner of the 1998 Miss America pageant tells the story of her year wearing the crown while offering an incisive history and analysis of an always-controversial beauty contest.
Stage actor Shindle was a junior at Northwestern University when she won the Miss America title. From that moment forward, she would no longer simply be just another talented and beautiful collegiate. As Miss America, she would “always carry the mantle—and, as it turns out, the baggage that comes with it—of Miss America’s complicated history” and become something more than herself. Part memoir, part exposé, Shindle’s book interweaves her experiences with an examination of a nearly 100-year-old institution. She discusses her early involvement with the contest as a volunteer and the way becoming Miss America became her “ticket to acceptance” among peer groups that once ignored her. At the same time, Shindle delves into the history of the pageant, which first began in 1921 when Atlantic City businessmen used it as a sexy gimmick to bring in post–Labor Day business. From there, it evolved into a national icon that celebrated contestants for their wholesomeness and beauty rather than their aspirations and political outspokenness. Shindle documents the growing pains Miss America faced in the aftermath of the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and the way organizers struggled, often without success, to align the event with changing perceptions of American womanhood and stay culturally relevant. She argues that these difficulties continue even into the present, despite an emphasis on contestant involvement in community projects. Citing “mismanagement on both the staff and board levels” as the root of pageant problems, Shindle concludes that if the Miss America “brand” is to survive, it will have to “[develop] a lasting identity and [reject] the many temptations that run counter to that identity.”
Though critical, this provocative book’s greatest strength is the author’s positive call to action to help Miss America “become something greater” than it is.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-292-73921-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
PROFILES
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.
A respected feminist activist’s memoir about the life lessons she learned as a peripatetic political organizer.
Until she was 10 years old, Steinem (Moving Beyond Words, 1993, etc.) grew up following two parents who could never seem to put down roots. Only after her stability-craving mother separated from her restlessly migratory father did she settle—for a brief time until college—into “the most conventional life” she would ever lead. After that, she began travels that would first take her to Europe and then later to India, where she began to awaken to the possibility that her father’s lonely way of traveling “wasn’t the only one.” Journeying could be a shared experience that could lead to breakthroughs in consciousness of the kind Steinem underwent after observing Indian villagers coming together in “talking circles” to discuss community issues. Once she returned to the United States, she went to New York City, where she became an itinerant freelance journalist. After observing the absence of female voices at the 1963 March on Washington, Steinem began gathering together black and white women to begin the conversation that would soon become a larger national fight for women’s rights. In the 1970s and beyond, Steinem went on the road to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and for female political candidates like 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, Steinem began work with Native American women activists who taught her about the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of balance. From this, she learned to walk the middle path between a life on the road and one at home: for in the end, she writes, "[c]aring for a home is caring for one's self.” Illuminating and inspiring, this book presents a distinguished woman's exhilarating vision of what it means to live with openness, honesty, and a willingness to grow beyond the apparent confinement of seemingly irreconcilable polarities.
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-679-45620-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.
An American poet of Japanese descent illuminates the tensions that exploded with World War II and the aftershocks within his family.
By the time Shimoda (The Desert, 2018, etc.) came to know his grandfather, the latter was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and thus it was only after his death that the author began to untangle the narrative of his life as a citizen of one country living in another. The resonance of the story that he pieces together, through pilgrimages back to Japan and across the United States, extends well beyond a single family or ethnicity to the soul of his own native country, where “white settlers were the original aliens. They sought to diffuse their alienation, by claiming the land and controlling the movement and rights of the people for whom the land was not alien, but ancestral.” Shimoda’s grandfather was conceived in Honolulu and born in Japan, and he crossed the ocean to Seattle as a 9-year-old boy, without the rest of his family. World War II turned him into an “enemy alien,” though, as the author writes, “he was not born an enemy alien. He was made into an enemy alien. The first (alien) phase was immigration. The third (enemy) phase was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second phase was the transition. Which was, for a Japanese man, ineligible for citizenship, compulsory.” He was a trained photographer, and by all evidence, a very good and sensitive one, but the main offense on which he was initially incarcerated was possessing a camera. Shimoda wades through memories and dreams; lives and graves that have no names documented; unspeakable horrors committed by the country where his grandfather lived on the people of his native country; and the attempts to memorialize what is too graphically terrible to remember. By the end, writes the author, “I was just learning how to see.”
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87286-790-1
Page Count: 186
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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