A timely, compelling dissection of feminism's reliance on consumerism and useful suggestions for paths forward.
A clear analysis of the commodification of feminism from protest to brand.
As the former editor-in-chief of Jezebel and executive editor of Vogue, Beck is no stranger to the White feminism that permeates the modern cultural landscape. As influencers blithely attach Audre Lorde quotes to Instagram ads and White women are once again donning literal and metaphorical pink hats in “protest,” the author deftly retraces how we ended up here and highlights the many women this brand of feminism elides or ostracizes. Beck offers a lively history of the suffragettes and their ideological descendants, including the #GirlBoss and #MeToo movements. The author effectively brings out of the background many of the Black working women who enabled the success of the predominantly White and upper-class women at the center of these stories. “Instead of a protest vehicle,” she writes, “feminism became a brand….To ‘revolutionize’ your life through business once again merges the radicalism of feminism with the corporate, women-oppressing language of capitalism. If you threw a millennial-pink lens over this saying, you could put it on Pinterest.” Beck posits that the stark inequalities of so-called “women’s empowerment” are exacerbated even more unevenly in the Covid-19 era. The pandemic has engendered further demarcations along class and racial lines, between protected forms of labor and the economically vulnerable—e.g., nannies, housekeepers, and other caretakers. The author situates herself as a woman with considerable influence who chooses to amplify underappreciated workers in concrete ways rather than resting on the laurels of corporate “diversity.” With both vigor and rigor, Beck outlines a variety of fundamental problems with contemporary liberal feminism, which relies too much on brand endorsements and shallow empowerment. As she writes, “we can avoid becoming the next generation of white feminism by incorporating the points of view that this ideology does not account for.”
A timely, compelling dissection of feminism's reliance on consumerism and useful suggestions for paths forward.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982134-41-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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