Przybyszewski’s fashion history shines a much-needed spotlight on a contingent of forgotten professionals and the role they...
Historian and prizewinning dressmaker Przybyszewski (History/Univ. of Notre Dame; The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan, 1999, etc.) recounts the social history of a group of talented women, the “Dress Doctors,” who once instructed young American women in the art of dress.
While the author bemoans American women’s current sloppy attire, her illuminating commentary explains the sewing and design skills that were once common knowledge but have been washed away by a proliferation of cheap, ill-fitting and inappropriate clothing. Consequently, American women no longer possess the aptitude necessary to dress with style on a reasonable budget. Ambling through a used bookstore, Przybyszewski discovered a 1954 college textbook whose “message was artistic, logical, and democratic: knowledge, not money, is the key to beauty in dress.” A “remarkable group of women who worked as teachers, writers, retailers, and designers” wrote these texts, and many worked in home economics departments at colleges. The Dress Doctors based their theory of dress on the “Five Art Principles”: harmony, rhythm, balance, proportion and emphasis. Przybyszewski delves into the role of self-esteem, the turning away from thrift as an ideal, and the rise of consumption in America and its effects on the country. When the 1960s brought waves of social, legislative and cultural upheavals, the Dress Doctors began losing their hold on fashion. Miniskirts and pants were becoming the norm for many girls and women. By 1975, one Dress Doctor declared, the “bad was beautiful and the beautiful was worthless.” The author also explores the inherent racism of the Dress Doctors’ teachings. “The one type of woman the Dress Doctors overlooked completely was the African American,” she writes. “They thereby implied, even if they never actually wrote it down, that she could not be beautiful.”
Przybyszewski’s fashion history shines a much-needed spotlight on a contingent of forgotten professionals and the role they played in dressing American women with style.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-03671-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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