A fine work of history, showing how we came to live in a world of things, fat if not necessarily happy.
Pop quiz: Patriotism involves (a) giving your life for your country; (b) flying the flag on national holidays; (c) shopping till you drop. If you answered (c), you’ll be well prepared to follow this intriguing, oblique look at the recent American past by Bancroft Prize–winner Cohen (Making a New Deal, 1990).
Mass consumption, whether of canned soup, laundry detergent, or cookie-cutter houses, already had a long pedigree by WWII, the author writes; the 1920s in particular saw a huge growth in mass-market advertising and national brand-building. But the war and its immediate aftermath gave American consumers an ideology to justify their acquisitive habits, argues Cohen (History/Harvard): Americans of the time “saw their nation as the model for the world of a society committed to mass and what were assumed to be its far-reaching benefits.” In this democracy of the checkbook, spending was perceived as a duty, and the Consumers’ Republic became even more ideologically charged during the Cold War, when propagandists contrasted the overflowing aisles of American supermarkets with the bread lines and empty shelves of the Soviet bloc. Cohen links such postwar policies as the GI Bill and the restructuring of collective-bargaining procedures to this national marketplace; elsewhere she couples African-Americans’ dawning awareness of their purchasing power with the rise of the civil-rights movement. She examines the growth of suburbs and other features of “the landscape of mass consumption,” together with the social tensions resulting from changes in gender, class, and economic dynamics as everyone increasingly ate the same burgers and bought the same soap. Cohen’s arguments are dense, her tone academic, but the narrative is always accessible and enlivened by telling asides: “Department store profits reached a new peak during 1941,” she notes, “with the bombing of Pearl Harbor casting only a small shadow over Christmas gift-buying that December.”
A fine work of history, showing how we came to live in a world of things, fat if not necessarily happy.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40750-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.
Gornick’s (The Odd Woman and the City, 2016) ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection.
Rereading texts, and comparing her most recent perceptions against those of the past, is the linchpin of the book, with the author revisiting such celebrated novels as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Colette's The Vagabond, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. Gornick also explores the history and changing face of Jewish American fiction as expressions of "the other." The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years. Though she was an avatar of "personal journalism" and a former staff writer for the Village Voice—a publication that “had a muckraking bent which made its writers…sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society’s head”—here, Gornick mostly subordinates her politics to the power of literature, to the books that have always been her intimates, old friends to whom she could turn time and again. "I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L," she writes; it shows. The author believes that for those willing to relinquish treasured but outmoded interpretations, rereading over a span of decades can be a journey, sometimes unsettling, toward richer meanings of books that are touchstones of one's life. As always, Gornick reveals as much about herself as about the writers whose works she explores; particularly arresting are her essays on Lawrence and on Natalia Ginzburg. Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty. It is reflected throughout, perhaps nowhere so vividly as in a vignette involving a stay in Israel, where, try as she might, Gornick could not get past the "appalling tribalism of the culture.”
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-28215-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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