Hackneyed prose, confused ideas.
Inane, self-justifying sequel to Confessions of a Slacker Mom (2004).
Mead-Ferro, who lives with her two children and second husband in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, urges mothers and wives to transcend pettiness and artificiality—in ten essays that obsess over her dirty house, boob jobs and “prioritizing” her duties. These chatty pieces, sprinkled throughout with anecdotes, might be imaginatively witty, even original, if the author had any gift at all for stylish satire à la Erma Bombeck. Instead, Mead-Ferro is a writer of niceties, a startled throwback to the olden days before the 1970s who is still asking herself why she has to be called Mrs. Michael Ferro or why she has to be the one to RSVP to invitations and write the family Christmas cards. (Message to the author: You don’t.) On the other hand, hearkening back to her childhood on a farm in Wyoming, she remembers that her mother didn’t worry about a dirty floor or concocting gourmet dinners. In “Can We Talk Dirty?” the author makes the revolutionary decision to stop washing her hair every day because it’s healthier and saves time. Elsewhere she considers the convenience of separate beds for her and her husband. Is this 44-year-old turning into her mother? Well, Mom probably didn’t have plastic surgery that left her with “a pair of oranges in a pair of socks.” Nor would she be likely to admit, as Mead-Ferro does in “I Knew There Was Something I Forgot to Do Today!” that she visited a kinky-toys shop with her girlfriends. The author’s main problem is that she’s not nearly as provocative as she thinks she is. “Old Enough to Know Better” purports to explore women’s susceptibility to the images of perpetual youthful beauty bombarding them on TV and in print, but Mead-Ferro tells us a friend’s husband left her because “she let herself go,” without exploring the contradictory connotations of this expression.
Hackneyed prose, confused ideas.Pub Date: April 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-7382-1016-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.
Essays focused on an overarching question: “What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?”
Melding memoir, history, and trenchant literary analysis, Nobel Prize laureate Morrison (Emeritus, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; God Help the Child, 2015, etc.) offers perceptive reflections on the configuration of Otherness. Revised from her Norton Lectures at Harvard, the volume consists of six essays that consider how race is conceived, internalized, and culturally transmitted, drawing in part on writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Conrad, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the African writer Camara Laye, whose novel The Radiance of the King Morrison greatly admires. Laye told the story of a white man, stranded and destitute in Africa, struggling to maintain his assumptions of white privilege. For Morrison, the novel illuminates the pressures that “make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of humanity.” She also offers insightful glosses into her own aims as a novelist. “Narrative fiction,” she writes, “provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.” In Beloved, for example, she reimagined the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who had killed her children rather than see them enslaved, as she had been. In A Mercy, she examined “the journey from sympathetic race relations to violent ones fostered by religion.” In Paradise, she delved into the issue of hierarchies of blackness by looking at “the contradictory results of devising a purely raced community”; she purposely did not identify her characters’ race in order to “simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was.” In God Help the Child, Morrison considered “the triumphalism and deception that colorism fosters.” Her current novel in progress, she discloses, explores “the education of a racist—how does one move from a non-racial womb to the womb of racism”?
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-97645-0
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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