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VANITY FAIR'S WOMEN ON WOMEN

Besides making for absorbing reading, these essays pack a feminist wallop.

A vigorous selection of essays spanning the magazine’s modern era that underscore the combative resilience of notable accomplished women who never gave in to what was expected of them.

Perusing the list of subjects—including, among many others, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Tiny Fey, Whoopi Goldberg, Frida Kahlo, Michelle Phillips, Princess Diana, Tina Turner, and Lady Gaga—it’s clear that a major theme of the collection is overcoming adversity. The profiles are divided into “Comedians,” “White House,” “Society and Style,” “Renegades,” “Musicians,” “the House of Windsor,” “The Stars,” and “In Their Own Words,” and the content spans the last four decades of editors-in-chief, including Tina Brown, Graydon Carter, and Jones, the current EIC. Yes, the pieces engagingly capture the celebrity of many of the subjects, but they are also culturally relevant and timely—e.g., “The Change Agent,” about actor Michelle Williams, who forced a reckoning over the wide discrepancy in pay between men and women in Hollywood. Written as minibiographies, the profiles serve as poignant tales of how one rises and falls and then rises again. In “Deconstructing Gloria” (1992), Leslie Bennetts examines how Gloria Steinem caused a major scandal by dating real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, as if she were betraying all her feminist ideals: “Trashing her became the favorite spectator sport of the smart set.” In Maureen Orth’s piece on Tina Turner, the singer recounts candidly how she was abused physically and emotionally by Ike Turner for decades; though many witnessed the mistreatment, “no one ever intervened.” Along with bubbly profiles of style icons Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, Laura Jacobs offers an astute piece on Emily Post, who turned a soured marriage and scandalous divorce into a satisfying new career as a bestselling writer. Finally, there are a cluster of recent essays delineating the fallout of the #MeToo movement by those closest to the subject in film, literature, and Wall Street.

Besides making for absorbing reading, these essays pack a feminist wallop.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-56214-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: July 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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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