Thorough research and helpful personal stories effectively relay the dilemma that nearly all women face on a daily basis.
How real women continue to struggle to reach the fictitious goal of having the perfect body.
Women often joke about having a bad hair day or how they can find nothing to wear, but as Engeln (Psychology/Northwestern Univ.) discovered through her intensive research and numerous interviews, our culture holds women to an impossible standard of perfection. The struggle to reach that pinnacle, even when women acknowledge that it’s impossible, is creating a sector of society that is fearful and anxious about body image from a very young age. Women spend hours fussing and primping their hair, makeup, and nails and planning the perfect outfit and almost every waking moment worrying about their weight and body image. Engeln calls this pervasive situation "beauty sickness”—“what happens when women's emotional energy gets so bound up with what they see in the mirror that it becomes harder for them to see other aspects of their lives.” Furthermore, she writes, “although we hear the most about beauty sickness in young women, it's a malaise that affects women of all ages." From as early as age 5, girls fret about their weight and appearance, and they quickly discover that what they wear can affect their chances to play like their male friends. As girls move into adolescence and young adulthood, the objectification intensifies, and women discover that they must walk a fine line between feeling powerful, sexy, and attractive and being considered slutty for wearing revealing clothes. It’s a double standard that can affect women in every area of their lives. As Engeln points out, change starts at the individual level, with women taking possession of their own thoughts. Her solid ideas, mostly related in the final section, “How We Can Fight Beauty Sickness,” will help women think positively about themselves regardless of body shape.
Thorough research and helpful personal stories effectively relay the dilemma that nearly all women face on a daily basis.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-246977-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
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