Yong’s take on beauty and fashion is revealing, playful, and heartfelt.
A vibrant essay collection about beauty, identity, and cultural acceptance.
Is beauty only skin deep, or is it in the eye of the beholder? A social construct, or part of human nature? All of the above, writes Yong in this enjoyable book. The author examines the subject of beauty from a range of perspectives, including as a former senior editor of Allure, a bible of the fashion industry. She also looks back on her personal history as an Asian kid in a mostly white school. Yong has a clever, self-deprecating sense of humor, and she recounts her career as a procession of stumbles, steps forward and back, and lucky breaks. The author is conflicted about beauty: On one hand, she loves its aesthetic qualities, while on the other, she hates the way it promotes surface over depth. Even after leaving Allure, she continued to explore the nature of beauty, emphasizing how social media has radically increased the tempo of fashion cycles. Keeping up with the trends is an exhausting process, and many women (and men) become lost in the labyrinth of influencers, brands, and celebrity endorsements. Yong has a good time puncturing some of the wilder bubbles of the fashion business, and several of her essays are comically droll. Though she doesn’t reach any definitive conclusions about the concept of beauty, she makes clear that the fashion industry is a business first and foremost, and its goal is to make profits. Consequently, women should bear its manipulative nature in mind, and perhaps get away from it every now and then. Ultimately, writes the author, “there is no inherent shame in taking pride in your appearance or wanting to look good, just as there’s no shame in coming just as you are.”
Yong’s take on beauty and fashion is revealing, playful, and heartfelt.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780063236486
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.
The Top Chef host describes her journey to new heights.
For those who don’t know, Kish is a “gay Korean adopted woman, born in Seoul, raised in Michigan” and “a chef, a character, a host, and a cultural communicator—as well as a human being with a beating heart.” Though this book covers every step of her journey, every restaurant job and television role, and also discusses her experience as an adoptee (very positive) and a queer woman (late bloomer), the storytelling is so straightforward, lacking in suspense, character development, or dialogue, that it is basically a long version of its (longish) “About the Author.” Seemingly dramatic situations are not dramatized—when she was eliminated on her first Top Chef run, she assures us that she did the best she could, and drops it. “I can spare you the gory details (bouillabaisse and big personalities were involved).” Later, she cites a belief in protecting the privacy of others to omit the story of her first relationship with a woman. With no character development, neither does the reader get to know those who fall outside the privacy zone, like her best friend, Steph, and her wife, Bianca. When she gets mad, she says things like, “It’s a gross understatement to say I was crushed, beyond frustrated, and furious with the situation.” The fact that “I’ve never been a big reader” does not come as a surprise. It is more surprising when she confesses that “I believe the universe is selective about the moments in which it introduces life-changing prospects.”
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780316580915
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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