A somewhat dry yet comprehensive report on Japanese women— from a professor of psychology (at Tokyo's Keio Univ.) and adviser on women's issues. Iwao reports that, not surprisingly, Japanese women—who have long been recognized as the dominant force in the home—have developed a different perspective from their US counterparts on equality, marriage, and a woman's role and identity. The author details the growing differences between the generations born between 1935-59, and those born in the 1960's or later—differences that predictably demonstrate a moving away from traditional deference to the husband, from working only in the home, and from the importance of marriage. Younger women enjoy a more egalitarian relationship with men, expect more from marriage, and anticipate having careers. But even these women are affected by the traditional tendency to value pragmatism over principle (Japanese women have legal equality but are reluctant to test it) and to be realistic about what is possible (they do not expect their husbands to be a best friend, nor themselves to be great successes). Less goal-oriented than her American counterpart, the contemporary Japanese woman values personal fulfillment, finds men's lives impossibly regimented, and ``believes that if one can achieve a workable balance among one's various roles, that is sufficient.'' Today, young women are entering corporations—but even this, Iwao contends, will not provoke confrontation. Instead, the old ``autonomy and separation of activity between the sexes will weaken, and, in Japan, where realism and pragmatism are highly prized and where evaluations are based on a long-term perspective, interdependence will be viewed affirmatively.'' An informative and useful contribution to mutual understanding—but marred by less than scintillating prose.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-932315-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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