Feminist icon, goddess, social climber, bunny—who is Gloria Steinem? All of the above, according to a serious new biography that examines Steinem's life from early childhood to ``this-is- what-63-is-like.'' To many, if not most, who came of age around 1972, Steinem is synonymous with the second feminist revolution. That year marked the launch of Ms. magazine, the popular journal of women's revolt against the patriarchy. According to Stern (coauthor, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry, 1990), Steinem was late to the revolution. Her famous article, ``A Bunny's Tale,'' about her debilitating experiences as a Playboy Bunny, was published in the same year as Betty Friedan's seminal The Feminine Mystique, but Steinem's ``click'' did not come until 1969, when she attended a speakout on abortion. From then on, her liberal ideology and her writings began to focus on women. What's new here is a real look at Steinem off the public platform, at the ambitious woman who barred marriage and children from her agenda but used men as access to the next rung of the social ladder. A long list of lovers here runs from the well-connected scion of a musical family to publishing and real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman. Over the years, Steinem managed to keep most of the lovers as friends. That was tangential to developing herself, with the help of eloquent podium partners, as spokeswoman for the movement. Stern points up that in spite of—or perhaps because of—Steinem's short skirts, iconic hairstyle, possible face-lift, and questionable protestations that good looks have been a hindrance, she is kind, caring, generous, and genuinely dedicated to women's interests. Some of the more touching stories of the formative years have been revealed in Steinem's own books but are told here with a perspective that glorifies a heroine for the '90s, kohl eyeliner and all. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55972-409-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
