A shrewd take on cultural history.
Toy mania.
Journalist Hitt makes a lively book debut with a dive into the creation, marketing, and meaning of the iconic Barbie doll, Mattel’s huge moneymaker, launched in 1959. Finding the toy world to be “like the Pentagon,” “highly secretive, obsessed with the threat of espionage and the potential theft of secrets,” Hitt has mined archives and published sources to unravel the mystery of Barbie’s origins, the company’s internal machinations, and its battles against competitors. Barbie, she reveals, was based on a German newspaper cartoon figure called Lilli, who became fashioned into a plaything by a German toy maker. Lilli the figurine debuted in 1955, looking “like a plastic Marlene Dietrich—impossibly thin, synthetically perky, eyebrows angled over a sidelong gaze, already bored by her beholder.” Barbie’s American creator, the feisty Ruth Handler, bought several Lilli dolls on a European trip in 1956, probably having seen one first in a posh toy store on Rodeo Drive, a short distance from her Los Angeles home. Although toy mogul Louis Marx got an exclusive contract to sell Lilli in the U.S., Mattel prevailed after a lawsuit that went on for two years. From the first, the company understood Barbie not as “a terminal product that ends with the first sale, but something to collect, nurture, and feed with a constant supply of costumes and accessories.” Hitt follows Barbie’s fortunes decade by decade, as Mattel strived to change with the times: offering diverse dolls in the 1980s, a President Barbie in 1992, and a roster of niche Barbies later. At the same time, the company mounted relentless infringement suits. By 2023, though, when Greta Gerwig’s movie satirized its clueless male leadership, Mattel finally realized that parody could be a boon for its brand.
A shrewd take on cultural history.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668031827
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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