A worthy blend of psychology, ethnography, and feminist theory that investigates the factors shaping women’s perceptions of...
A book offers a qualitative study of women’s feelings about life choices and empowerment.
In this work, Cooper (Sophie Star Child, 2015) draws on a combination of Jungian theory, popular nonfiction, and assorted interviews to explore the elements of women’s empowerment. The author begins on a personal note, tracing her own “journey toward empowerment” and those of other women in her life. The book then broadens its focus to examine larger questions of what constitutes empowerment, why it matters, and how it affects quality of life. After establishing the study’s theoretical basis, the volume moves into extended excerpts from interviews with more than a dozen participants, women of varying ages and experiences responding to questions about fulfillment, happiness, work, and family. They share stories of challenges, emotions, aspirations, and tactics for managing their personal and professional lives, providing the raw material from which Cooper draws broader conclusions on empowerment and delivers advice to readers on maximizing their own contentment. She emphasizes that “a woman’s highest obligation is to love herself without condition, in the manner one would love a child or one’s best friend.” The writing style in these pages is varied, veering between conversational prose and forests of jargon (“By integrating empowerment, Jung’s animus and anima theory and psychological happiness and how this relates to actual lived contemporary female experience displayed in the interviews conducted, we can identify models of effective interventions, treatments and modalities”). The approaches to the topic range from clinical to spiritual (“Destiny is inviting women at this time in history to shake off old outworn personas and beliefs and step into the Sun, taking our rightful place again as Goddesses of the Earth”). While sweeping statements like “in essence, the 21st century woman is in a crisis of the soul” are somewhat excessive, the book provides a valuable perspective on the realities of contemporary women’s lives and a framework for understanding them in a theoretical context, as well as strategies for maximizing one’s own authority and satisfaction. An extensive bibliography and in-text citations place the book within the context of Cooper’s substantial research.
A worthy blend of psychology, ethnography, and feminist theory that investigates the factors shaping women’s perceptions of their lives.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63051-405-1
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Chiron Publications
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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