Supermodel-cum-columnist, actress (in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever and Malcolm X), and TV correspondent (on Good Morning America and HBO's Entertainment News) Webb's first collection of maladroit essays will thrill Seventeen subscribers, but few others. Webb offers a tell-all memoir tracing her journey from New York club kid to Paris ingenue, posing for the likes of Bruce Weber and Peter Lindberg in duds by Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Calvin Klein, et al. A swanky Miss Malaprop (who occasionally gets it right), Webb peppers her otherwise puerile worldview with big words like ``exacerbate'' and ``ingratiate.'' When it comes to the city of light, the most she can say is that ``France is like another planet.'' Her guilty decision to abort an unwanted child goes like this: ``I know it's not falafel and then a baby. It's a baby, and I'm sorry.'' On insecurity: ``It tends to bring out the worst in people.'' Clearly, a fancy vocabulary does not a thinker or a writer make. After escapades as an A-list model in Milan, London, Norway, Morocco, etc., and a stint as Spike Lee's girlfriend, she became the first black woman to land an exclusive contract with Revlon. When the contract was terminated after three years, she turned to broadcast journalism, and, finally, to the writing life. As feminist scribe, railing against breast cancer, the straitjackets of gender and sexuality, the beauty myth, and the word ``bitch'' as a form of address, she is hopelessly inadequate. On race (the ``N'' word, Clarence Thomas, Mike Tyson), crime, and other political matters, she is equally superfluous. She is better suited to show inventories, paeans to couture decadence, and the therapeutics of shopping at Barneys. In most of these essays, like Shakespeare's ``little wanton boys that swim on bladders,'' Webb seems beyond her depth. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7868-6338-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.
In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleading—she’s more of an inconsistent or conflicted feminist—the author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls “rape culture” in society—and by Gay’s measure, this is a culture in which even the stately New York Times is complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies as The Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term “women’s fiction” and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena Dunham’s Girls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcement—especially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies in Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gay’s writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perry’s movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies like The Help, 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that “all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.”
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228271-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The benefit of slavery is but one of the firebombs lobbed within a book that more are likely to find infuriating than...
A conservative professor of economics and public policy argues that conventional attitudes about racism and social injustice are not only wrong, but harmful as well, in an analysis that will spark outrage among the liberal intellectuals that he targets.
Sowell (The Housing Boom and Bust, 2009, etc.) understates the case when he writes that he has arrived at “many conclusions very different from those currently prevailing in the media, in politics or in academia.” The result of that common liberal consensus, he charges, “has been a steady drumbeat of grievance and victimhood ideologies, from the media, from educational institutions and from other institutions permeated by the vision of the intelligentsia.” As a member of the media, an educator, an intellectual and a black man (who often writes about racial issues from a conservative perspective), Sowell relishes his role as provocateur. Of course, the author’s version of truth serves an agenda suggesting that the black community might have been better off before initiatives such as civil rights and affirmative action and that blaming society for the inequities suffered by minorities represents “a long tradition of intellectuals who more or less automatically transform differences into inequities and inequities into the evils or shortcomings of society.” Even if blacks have less opportunity than whites, achieve less and commit more crime, he writes, these are not the results of oppression, and they can’t be resolved by “a lifestyle of dependency.” Instead, “those who lag, for whatever reasons, face a daunting task of bringing themselves up to the rest of society in knowledge, skills and experience—and in the attitudes necessary to acquire this knowledge and these skills and experience.” In other words, the problem isn’t white racism but black attitudes.
The benefit of slavery is but one of the firebombs lobbed within a book that more are likely to find infuriating than enlightening.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-05872-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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