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
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
Only the most dedicated Ginsburg fans, and there are many, will devour everything here, but most readers will find items of...
From the second woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court, a collection of writings ranging from the slight to the serious.
Now 83, women’s rights icon Ginsburg nears the close of her distinguished career as a law professor, appellate advocate, judge, and justice, arguably having done more to move our law in the direction of gender equality than any living person. Now, as two Georgetown Law professors, Hartnett and Williams (emerita) prepare her official biography, they have collected Ginsburg’s speeches, lectures, articles, and opinions, some on offer here. They preface most of this material with explanatory, wholly complimentary notes and begin with a chapter of juvenilia, demonstrating Ginsburg’s early interest in human rights and in preserving individual liberties. Passages devoted to “the lighter side” of life at the Supreme Court include, for example, Ginsburg’s musings on lawyers depicted in opera, not least her own “starring” role in Scalia/Ginsburg. There follows a section on “waypavers” and “pathmarkers,” Ginsburg’s tributes to, among others, Belva Lockwood, the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court Bar, Gloria Steinem, “the face of feminism,” and Sandra Day O’Connor, the court’s first woman justice. Especially good are the author’s observations on the court’s “Jewish seat” and her charming lecture on four notable Supreme Court wives. These, and many other agreeable selections, are characterized as “remarks,” delivered and often recycled for various audiences. The collection also contains numerous bench announcements, summaries of some of Ginsburg’s most consequential opinions and dissents, and a few revealing essays that offer keys to her jurisprudence: for example, her perspective on the role of dissents, the value of consulting foreign law, and the wisdom of “measured motions” by the judiciary, wherein she mildly criticizes Roe v. Wade for provoking a backlash and halting “a political process that was moving in a reform direction.”
Only the most dedicated Ginsburg fans, and there are many, will devour everything here, but most readers will find items of interest from this icon of women’s rights.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4524-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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