At a time when women weren’t supposed to want to travel beyond their fenced yards, stewardesses set their sights on the sky;...
A historian chronicles the stewardess’ trajectory from friendly nurse to sultry sex symbol during the “golden age” of flying, 1945–1970.
In our era of flight delays, overcrowded planes and pretzel packets, it’s easy to forget that air travel once held the promise of allure and sophistication, and that the attendants who staffed the aisles acted as role models for women who craved more than just suburban domesticity. Using archival materials and interviews with former stewardesses, Vantoch (The Threesome Handbook, 2007) demonstrates that these women strived to literally soar beyond the confines of the roles allotted to them in midcentury America. Aside from a brief, giddy phase in the 1920s when “lady pilots” performed at air shows, aviation was a man’s world—until airlines began promoting in-flight service as a way to woo travelers away from automobiles and trains. Who better to assist first-time fliers and businessmen than docile young women with medical training? With the 1940s came improvements to the airplanes (pressurized cabins, more headroom), resulting in less turbulence, and airlines dropped the nursing requirement for prospective stewardesses. By this time, the stewardess as icon embodied a dichotomy dear to the heart of Cold War–era Americans: the plucky, attractive woman who lived to serve even as she professed independence. Vantoch’s research illuminates the strict rules that airlines imposed to keep stewardesses in line, monitoring their weight, inspecting their hair and makeup, and insisting that they retire upon marriage, pregnancy or the age of 32. The revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, however, led many stewardesses to protest these increasingly irrelevant rules, as well as to challenge racial stereotyping in hiring policies and to rebel against sexualized ad campaigns.
At a time when women weren’t supposed to want to travel beyond their fenced yards, stewardesses set their sights on the sky; this book lovingly salutes them.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8122-4481-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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