A Bonus Post: After you finish reading my review, I suggest heading over to Book Riot where I wrote about how this book led me down the bibliography rabbit hole and some of the other books about women and politics that I’m hoping to read.
Review: Rebecca Traister’s goal in Big Girls Don’t Cry is a big one — to tell the story of women and the 2008 presidential election, a story of the country and its culture and how the public figures in this race showed how far the country has come and how much further there still is to go when it comes to addressing sex and race in our public discourse.
What It’s About: The 2008 presidential election was a big one for a number of reasons, but the narrative this book focuses on is the role of women as candidates, spouses, and commentators. Traister, a reporter for Salon, offers an account of the election, covering a range of women including Sarah Palin, Tina Fey, Katic Couric, and Hillary Clinton and exploring the different reactions the candidates received throughout the election season.
I’m Sorry You Feel That Way is a memoir — series of essays, really — about a woman told through the relationships with the men in her life. Through essays about her son, father, first husband, second husband, friend, and the Satanist that lives downstairs (among others), Diana Joseph explores what its like to be a women based on the different relationships she has with men.
When I read Jennifer Pozner’s Reality Bites Back, a feminist critique of reality television, I finally felt like I was reading a book that got what I’ve been trying to say. And although the book is focused specifically on reality television, I think Posner’s methods of analysis and conclusions can apply equally well to other forms of popular entertainment.
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a story about how one woman fought back against one of the most repressive regimes in the world in order to save herself, her family, and her community, one dress at a time.
When the Taliban seized control of Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1996, life for the residents of the city, especially the women, changed dramatically. Women like Kamela Sediqi, a young, educated teacher, were suddenly forced to stay in their homes, restricted from even the most basic activities. At the same time, the men of Kabul were either conscripted or forced to flee, leaving a city of women that needed to work to survive but were forbidden from doing so. Out of these difficult circumstances, Kamela mobilized her sisters and started a dressmaking business to support her family through the occupation.
One Sentence Summary: Can the great books of feminism help one working mother reconcile her idealized outlook on life from college to the experiences she has today?
One Sentence Review: Although I felt like just barely the wrong age group for Reading Women, I loved the analysis of feminists texts and want to go read even more of them.
while ago I started reading The Odyssey as part of a read-a-long hosted by Trish at Love, Laughter, and Insanity. I did finish the book right on schedule, reading the last page on Thanksgiving during a post-turkey coma, but then never got around to writing up my thoughts (for the end, or for the second check in… a good participant, I am not).
But The Odyssey was awesome, and I am really glad I read it. I have to admit, that’s not what I expected would happen — something about The Odyssey being an epic, ancient, and a poem intimidated me into thinking I’d hate it, which was not the case at all.
Because I’m woefully behind on writing reviews, I’m combining a few of them to try and get caught up. These are three nonfiction books that I enjoyed, for the most part, but ended up not having a ton of stuff to say about. Click the photos to head to the reviews!
Summary: Journalist Laura Sessions Stepp looks into the changing youth dating culture. Instead of the traditional dating to relationship to marriage path, more and more women (and men) are “hooking up,” creating a no-strings-attached sexual culture that lets participants change partners at will and without ever committing to each other.
