The new face of boardroom feminism, of course, is Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Now, it’s nearly impossible to dislike Sandberg, or to be unimpressed by her wry candor and the indisputable truth of her message. Her new book, Lean In, is a disarmingly self-deprecating career-management advice manual that doubles as a feminist manifesto.
When Hugo Chávez took office as Venezuelan president in 1999, his appeal in the country seemed almost universal. Even many of the old petro-state’s entrenched beneficiaries, the elites with their flats in Paris, London, New York and Miami, welcomed a fresh face to shake up an ossified political system. The poor identified with his dark skin, folksy manner and confidence in speaking truth to power. Here, it seemed, was a leader with the vision, social commitment and broad base to break down the structural barriers that had marginalised so many.
Several crocodiles make appearances in The Rainbow Troops. They are presented without much fanfare, as they pose just one of the everyday dangers of living poor in an Indonesian swamp. When a crocodile blocks his way, Lintang, the unlikely star of his ten-student, one-room schoolhouse, simply hacks a new route to class. He is well-trained in the art of making do—although just barely. When his bicycle chain snaps, he pawns his father’s wedding ring to repair it. His classmates hope the chain will hold, since Lintang’s family has nothing else to pawn, and the bike is his only means of
In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium series, a disaffected teenaged rape survivor, Lisbeth Salander, kicks ass and takes names. Readers and critics hailed Larsson’s creation as groundbreaking. To pick just one representative case, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, calls Salander “one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while: . . . the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl.” One would think the critics had never seen a woman in pants before, let alone one who can hold her own against the patriarchy.
Lakewood Church senior pastor Joel Osteen’s second book, Become a Better You, reportedly made him $13 million; his latest, I Declare (FaithWords, $22), is now on USA Today’s best-seller list. Osteen came to lead the country’s most mega megachurch by selling a feel-good message about the relationship between positive thinking and a life well lived. “Explosive blessings,” Osteen tells his congregation, come to those who “speak victory.” Osteen fans, who include Oprah Winfrey, Hulk Hogan, and Cher, are instructed to “develop a habit of happiness.” And while some critics quibble with the pastor’s parroting of the prosperity gospel, and others
Emily Bazelon’s intelligent, rigorous Sticks and Stones charts the experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on how to contain or prevent such harm. She focuses primarily on the stories of three kids: an African-American girl, Monique McClain, who became the target of a few girls at her school in Connecticut, went through a depression and finally switched schools and found happiness; a gay boy in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher, who struggled against prejudice but also enjoyed being a provocateur; and Phoebe Prince, an Irish girl transplanted to a town in Massachusetts, who was bullied atrociously
Former General David Petraeus, now retired from the United States Army and unemployed, had been a professional soldier for thirty years before he commanded troops in combat. The year was 2003, the place southern Iraq. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein was only a few days old when Petraeus concluded that the scrambling retreat of the Iraqi army was not going to be the whole of the story.
Dan Slater’s parents met through Contact, Inc., a matchmaking service that debuted in 1965 and went defunct soon after—though not before the two college students paid $4 each and filled out Contact’s 100-question personality test. A rented mainframe computer nicknamed Eros tallied up their responses and concluded they were well-suited. And thus a Harvard boy got introduced to a Mount Holyoke girl.
Jim Crace’s new novel, set in an unspecified part of rural England during an unspecified time that might be the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, begins with two pillars of smoke – an appropriately biblical turn. One of these announces that, somewhere within the boundaries of the tiny village where Harvest is set, new settlers have arrived: the law “gives the right of settlement and cedes a portion of our share to any vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it”. The other column of smoke
One person’s sonic heaven is the next person’s purgatory. When is sound enjoyable? When is it an irritation? When is it actually dangerous? These are some of the themes of Mike Goldsmith’s Discord: The Story of Noise, an enjoyable history of “sound out of place.” Mr. Goldsmith, a longtime researcher in acoustics, covers the scientific history of noise—especially how to measure and contain it—as well as its cultural aspects.
Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars argues persuasively that humans are losing some kind of property rights struggle with creatures of the wild. He cites an extensive history of resolute and sometimes blatantly hostile real-estate invasion by beavers, Canada geese, wild turkeys, and white-tailed deer, all of which were once assumed to be picturesque and even lovable denizens of the dark and safely remote forest.
Dave Zirin’s new book hovers over the world of sports, galloping liberally from the players to owners, from economic inequality to gender inequality. He argues that politics “has returned [to sports] with a vengeance.” And he insists that “the stakes couldn’t be higher.”
The men in Jess Walter’s pungent new story collection, We Live in Water, are coming apart. These men — and they are exclusively men, save a few catalytic female characters — are what society (and ex-wives) commonly label disappointments. Trading in ill-considered choices, they have made a habit of letting folks down — their women, their kids, their friends, their creditors and, chiefly, themselves. Walter’s protagonists endure a buffet of self-inflicted misfortune, everything from meth addiction to dodgy parenting, often served in a combo platter with a side of unlucky in love. His characters are all searching, with varying levels
Since my fiction is usually about people, and I consider sex one of the more important and emotionally fascinating activities people undertake, sometimes I must run the gauntlet of writing a sex scene. The results vary, though I try to make a habit of not publishing the many occasions when things don’t work. “Don’t worry,” I console myself, stroking my arm. “It happens.”
How to classify Artful, the latest offering from Scottish writer Ali Smith? An introductory note declares the book to be a faithful adaptation of the four Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature she delivered at Oxford last winter, but Artful is far from a rigorous academic talk; its literary criticism comes in the form of a fictional soliloquy of yearning. The premise is this: In a house in London, a woman mourning the death of her partner turns to their shared library for distraction from loss, only to find that her beloved has come back, unannounced, for a visit. The
Courage to today’s aspiring rock star. In 1967, The Byrds could afford to be gently cynical about pop-music acclaim. After all, they’d made a fortune by transforming Dylan’s folk song “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a jangly pop tune delivered with a crooked smile. But what should an aspiring rock star do today?
“I wanted to rent a lion, but they said the insurance was too much,” Eddie Huang told me, offhandedly, one chilly afternoon late last year. We were discussing the four-minute TED talk he’s preparing to deliver at the organization’s annual conference this February, “I Dreamt of White Lions.” Its main point, according to Huang, who is a 2013 TED Fellow, is that “lions are the king of the animal kingdom like white people rule the world. But neither of those ideas have any power unless you give it.” He was hoping to illustrate his upending of the received wisdom by
Biographers of Sylvia Plath take on a daunting task: Who could ever write as much or as well about Plath as Plath did? Plath was obsessed with re-creating her life’s story, which she not only transmuted into poetry and fiction but wrestled with in a staggering volume of personal writing. In the overflowing margins of leather-bound pocket calendars, across thousands of pages of journal entries and letters, Plath described the minutia of her days sometimes down to the hour, sparing no one from her exacting, critical eye. Plath’s story can even be divined through an incredible store of the stuff
Los Angeles is traditionally where factoids become fables and get passed off as philosophy. The true mystical secret of Zen ideas in particular is that they’re stupid. California is pretty stupid, too—which means that warmed-over takeout Zen has done a good business there. Consider, just for instance, the success of the Nichiren Shōshū sect: Its promoters have melded simplistic Zen ideas with materialism, and throughout the ’80s, suburban Angelenos gathered in living rooms, all chanting for happiness and/or a new car. It worked, too: Lots of them did eventually get new cars.
In 1971, Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler announced his intention to “photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive, in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled.” His Variable Piece #70 was, unsurprisingly, never completed, but Huebler’s comprehensive cataloguing impulse is telling: It speaks of a desire to map the contours of civilization, to capture and behold the mass of humanity. What do we, collectively, look like? And how do we depict ourselves to ourselves?
