Clothes+shoes, I can actually resist. Food, I can, too (I just choose not to). But with books I am utterly and entirely powerless.
2. Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique, Jaclyn Geller
Tempt a woman with a truckload of wedding gifts and social approbation, says Geller, and she's more than happy to forget that matrimony is the last institution she should want to join, given its patriarchal history. Geller examines modern marriage in a lively, accessible book that's one part academic analysis and three parts rant. As friend after friend rushed down the aisle, however, she began to examine why marriage is so revered that it automatically trumps a close, platonic friendship; the excitement of multiple sexual relationships; or a solitary, contemplative existence. Determined to find the answer, Geller pores over husband-hunting manuals and wedding guidebooks, and even poses as a bride at Bloomingdale's bridal registry, where the crystal pitchers, silver fondue dishes and Limoges soup tureens, she confesses, have tremendous allure.
3.Darling?, Heidi Jon Schmidt
The cover of this delightful second collection features a Rorschach blot that manages to suggest both a human heart and a plucked chicken both fitting metaphors for Schmidt's main characters. They are women (mostly) whose relationships to love and loved ones are full of longing, disappointment and hilarity; even when the women are vulnerable, they're defiantly so.
4. The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
Petite Tony teaches the agressively male subject of military history and has a talent for speaking backwards; actually, she's not. Charis eats only vegetarian fare and consults crystals. Boisterous, stylish Roz runs her own company and drives a BMW. These three women would seem to have little in common, but they're held together by a single thread: Zenia, a lying, charismatic femme fatale who at one time or other stole the men in their lives. But Zenia is dead, blown to bits in Beirut, and can hurt them no more. Or so they think. until the day a still-seductive Zenia walks into the restaurant where they are having lunch. As in Cat's Eye, Atwood takes feminism one step further, showing women as victims not only of society but of themselves.
5. Bare Blass, Bill Blass
Nonlinear in format-Blass skips from telling of a 1949 prize he won for designing a gingham dress with a patent leather belt, to a 1971 fashion show in Fort Wayne, Ind., and then back to his role serving in the armed forces during WWII-the book has the feel of a scrapbook of memories, which is indeed delightful when one considers the colorful life Blass led. Originally from the Midwest, he moved to New York at age 17 and eventually became one of fashion's biggest names. Written in the first person and peppered with snapshots of Blass with Pat Buckley, Nancy Kissinger, Nancy Reagan, Gloria Vanderbilt and others, Blass's memoir is at once a tribute to the designer and, as he writes, "a typical American success story."
6. The Law of Love, Laura Esquivel
Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel leapt to international fame in 1993 with Like Water For Chocolate. Her new novel strives to replicate the impact of that work with multimedia innovation in style and structure. This translation by Margaret Sayers Peden comes with a CD of arias by Puccini and Mexican danzones, and 48 pages of striking color illustrations by Spanish artist Miguelano Prado. The text by Esquivel is part science fiction, part new age spiritual journey, as she chronicles the efforts of 23rd century "astroanalyst" Azucena to find her twin soul.
7. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – a marriage, Dianne Middlebrook
Astutely reasoned, fluidly written and developed with psychological acuity, the work is a sympathetically balanced assessment of two lives that flamed brightly with the incandescent fire of creative genius. And she effectively demolishes Hughes as the demon who destroyed Plath, stating that during their marriage he displayed "a high level of tolerance toward what other people considered... antisocial, crazy... behavior"; she also writes that Plath's emotional breakdown was a recurrence of the clinical depression that occasioned her first attempt at suicide in 1953. In the end, the book is most valuable in interpreting Hughes's sources of poetic inspiration and emotional behavior, and in providing a balanced assessment of the legacy of a troubled marriage and the works of art it engendered.
Reviews from Amazon
