Author: resolutewoman
-
The self-assertive, independent woman
“What kind of revolution, I wonder, do we need to make men dream of self-assertive, independent women as the epitome of beauty?” asks Fratema Mernissi in her book Scheherazade Goes West—Different Cultures, Different Harems. A professor of sociology at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco, Mernissi remembers trips to visit her grandmother, who…
-
Thanks for animal friends
I just read a good dog book—the heartwarming story about Haatchi and Little B. Haatchi is a big dog—an Anatolian shepherd—that was abused and then left for dead on railroad tracks. Little B., whose real name is Owen, is a boy who lives in England and has a rare genetic disorder. He had become anxious…
-
Not as big as a Dreadnoughtus
I’m feeling dreadful. I hadn’t lost the extra pounds I gained during my vacation when company arrived at our house. After five days of entertaining, I have a few more pounds to lose. That’s why I was happy to find an article in The Dallas Morning News about an 86-feet-long, 130,000-pound Dreadnoughtus. One of the…
-
No perfect heroes
Today we want our heroes to be perfect, says filmmaker Ken Burns. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, the two presidents featured in his new PBS series, were great presidents, but they were not perfect people, Burns stresses. They were complicated people. He wants us to look beyond the easy caricatures we use to define historical…
-
A complicated marriage
Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt had “a complicated marriage,” concluded filmmaker Ken Burns when he talked to an audience in Dallas recently about his new PBS series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Burns paused just a minute for emphasis. Then, he smiled and added, “But, that’s redundant, isn’t it?”
-
Gaining confidence
What’s the “magic formula” for gaining confidence? “For once, we found surprising clarity and consensus,” write Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code. “Confidence…requires hard work, substantial risk, determined persistence and sometimes bitter failure. Building it demands regular exposure to all of these things. “You don’t get to experience how far…
-
The pursuit of perfection
What’s the most crippling thing we do to undermine our confidence? Trying to be perfect, answer Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code. “If perfectionism is your standard, of course you will never be fully confident because the bar is always impossibly high, and you will inevitably and routinely feel inadequate.…
-
When in doubt, act
Katty Kay and Claire Shipman stress that the most important lesson to remember from their book The Confidence Code is this: “When in doubt, act.” “Nothing builds confidence like taking action, especially when the action involves risk and failure,” the two authors explain. “Risk keeps you on life’s edge. It keeps you growing, improving and…
-
The opportunity to get over it
Major General Jessica Wright, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, remembers when she was a brand-new lieutenant, and a superior told her that he didn’t like females in the military. “There were 500 things going through my head,” the major told Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who write about the incident in their book…
-
A fascinating spectacle
Joyce Carol Oates, whose latest novel is Carthage, says that the book that changed her life was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, a combination of the two classics in one volume. Her grandmother Blanche Morgenstern gave her the volume for her ninth birthday in 1947, Oates writes in the June/Jul…