Category: book
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My trip to Middlemarch
I have been traveling to Middlemarch with George Eliot. It has been a long trip since Eliot’s book Middlemarch is 781 pages long. However, even though I am enjoying a visit to a provincial English town, I’m happy that my stay is temporary. The life of women in England in 1832 was restricted. As Eliot…
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Self helpless
“Self helpless. You’re always one perfect advice book away from a much better you.” That’s the great headline and subhead for Kristin van Ogtrop’s essay in the July 21, 2014, issue of Time magazine. The editor of Real Simple magazine, van Ogrop confirms a message that Fayteen and I agree with completely. “Everyone wants to…
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The Western woman’s harem
Fratema Mernissi, a professor of sociology at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco, remembers trips to visit her grandmother, “who was illiterate and lived in a harem with locked gates that women were not supposed to open.” In her book Scheherazade Goes West—Different Cultures, Different Harems, Mernissi describes visiting an American department store,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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The woman who defeated Al Capone
Mabel Walker Willebrandt was a remarkable woman who earned a law degree in 1916 and served as assistant attorney general in President Harding’s administration, the most senior woman in the federal government at the time. In the 1920s, mobsters seemed “invincible,” writes Bill Bryson in his book One Summer—America 1927. It was almost impossible to…