Yong’s take on beauty and fashion is revealing, playful, and heartfelt.
A vibrant essay collection about beauty, identity, and cultural acceptance.
Is beauty only skin deep, or is it in the eye of the beholder? A social construct, or part of human nature? All of the above, writes Yong in this enjoyable book. The author examines the subject of beauty from a range of perspectives, including as a former senior editor of Allure, a bible of the fashion industry. She also looks back on her personal history as an Asian kid in a mostly white school. Yong has a clever, self-deprecating sense of humor, and she recounts her career as a procession of stumbles, steps forward and back, and lucky breaks. The author is conflicted about beauty: On one hand, she loves its aesthetic qualities, while on the other, she hates the way it promotes surface over depth. Even after leaving Allure, she continued to explore the nature of beauty, emphasizing how social media has radically increased the tempo of fashion cycles. Keeping up with the trends is an exhausting process, and many women (and men) become lost in the labyrinth of influencers, brands, and celebrity endorsements. Yong has a good time puncturing some of the wilder bubbles of the fashion business, and several of her essays are comically droll. Though she doesn’t reach any definitive conclusions about the concept of beauty, she makes clear that the fashion industry is a business first and foremost, and its goal is to make profits. Consequently, women should bear its manipulative nature in mind, and perhaps get away from it every now and then. Ultimately, writes the author, “there is no inherent shame in taking pride in your appearance or wanting to look good, just as there’s no shame in coming just as you are.”
Yong’s take on beauty and fashion is revealing, playful, and heartfelt.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780063236486
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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