Synopsis
The Power of Beauty traces the importance of looks in our lives from our first hours in the nursery through childhood, adolescence, and the years as adults and parents to old age. It examines developmentally the author's own experiences, the stages of life itself, the feminist revolution that for the past thirty years has rocked relationships between men and women, and contemporary culture from high art to pop. In addition, it draws on a decade of research Friday has conducted on the psychology of physical appearance, including focus groups, symposia, and a national survey conducted with DYG Inc.
Reviews
Bestselling author Friday (My Mother/My Self) here turns in a hefty, ambitious tome, an uneasy mix of cultural analysis, autobiographical confessional, pop psychology and sexology, loosely built around the theme of society's overvaluation of personal appearance and physical beauty. She ruefully notes women's dissatisfaction with their bodies; boys and men, she observes, are less involved in their looks. Scolding feminists for abandoning the quest for women's sexual freedom, she paradoxically argues that they should stop debunking beauty and instead recognize its pervasive influence in our lives and make better use of it. There is much here on women's culturally conditioned sexual guilt and self-hatred, girls' suppressed rage at their mothers, adult erotic fantasies?themes familiar to readers of Friday's previous books. She also comments in passing on a multitude of topics from fashion and the beauty industry to incest, envy, popular movies, women in the workplace, Hillary Clinton, the swinging 1960s and sibling rivalry. While devoted fans will be captivated, others may be stupefied by a free-floating meditation filled with capsule summaries of other writers, facile generalizations, platitudes and repetitive gush. $175,000 ad/promo; translation rights: HarperCollins; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Friday (Women on Top, 1991, etc.) describes women's self-image from infancy through old age, with lots of tiresome editorializing about the state of the women's movement today. Friday's defense of men against the tyranny of feminism may cause some controversy, but the interest in this disorganized ramble is the clutter of anecdotes, gossip, sex education, and digression, like toiletries piled on the vanity table of a woman who has spent several decades dressing up to face the world. How ``we women'' feel about ourselves and our beauty, Friday theorizes, begins in the nursery with the ``Giantess'' (a.k.a. mother). ``Woman born of woman is not a good teacher, especially in that area where she has been taught to deodorize, to treat as an offensive necessity.'' Since most women spend a lifetime hating the way they look, Friday advocates bringing fathers into the child- rearing process. It would be especially good, says Friday, if fathers were in charge of toilet training, because men do not hate their genitals the way ``antisex'' mothers do. Unlike Matriarchal Feminists and Victim Feminists, who blame their problems on ``Bad Men'' and disparage the attainment of power through beauty, Friday encourages women to compete with all the ammunition at their command, as Gloria Steinum supposedly has. Men, from John Kenneth Galbraith to Mort Zuckerman, ``as well as women would . . . assist Steinem for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was and is that she is lovely to look at.'' Writing of her girlhood in the Charleston of the 1940s and '50s, Friday's mother and sister, she remembers, drank gin to get them through the pains of menstruation. So, on the first day of her first period, Friday imitated her role models and broke through a neighbor's window to get to the gin bottle. Friday keeps hammering home her message, but peeking through the psychobabble and harangue is a tantalizing memoir. ($175,000 ad/promo; author tour; radio satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Readers expecting this volume to contain Friday's usual mix of pop psychology and erotic letters will find only the psychology. The book's purpose is ostensibly to examine the role beauty plays in society and, in particular, to focus on the juxtaposition of beauty and power. Ironically, unfocused is the operative word here. The interminably long book is an odd jumble of Friday's personal history, a survey of modern feminism, and a rehash of what the author has written in previous books about males, mothers, and, of course, sex. Free-flowing might be a charitable way to describe the prose. Quotes from Freud and from the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails sit uncomfortably on the page alongside what appears to be Friday's random thoughts on just about anything. Someone along the way should have pointed out that Friday had some interesting ideas here--enough for a magazine article. Unfortunately, when a magazine piece balloons into a more than 400-page book, the results are rarely pretty. Expect the author's name recognition and an attendant media blitz to generate requests, but don't expect satisfied readers, especially those who opened the book anticipating an up-market version of the Penthouse letters column. Ilene Cooper
Despite its footnotes, bibliography, and length, this is not a scholarly work. Instead, Friday (My Mother/Myself, LJ 9/15/77) has produced another pop psychology book offering little, if any, new insights into the importance of physical appearance. Friday blames mothers for warping their daughters' views of themselves; announces that beauty is still a power in the world; and asserts that there is a double standard when it comes to society's views on aging. Friday does not analyze in terms of class or ethnicity and, apparently inspired to write based on her own upbringing, regularly conflates her own experience with that of all women. Recommended only for public libraries with a demand for Friday's books or with large women's studies collections.?Sharon Firestone, Arizona State Univ. Libs., Tempe
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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