2021/09/23
25 Great Book Reviews From the Past 125 Years - The New York Times
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25 Great Writers and Thinkers Weigh In on Books That Matter
To celebrate the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, we’re dipping into the archives to revisit our most thrilling, memorable and thought-provoking coverage.
Damon Winter/The New York Times (Toni Morrison); Henry Clarke/Conde Nast, via Getty Images (Joan Didion); Ulf Andersen/Getty Images (Patricia Highsmith); Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times (Patti Smith); Oliver Morris/Getty Images (Kurt Vonnegut); Ulf Andersen/Getty Images (James Baldwin)Credit...
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By Tina Jordan, Noor Qasim and John Williams
Published Jan. 25, 2021Updated Jan. 28, 2021
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On Oct. 10, 1896, after years of robust literary coverage at The New York Times, the paper published the first issue of the Book Review.
In the 125 years since, that coverage has broadened and deepened. The Book Review has become a lens through which to view not just literature but the world at large, with scholars and thinkers weighing in on all of the people and issues and subjects covered in books on philosophy, art, science, economics, history and more.
In many ways, the Book Review’s history is that of American letters, and we’ll be using our 125th anniversary this year to celebrate and examine that history over the coming months. In essays, photo stories, timelines and other formats, we’ll highlight the books and authors that made it all possible.
Because, really, writers are at the heart of everything we do. Pairing a book with the right reviewer is a challenge, one that we relish. And we’ve been fortunate to feature the writing of so many illustrious figures in our pages — novelists, musicians, presidents, Nobel winners, CEOs, poets, playwrights — all offering their insights with wit and flair. Here are 25 of them.
H.G. Wells | Vladimir Nabokov | Tennessee Williams | Patricia Highsmith | Shirley Jackson | Eudora Welty | Langston Hughes | Dorothy Parker | John F. Kennedy | Nora Ephron | Toni Morrison | John Kenneth Galbraith | Nikki Giovanni | James Baldwin | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | Joan Didion | Derek Walcott | Margaret Atwood | Ursula K. Le Guin | Stephen King | Jhumpa Lahiri | Mario Vargas Llosa | Colson Whitehead | Patti Smith | Bill Gates
Tell us: Who are the writers who have inspired you?
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1913
H.G. Wells
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On Morley Roberts’s “The Private Life of Henry Maitland”
H.G. Wells, the author of science fiction classics like “The Time Machine” and “The War of the Worlds,” admitted that he had a personal interest in this work about his fellow author George Gissing (who was oddly given the pseudonym Henry Maitland in a book that was clearly about him). “In so far that I have on several occasions encouraged Mr. Roberts to write it,” Wells wrote, “I feel myself a little involved in the responsibility for it.” He must have left Roberts feeling a bit less than grateful for the encouragement when he judged: “It is no use pretending that Mr. Roberts’s book is not downright bad, careless in statement, squalid in effect, poor as criticism, weakly planned and entirely without any literary distinction.”
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1949
Vladimir Nabokov
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On Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea”
Nabokov was not yet a household name in the United States (that would come about a decade later, with the publication here of “Lolita”) when he reviewed Sartre’s philosophical novel about Antoine Roquentin, a French historian troubled by the very fact of existence. “Sartre’s name, I understand, is associated with a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy, and since for every so-called ‘existentialist’ one finds quite a few ‘suctorialists’ (if I may coin a polite term), this made-in-England translation of Sartre’s first novel, ‘La Nausée,’ should enjoy some success.”
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1949
Tennessee Williams
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On Paul Bowles’s “The Sheltering Sky”
Williams, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” reviewed this debut novel by Bowles, which went on to be acclaimed as one of the best of the 20th century. The story mercilessly follows a young married couple from New York adrift in the North African desert. “I suspect that a good many people will read this book,” Williams wrote, “without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.”
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1950
Patricia Highsmith
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On R. Frison-Roche’s “First on the Rope”
When she wrote this brief review, Patricia Highsmith was the author of one novel, “Strangers on a Train.” She would go on to worldwide fame for that and other thrillers, including the ones that feature Tom Ripley. The author she reviewed, the French mountaineer R. Frison-Roche, is now relatively obscure. “This is exactly the kind of novel one would expect a Chamonix guide to write — blunt in style and treatment, unevenly paced, about mountain climbing, of course, and authentic down to the last piton, the last breathtaking moment before the summit.” More tantalizingly, Highsmith added: “There is a delightful and unexpected chapter about a cow battle that is fully as dramatic as the mountain scaling.”
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1950
Shirley Jackson
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On Red Smith’s “Out of the Red”
One of the stranger matchups of big names in our archives is this review of the sports columnist Red Smith’s work by Shirley Jackson, the author of “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” Jackson wrote about her enjoyment of watching sports on TV. Though she had “limited knowledge” of sportswriters at the time, Smith’s book won her over. “There are some otherwise modest, sensitive females — I am among them — who are become brazen snatchers of the sports page from the morning paper, and only a book like Red Smith’s shows me what I have been missing by not getting into this field sooner. Reading ‘Out of the Red’ has been, actually, an educational experience unlike almost anything I have known since first looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
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1952
Eudora Welty
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On E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web”
Eudora Welty’s review of this timeless tale is a sheer delight, starting from its headline (“Life in the Barn Was Very Good”) and its first sentence (“E.B. White has written his book for children, which is nice for us older ones as it calls for big type”). Unlike contemporary reviews that get future classics “wrong,” Welty — who worked briefly as an editor at the Book Review during World War II — saw this accomplishment clear in the moment. “What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time,” she wrote. “As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done.”
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1956
Langston Hughes
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On James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”
In this review, Langston Hughes, an eminent literary figure and chronicler of the Black experience in the United States, took the measure of this first collection of essays by Baldwin. He was impressed: “He uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing.” He suggested that Baldwin still had room to grow, but that “America and the world might well have a major contemporary commentator.”
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1957
Dorothy Parker
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On S.J. Perelman’s “The Road to Miltown”
To no one’s surprise, Dorothy Parker, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, was funny in this review of work by her fellow humor writer. She begins it: “It is a strange force that compels a writer to be a humorist. It is a strange force, if you care to go back farther, that compels anyone to be a writer at all, but this is neither the time nor the place to bring up that matter. The writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?” But while Parker was part of a “vicious circle,” and known for her piercing barbs, she happily praised Perelman, who, she wrote, “stands alone” in his field.
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1959
John F. Kennedy
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On Arthur Larson’s “What We Are For”
John F. Kennedy was the author of three books and still a Massachusetts senator when he reviewed this book, an attempt to define for the world what America believed in beyond simply opposition to the Soviet Union and Communism. Larson was a Republican who had worked with labor issues and had been a top speechwriter for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Though the book’s style is somewhat discursive and here and there perhaps a trifle condescending,” Kennedy wrote, “Mr. Larson does succeed very well in portraying the dangers of analyzing American society in terms of class distinctions or rigid economic interests. Though it is not a new theme, he is very successful in reminding us of the ‘kaleidoscope of apparently inexplicable mixtures of political coloration across the landscape.’”
1968
Nora Ephron
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On Rex Reed’s “Do You Sleep in the Nude?”
In this review, the filmmaker, director and writer Nora Ephron marveled at how the young Reed got his show-business subjects to say the things they said to him. Those subjects included Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty and Lucille Ball. Ephron’s opening is a classic: “Rex Reed is a saucy, snoopy, bitchy man who sees with sharp eyes and writes with a mean pen and succeeds in making voyeurs of us all. If any of this sounds like I don’t like Rex Reed, let me correct that impression. I love Rex Reed.”
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1971
Toni Morrison
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On Toni Cade Bambara’s “Tales and Stories for Black Folks”
Toni Morrison had just one novel under her belt when this review was published in 1971. One of the joys in our archives is to see — in retrospect — the understated descriptions of those who wrote for us. Morrison’s read: “Toni Morrison, an editor in a New York publishing house, is the author of ‘The Bluest Eye.’” “It is a most remarkable collection,” she wrote of Bambara’s work. “Joy aches and pain chuckles in these pages, and the entire book leaves you with the impression of silk — which is so nice because it was made by a living thing that had something on its mind, its survival no doubt.”
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1971
John Kenneth Galbraith
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On Chester Bowles’s “My Years in Public Life”
“Truth, not unconvincing humility, is the grandest virtue and accordingly I may observe that I am better qualified than any man alive to review a book on the public life of Chester Bowles.” The iconoclastic economist and prolific author John Kenneth Galbraith began his review this way because he and Bowles had held some of the same positions of power and had worked together on presidential campaigns. In so doing, they had become friends, which, Galbraith wrote, “is a disadvantage only if the book in question is bad. Only then do you have to consider whether the author should get the truth from you or someone else. This, fortunately, is an extremely good book.”
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1974
Nikki Giovanni
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On Virginia Hamilton’s “M.C. Higgins, the Great”
The acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni has written verse for children as well as adults, so she was the ideal reviewer for this novel, which was written for young readers but dealt with difficult, mature subjects. Hamilton’s novel, which won a Newbery Medal and a National Book Award, concerns a young boy hoping to save a local mountain from the ravages of strip mining. “‘M.C. Higgins, the Great’ is not an adorable book, not a lived‐happily‐ever‐after kind of story. It is warm, humane and hopeful and does what every book should do — creates characters with whom we can identify and for whom we care. … We’re glad Miss Hamilton is a writer. It makes the world just a little bit richer and our lives just a little bit warmer.”
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1975
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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On Tom Wicker’s “A Time to Die”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. reviewed this account of the 1971 uprising at Attica prison written by Tom Wicker, who was a reporter, columnist and editor for The Times. The book mixed its reportage about the dramatic events at the prison with passages of autobiography. Leave it to Vonnegut to come up with a memorable comparison for what resulted: “The book is designed like a shish kebab, with novelistic scenes from ‘Wicker’s’ childhood and youth alternating with hard‐edged episodes from Attica, and with Tom Wicker himself as the skewer. The materials placed shoulder‐to‐shoulder on the skewer are as unlike as ripe peaches and hand grenades.”
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1976
James Baldwin
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On Alex Haley’s “Roots”
The Book Review has always taken pride in finding the right reviewers for the right books, and that is only heightened when a book is a true event, like Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which spent months at No. 1 on The Times’s best-seller list. The great James Baldwin’s piece is something still worth reading and considering today. He wrote of “Roots”: “It suggests with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road.”
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1979
Joan Didion
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On Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song”
Talk about two heavyweights. On the cover of our Oct. 7, 1979, issue, Didion reviewed Mailer’s epic, genre-defying novel about the infamous Gary Gilmore, who murdered two people in Utah and later demanded that the state follow through with his execution for the crime. Much more than just the story of a crime and a very public death penalty debate, Mailer’s book captured the desperate side of life in the American West. “I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book,” Didion wrote. “The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in ‘The Executioner’s Song,’ is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.”
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1983
Derek Walcott
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On “The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Blériot, July 25, 1909” by Alice and Martin Provensen
The poet Derek Walcott, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, reviewed this book about the French aviator Louis Blériot and his flight across the English Channel, 18 years before Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. “Gaiety and true bravery are close in legend, and this spaciously crafted and modestly presented book is very much in the spirit of its subject,” Walcott wrote. “Fact is turned into magic, very quietly. The return to innocence requires gay and brave strides; the light on the way there is direct, the flight natural and simple, and ‘The Glorious Flight’ has made it.”
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1987
Margaret Atwood
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On Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”
Sometimes a book that will become an undisputed classic is met at the moment of its publication with appropriate awe. Such was the case with Morrison’s “Beloved,” a remarkable ghost story set in the years after the Civil War. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and in 2006 was named the best novel of the previous 25 years by a group of prominent writers, critics and editors polled by the Book Review. In her original review of the book in 1987, Margaret Atwood — the author of her own classics, like “The Handmaid’s Tale” — wrote: “‘Beloved’ is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed, Morrison’s versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ‘Beloved’ will put them to rest. In three words or less, it’s a hair-raiser.”
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1991
Ursula K. Le Guin
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On J.G. Ballard’s “War Fever”
The critic Harold Bloom once said that Ursula K. Le Guin had “raised fantasy into high literature for our time.” In this review of another iconic writer of literary science fiction, Le Guin captured the scope and relevance of Ballard’s themes. “The brilliant, obsessive fictions of J.G. Ballard circle through a round of almost canonical topics of modernist literature and film: the Conradian jungle and its white folk, consumerist America and the ugly American, popular cult figures such as astronauts and film stars, T.S. Eliot’s ‘waste land’ and ‘unreal city.’ Through these and other landscapes of alienation, stock figures move in meticulous patterns toward a predictably shocking conclusion. The voltage is high, but it’s all in the mind.”
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1999
Stephen King
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On Thomas Harris’s “Hannibal”
Dark imaginations collide in this review. (If Thomas Harris hadn’t invented Hannibal Lecter, perhaps eventually Stephen King would have?) This was Lecter’s first appearance in a novel in 11 years — and the first since the film adaptation of “The Silence of the Lambs” had made him a household name. “I don’t think many of the Danielle Steel crowd will be rushing out to buy a book in which one character is eaten from the inside out by a ravenous moray eel — but for those who like what Harris can do so brilliantly, no book report is required.”
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2000
Jhumpa Lahiri
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On Mohsin Hamid’s “Moth Smoke”
We like to keep our eyes peeled for the newest talents here at the Book Review, and here is a vintage example. About a month after this review was published, Jhumpa Lahiri would win a Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection of stories, “Interpreter of Maladies.” And here she was reviewing the debut novel by Mohsin Hamid, who was embarking on his own award-winning career. “Like Fitzgerald, Hamid writes about the slippery ties between the extremely wealthy and those who hover, and generally stumble, in money’s glare,” Lahiri wrote. “Hamid also sets the action over a single, degenerate summer, when passions run high and moral lassitude prevails. And like Fitzgerald, Hamid probes the vulgarity and violence that lurk beneath a surface of affluence and ease.”
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2000
Mario Vargas Llosa
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On Suzanne Jill Levine’s “Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman”
The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered a sweeping review of this biography of the Argentine writer Manuel Puig. In it, Vargas Llosa considered everything from the influence of the movies on Puig to what made his work so original to whether that work has the “revolutionary transcendence attributed to it by Levine and other critics.” He praised Levine’s own work: “This fascinating book is indispensable for anyone interested in Puig’s work (which Levine, the translator of several of his novels into English, knows to perfection) and in the close connection between film and literature, a defining characteristic of cultural life in the late 20th century; both are described with intelligence and an abundance of information. I found occasional errors, but these in no way diminish the virtues of a book in which rigor and readability walk arm in arm.”
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2006
Colson Whitehead
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On Richard Powers’s “The Echo Maker”
As we celebrate 125 years of the Book Review, we’ll spend time not just in the distant past but in the vibrant present. Few writers this century are as acclaimed as Colson Whitehead, the author of several novels and the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for “The Underground Railroad” (2016). In 2019, Richard Powers joined the list of Pulitzer winners as well, for “The Overstory.” But back in 2006, when both were simply very acclaimed authors, Whitehead reviewed this novel about a man who suffers from a rare cognitive disorder after a near-fatal car accident. “Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation,” Whitehead wrote. “His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters … help us understand how we work.”
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2014
Patti Smith
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On Haruki Murakami’s “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage”
A longtime rock star and poet, Patti Smith became an award-winning memoirist with the publication of “Just Kids” in 2010. We also think she’s a fine reviewer. She brought her deep knowledge of the work of Haruki Murakami to this assessment of his 13th novel. “This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it; at times, it seems like a prequel to a whole other narrative. The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted, either by design or flawed in translation. Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another.”
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2018
Bill Gates
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On Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”
Yes, we love to publish work by prominent novelists, essayists, poets, journalists, historians. But sometimes it’s a thrill to have someone weigh in who is (very, very well) known for something other than books. And who better to review a look at the 21st century than Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, who did so much to shape the world we live in? “Harari is such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking. All three of his books wrestle with some version of the same question: What will give our lives meaning in the decades and centuries ahead? … It’s no criticism to say that Harari hasn’t produced a satisfying answer yet. Neither has anyone else. So I hope he turns more fully to this question in the future.”
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Sex in the Brain : How your brain controls your sex life by Amee Baird | Goodreads
Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating - Kindle edition by Weigel, Moira. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Lines like “I’ll pick you up at six” made sense at a time when people had jobs that started and ended at fixed hours. But in an age of contract work and flextime, many of us have become sexual freelancers, more likely to text a partner “u still up?” Weaving together over one hundred years of history with scenes from the contemporary landscape, Labor of Love offers a fresh feminist perspective on how we came to date the ways we do. This isn't a guide to “getting the guy.” There are no ridiculous “rules” to follow. Instead, Weigel helps us understand how looking for love shapes who we are—and hopefully leads us closer to the happy ending that dating promises.
“The Best Revenge is Your Paper”: Notes on Women’s Work
By Alice Bolin
JUNE 19, 2016
IN HER NEW BOOK Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Weigel traces the beginnings of American dating to the turn of the 20th century, when a new class of young, single women entered the workforce. These women were the servants, factory workers, and saleswomen in the United States’s industrializing cities. For the first time, single men and women could meet unsupervised, supporting the United States’s growing consumer sector by participating in leisure activities together. “Shopgirls,” department store clerks whose primary skills were good looks, poise, and charm, used the same techniques to get a date as they did to make a sale. It was understood that many women were in this line of work to meet men from a different social class from their own. But, Weigel argues, it was less that this kind of work prepared women for romance than that the innovation of dating trained women to be good workers.
Women dated because it was how they could take part in leisure activities that they could not afford with their meager paychecks. In order to gain access to restaurants, movie theaters, amusement parks, and the many other new consumer services proliferating around them, they had to attract and please men, who enjoyed higher earning power. They thus provided a service that men, in turn, paid for. Women’s love lives became work in a way that was, from the beginning, ambiguous.
“Ever since the invention of dating,” Weigel writes, “the line between sex work and ‘legitimate’ dating has remained difficult to draw and impossible to police.” Many early female daters were arrested because “[i]n the eyes of the authorities, women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.” Weigel notes that there is still debate about “what exactly makes sleeping with someone because he bought you dinner different from sleeping with someone because he paid you what that dinner cost.” On websites like SeekingArrangement.com, a rich “Sugar Daddy” can seek a “Sugar Baby,” an attractive young woman he will support in exchange for sex and companionship. Despite the evidently transactional nature of such a relationship, many men seeking this arrangement like to imagine that they are not hiring a prostitute, as Alana Massey has observed in The New Inquiry, specifying on their online profiles that “no pros” need apply. Women’s work must not look like work.
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Shopgirls, Sugar Babies, and sex workers all perform what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor.” Weigel defines it as “work that required workers to manage their feelings in order to display particular emotions.” “We speak of ‘service with a smile,’” she writes, “but in many jobs, the smile is the service.” Sex work is the ultimate in emotional labor, an industry in which workers have to simulate intense emotions of affection and sexual attraction. But almost all of what we term “women’s work” is emotional labor, and not just because so many women work as salespeople, food service workers, educators, and caregivers. Rather, women are so represented in these sectors because of our expectations of their emotions.
Weigel writes about how a false division between public and private at the time of industrialization devalued the work that women were expected to do: “The idea arose that work was what someone else paid you money to do. Not-work was what you were not paid to do. Work was what men did out in public. Not-work was what women did at home.” The notion of being paid for one’s emotional labor was crass and embarrassing, even when a woman was being compensated in her public or private life for displaying certain feelings. Women came to believe that raising children and taking care of a husband were instinctual, as if “it was simply in their natures to do anything for love.” Labor of Love interrogates these beliefs and “instincts.” Emotions, the book argues, are as socially determined as they are personal, as “[t]he possibilities of how we feel arise from those we feel among.” Weigel’s book is more than a history of dating; it is a history of feelings.
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In a 2015 essay for Jezebel, Colette Shade wrote about the strange proliferation of the hip-hop slang word “hustle” in twee, feminine products on Etsy. “Hustling” once connoted selling drugs or sex or making money by other illegal means, trying to survive on the streets. In cutesy slogans like “dream big, hustle hard” and “good things come to those who hustle,” this appropriation now depicts the realities of jobless recovery and the freelance economy. As Shade writes, in the 2008 recession “scant resources, stagnant wages and structural unemployment spread to people who had never before experienced it. In the new economy, everyone became a hustler.” These Etsy products, presumably made by women who are themselves hustling, “exist to soothe workers — specifically, female workers — into accepting this new reality as cute, fun, and, most of all, a self-empowering personal choice.”
The rise of emotional labor came in the wake of the greatest economic recession the United States had ever seen, in the 1890s, creating a class of workers who were doing more work than could even be accounted for, much less compensated. During the second tech boom work has become more personal, more emotional, and more invasive than ever. Social networking, too, is a form of emotional labor, and it is now a 24-7 activity for the creative class, especially women and people of color, for whom barriers to entry are greater. Men are relatively terrible at social media because it rewards attributes that have been socialized in women: to be cute, to be friendly, to be enthusiastic, to be diplomatic, to show interest in things and people they have no interest in, to be always available. Men who join Twitter in order to network are obvious: they have their job, like “writer,” in their screen name. They use hashtags. They retweet a lot, not posts they found amusing, but posts from official outlets in their fields. They tweet infrequently. Looking at these men’s accounts, I always wonder how people can be so bad at social media. How can they afford it?
Men can opt out of this kind of networking because they are allowed to compartmentalize their identities in ways that women cannot. They can sell their work, not themselves. Weigel explains how the idea of “personality” came about around the same time that dating did, to describe the factors in attraction that were hard to define. Although it was often seen as charisma, unselfconsciousness, or animal magnetism, personality has always been a performance. “A Shopgirl knew that the personality she expressed […] was not something she was born with,” Weigel writes. “Personality consisted of myriad effects that she had to work hard to produce.”
Personality is the currency on social media, and some women have made empires from it. The epitome of this new kind of emotional labor, the care and keeping of one’s personal brand, is Kim Kardashian West, who shares herself, body and mind, with her fans through reality TV, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and her exclusive smartphone app. Her high-profile celebrity relationships have formed a large part of her work, so much so that on her video game, dating other celebrities is one way that a player can “level up.” It’s hard to picture Kardashian tweeting, as her husband Kanye West did, “You have distracted from my creative process.” For her, Twitter is the creative process; there is no separation between creation and marketing. “If I wasn’t Bey would you still feel me?” Beyoncé asks on her most recent album Lemonade: an impossible question. A woman in our culture cannot separate her personality from her process: the roles of mother, wife, lover, and victim are ever-present and haunting.
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In Labor of Love, Weigel writes about the Real Housewives TV franchise, which has turned a league of women with rich husbands into moguls. They are trading on their feelings twice over: first, by “marrying up,” and second, by parlaying their privileged marital status into TV notoriety, which turns into more money. “We live in an era that tells people to do what they love and let their passion take care of their profession,” Weigel writes. “[The Real Housewife] is a heroine for an age that believes in getting rich by turning your feelings into assets.”
If dating and marriage are work for women, in today’s economy they have found many ways to monetize them. Of course reality stars like Kardashian and the Real Housewives have especially powerful platforms from which to exploit their emotions, but everyday women can do it too. A significant sector of online publishing belongs to women’s interest sites, which often promote a genre that Laura Bennett at Slate termed “the harrowing personal essay.” Many of the headlines that Bennett cites are about relationships: “I Was Cheating on My Boyfriend When He Died,” “I’m Living With My Abuser,” “Why Do I Keep Writing About the Time I Got My Heart Broken?” Women can sell their feelings on the open market, although the question, with this new wave of confessional writing, is whether it’s a fair trade. When sites like xoJane only pay around 50 dollars a story, is dredging up one’s worst experiences worth it?
Bennett criticizes this trend in first-person writing as “knee-jerk, ideally topical self-exposure, the hot take’s more intimate sibling.” Since xoJane published an essay where a woman claimed her mentally ill friend’s suicide was a blessing, was roundly criticized, and removed the author’s byline and then the piece altogether, there has been discussion about whether publishing a piece “for clicks,” when it is destined to become a hate-read, is ethical, especially when the piece is personal. Bennett writes that many of these pieces are “solo acts of sensational disclosure that bubble up and just as quickly vaporize,” as editors make it clear they are selling experiences, not writing.
Everyone knows female grief is marketable. Since Lemonade came out in April, Beyoncé has been widely praised for her honesty and ingenuity in weaving a story about marital infidelity, rage, sorrow, and forgiveness. Her only two notable critics have been the feminist scholar bell hooks and New Yorker critic Hilton Als. Als, in his ambivalent review of Beyoncé’s Formation tour, worries that, belying her promotion of black women and the idea that girls run the world, “None of [her success] has been separable from men.” Similarly, hooks is concerned with the depiction of relationships in Lemonade, which “glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction,” clinging too tightly to a survivor narrative common to stories about black women. Both Als and hooks seem dissatisfied with the way the story of Lemonade ends: with Beyoncé and Jay Z back together, and Beyoncé giving “her success to Tidal, her husband’s music-streaming service, bringing the fledgling company more than a million new subscribers” — just another internet start-up feeding on a woman’s pain.
I find it strange that hooks, in her critique of the album as “the business of capitalist money making at its best,” ignores the parts of Lemonade that are explicitly about capitalist moneymaking. “6 Inch” is about an ambiguous sort of women’s work, a glamorous woman who “grinds from Monday to Friday / Works from Friday to Sunday,” and “works for the money, she work for the money / From the start to the finish / And she worth every dollar, she worth every dollar / And she worth every minute.” This boasting feels a bit weird in the middle of such an extended act of vulnerability, but all of Beyoncé’s closest relationships have also been business relationships. She hints on “Daddy Lessons” at the way that her father and former manager, Mathew Knowles, pushed her into show business when she was a child. And her husband, Jay Z, has always been a creative and business collaborator.
Obviously, when Beyoncé made Lemonade, she was in charge of the decision to sell her pain, knowing that, in the world we live in, art is business just as relationships are work. And she was not only selling her own pain but also her unfaithful husband’s, too, showing his ass as an act of vengeance. In this, she and the generation of young female writers now coming of age on the internet may have similar aims. In her essay “The Monetized Man,” Alana Massey writes about her initiation into writing: “The first stories I put on the internet were about dating and sex and body image issues and I placed them where I could […] Some people call these women’s sites ‘the pink ghetto’ but I consider them more like the girls’ side of the lake at summer camp.” She learned to deploy the internet’s demand for first-person writing like a Valkyrie, profiting off of men who wronged her. “When several men’s rights activists devoted a few days to picking apart photographs of me and diagnosing me as unfuckable, I had some shrill girlish feelings about the whole ordeal,” she writes. “Then I took two hours to type […] these feelings out in order to publish them for hundreds of dollars.” There are pragmatics at work here that will obviously frustrate ideologues: men have always had monetary power over women, so women turning men’s bad behavior into money takes back some of that control, but it does not seek to change the system. As Beyoncé’s last words on Lemonade instruct, with only a little irony, the “best revenge is your paper.”
¤
In Labor of Love, Weigel juxtaposes two legendary figures of the sexual revolution: Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Brown, in her books Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the Office, promoted a vision of a new empowered woman who, in addition to a full schedule of dates and a rigorous beauty routine, was as powerful at the office as any man. And Hefner offered a new ideal to men: he “presented a vision of the life of Playboy as a life of leisure,” always appearing, as he still does, in a pair of pajamas. The two media icons were collaborating on a new model for society, one in which women did 100 percent of the work.
This is the real problem with women dreaming big and hustling hard, with Beyoncé grinding from Monday to Friday and working Friday to Sunday: it’s not fair. Weigel encourages us to abandon sentimentality, and to acknowledge that emotions are labor, relationships have always been work, and love and money are intertwined. But the burden of emotional labor must not all fall on women. Massey reminds us that many stories about “women’s experience” are not really about women’s emotional lives but men’s, and “how the unrestrained, unaccountable emotional lives of men wreak havoc on women […] Women’s issues, I dutifully called the results of their juvenile tantrums masquerading as acceptable adult behavior.” So the girls’ side of the lake is invaded by men, another arena where, as Weigel writes, “[t]his gendered division of labor makes women emotionally overworked and makes men emotionally incompetent.” “No matter how hard women in relationships with patriarchal men work for change, forgive, and reconcile, men must do the work of inner and outer transformation if emotional violence against black females is to end,” bell hooks says of Lemonade, and she’s right — but then why is her criticism of Beyoncé, and not the patriarchal men who have taken over her story? It is sad to think of women holding up the world, constantly selling the only things they have: their emotions, their personalities, their bodies. But we must, at least, not condemn women’s stories for the reality of men’s behavior, asking them to tell something other than the truth, blaming the lemonade for its lemons.
¤
Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls, an essay collection forthcoming from Morrow/HarperCollins. She is the nonfiction editor for Electric Literature’s weekly literary magazine of short things, Okey-Panky.
2021/09/22
Parship - Wikipedia
Parship
Type of site | Compatibility-based online dating |
---|---|
Available in | German, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish |
Owner | Parship GmbH |
Created by | Hugo Schmale |
Revenue | € 55 million (2010) |
Parent | ParshipMeet Group |
URL | www |
Commercial | Yes |
Registration | Required |
Launched | February 14, 2001; 20 years ago |
Current status | Active |
Parship (or Parship GmbH) is an online dating agency based in Hamburg, Germany. It was part of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Its stated goal is to encourage and forge long-term partnerships.
History[edit]
Founded in 2000, Parship went online on 14 February 2001 (Valentine's Day). In collaboration with psychologist Hugo Schmale of the University of Hamburg, a questionnaire and associated profile-matching algorithm was developed with the purpose of bringing like-minded couples together. On Schmale's initiative, the matching algorithm is based both on behavioristic principles and on psychoanalytical theories of personality.
Since 2002, Parship has expanded to 13 countries in addition to Germany: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.
In 2020, the parent company ParshipMeet Group was formed to manage both Parship and The Meet Group, after the acquisition of The Meet Group by ProSiebenSat.1 Media.[1][2]
Gay Parship[edit]
Simultaneous with the 2001 launch of Parship, Gay-Parship was launched. Due to the large success, in 2005 two separate portals were launched, catering explicitly to a homosexual target group. Here, too, the agency defines itself as focusing on a high level of education and income, and with the goal of a long-term partnership.
Memberships and cost[edit]
Parship's free membership includes registration, an automated evaluation of the questionnaire and the possibility of inspecting the profiles of other members, but not photos. For actual contact between members, including responding to received contact offers, and for exchanging photos, a Premium membership is required. Subscription costs range from 30 to 60 Euro monthly. According to the Parship website, 38% of their members are Premium members.
An automatic renewal clause (Clause 5 of the T&Cs as listed on the UK website, document dated 13/06/2014) applies to memberships, including special offers.
Reviews[edit]
The unaffiliated review website reviewcentre.com, at the time of writing, listed 169 reviews of Parship, 92 of which rated it as 'Terrible' with 1 star. Dissatisfied customers cite the 'hidden' auto renewal clause and subsequent appointment of debt collectors as a grievance, as well as the low number of appropriately matched profiles.
See also[edit]
External links[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Nicola, Stefan (March 5, 2020). "ProSieben to Buy Dating Firm Meet Group in Tough TV Market". Bloomberg News.
- ^ "The Meet Group Announces Closing of Acquisition by eharmony Parent Company Parship Group" (Press release). Business Wire. September 4, 2020.