Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday February 17, 2011
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THE GREAT MIGRATION: Journey to the North
Eloise Greenfield
Amistad
ISBN 978-0061259210
$16.99
Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan
Historians can argue over the scope and time span of the U.S. Great Migration (1 or 6 million African-Americans? 1915-1930 or decades beyond?), but the emotions surrounding this tremendous demographic shift come through clearly in Eloise Greenfield and Jan Spivey Gilchrist's latest collaboration. Greenfield, who was herself transported from the South to Washington as an infant in 1929, presents a variety of scenes in moving, plainspoken verse. Divided into short sections (The News, Goodbyes, The Trip, Question and Up North), the poems sometimes offer an individual perspective, sometimes a wider view, but they always evoke the hopes and dreams involved. Greenfield also makes a place for righteous anger, as in one woman's bitter farewell: "I can't wait to get away./I never want to see this town/again. Goodbye, town, Goodbye,/work all day for almost no pay,/enemy cotton fields, trying/to break my back, my spirit." Each of Gilchrist's illustrations is distinctive, too, combining watercolor and collage in shades that vary from verdant green to faded-photograph yellow to dark-brown shadows in a train station. Children will find much to examine in her pictures -- including reproduced portraits and maps -- as they journey back through time.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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LITTLE WHITE RABBIT
Kevin Henkes
Greenwillow
ISBN 978-0062006424
$16.99
Reviewed by Kristi Elle Jemtegaard
Kevin Henkes' "Little White Rabbit" is a paean to the power of the imagination, a pastel song of praise that evokes the same unfettered joy as his "My Garden" (2010) and "A Good Day" (2007). Here, he assigns a child's-eye view of the world to a small white rabbit, who bounds into the first picture with such vigor that only the fur on the tips of his toes skims the spiky grass. As he hops along, his surroundings suggest many possibilities, and he imagines what it would be like to be other than himself: green like the grass, tall like the fir trees, motionless as a rock. Each moment of wonder is followed by a wordless, double-page spread: a green rabbit surrounded by a frog, a turtle and a pair of highly dubious grasshoppers; a giant rabbit bending aside the tops of the trees to poke an inquisitive nose at a flock of birds; a stone-still rabbit crouched in the grass from yellow sunup to blue moonrise. A master of pattern, Henkes also knows that patterns are devised in order to be broken, and therein lies the charm. "When he hopped past the cat ..." Well, he is a rabbit after all, and he heads where any good bunny should: home. "He still wondered about many things," but, whisker to whisker with mother rabbit, "he didn't wonder who loved him." A flight of fancy, a frisson of fear, a kiss on the nose -- Margaret Wise Brown's "Runaway Bunny" has a cousin!
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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MOONFACE
Angela Balcita
Harper Perennial
ISBN 978-0061537318
222 pages
$13.99
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday
"Moonface" is a memoir by Angela Balcita, who is still a comparative youngster and the mother of a little girl named Birdie. Balcita's life has been defined by her health and its various rebellions: When she was 18, she experienced kidney failure and received a transplant from her older brother. Her point of view during this part of the narrative is adolescent: She sassily compares statues of the Virgin Mary with Mrs. Butterworth, although later she's grateful for her mother's religious devotion and fervent prayers.
Wait. Am I getting off on the wrong foot here?
I can see coming up the inevitable problem of reviewing a memoir. No matter how much you try to evaluate the prose style, the structure, the "plot" and the readability, it's very hard to keep from evaluating the life itself.
Here we have a memoir by a woman who has one kidney transplant from her older brother and, about 10 years later, has another kidney transplant from her husband, and then, after she gets an MFA, she decides she wants a baby. When the first specialist she consults says, "I would not recommend it. A pregnancy probably would not work out well for you," the author is enraged and has a tantrum in the doctor's parking lot: "How dare he? I mean, how dare he, right? He doesn't know how it is going to work out."
Balcita is a lady who wants what she wants. Her husband suffered severe infections when he offered up his kidney. A pregnancy would place that transplanted kidney in severe jeopardy, but she wants a baby. She doesn't want a surrogate, and she disdains the way ethnic babies are marketed for adoption.
Besides, she wants the experience of giving birth, right down to a vaginal delivery. "I want to push," she says. When she does become pregnant, her husband shakes her hand. "Congratulations," he says, "It's what you've always wanted." It would seem, to this reader, that she's opened the best present her husband could give her and then thrown it away in favor of a baby.
Because, of course, after a short pregnancy and a delivery filled with drama, a darling little preemie named Birdie appears, and the author's second transplanted kidney gives out. Balcita, who has written about "this overwhelming feeling women get as they move into their early thirties, wanting their bodies to experience something more," is, ironically, cheated of much of the experience she so craved. Mother and daughter are sequestered in different hospitals. The author is given several blood transfusions. Although Birdie weighs only two pounds, her mother is the sicker one. Balcita wonders: "Did I bring her into this world at a disadvantage? I was afraid she wouldn't be healthy enough to make her milestones. ... I never thought that I would be the one missing out on her important moments. Or mine. Or ours together. As selfish as it sounds, I just didn't think that they would go on without me: her first bottle feeding, her first time taking a bath."
The two grandmothers move in; her husband works himself silly, but after all that, the baby is still there, the author skirts death and a year later, an old friend from graduate school kicks in another kidney. In theory, this could go on forever.
You can look at "Moonface" as an autobiographical novel, and you might feel differently about it. Or you can think of it as a memoir, or more simply yet, a story. I don't know what we're supposed to feel when we read this. The last pages are draped in plentiful swaths of mother-love. And everyone knows that motherhood and highway safety are sacrosanct in this country. But when Balcita writes, "I am a greedy girl," something in the reader can't help but agree.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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UGLY BEAUTY: Helena Rubinstein, L'Oreal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good
Ruth Brandon
Harper
ISBN 978-0061740404
290 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday
Ruth Brandon is one of our most wide-ranging and accomplished cultural historians. She's written books about the automobile, Houdini, Sarah Bernhardt, the chef Alex Soyer and the anti-nuclear movement. My own two favorites among her dozen works of nonfiction -- she's also published seven novels -- are "Spiritualists: Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century" and "Surreal Lives: The Surrealists, 1917-1945." Both are immensely engaging, well researched, sometimes shocking and a pleasure to read.
Almost, but not quite, as much could be said of "Ugly Beauty," its title presumably an echo of "Ugly Betty," a television series set at a women's fashion magazine. Subtitled "Helena Rubinstein, L'Oreal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good," Brandon's new book, while full of interesting matter, reads like four or five magazine articles not quite successfully joined together.
Brandon opens with a potted biography of Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965), the great entrepreneur of modern cosmetics. Here she traces Rubinstein's life from her Jewish childhood in Krakow, to her first beauty parlor in Australia, to her immense success in Europe and America during the 1930s and '40s. Brandon argues that the hard-driving Rubinstein perceived the existence of a huge market that men were unaware of. Twentieth-century women didn't want face creams and lotions just to improve or preserve their appearance. What these products actually gave them was self-esteem. With a lipstick and some powder, they gained the confidence to slam the door on Victorian social constraints. They could finally be women, and not just daughters, wives and mothers.
Rubinstein was also a marketing genius, understanding that "the high price was an essential part of the treatment." If a product didn't sell well, she would make it more expensive. When a client, for instance, paid serious money for what the early ads called "'a rejuvenating cream de luxe for the ultra fastidious woman, containing the youthifying essence of Water Lily buds,' the mere possession of such a luxury helped her feel both youthified and richer." Not even a 1934 Consumer Research survey -- which pointed out that commercial facial treatments didn't do much of anything -- could slow the growth of the Helena Rubinstein empire. As Brandon writes, "No expose, however painstaking, could outweigh the magical allure of hope."
At this point, Brandon suddenly shifts the focus of her book to Rubinstein's contemporary, Eugene Schueller (1881-1957), the young French chemist who discovered the first safe hair dye and then founded L'Oreal. Schueller's father was only a baker, but he himself managed, through sheer luck, to receive an excellent scientific education. Combined with a workaholic nature similar to Rubinstein's, Schueller eventually oversaw several companies, produced Votre Beaute magazine and regularly spoke out about economic and business reform. He was, in fact, something of a visionary, paying worker incentives and foreseeing a united Europe. Unfortunately, just before and during World War II, he also grew politically and ideologically close to a group of homegrown fascists and their Nazi friends.
In its middle sections, "Ugly Beauty" consequently turns to an investigation of Schueller's war years. Eventually brought to trial for collaboration, the man himself was narrowly acquitted of any indictable wrongdoing, largely through the influence of young friends who had won honor in the Resistance. These supporters included France's future president, Francois Mitterand, a future director of L'Oreal, Francois Dalle and Schueller's eventual son-in-law, Andre Bettencourt. All three were closely connected to L'Oreal, the latter two throughout their lives. To his discomfort and embarrassment, even the young Mitterand worked for a year as the editor of Votre Beaute.
While Brandon clearly approves the drive, chutzpah and business sense of Rubinstein, she finds little to admire about L'Oreal. Now a vast international conglomerate, L'Oreal not only acquired Helena Rubinstein Inc. after its founder's death, but also comprises 400 subsidiaries and 500 brands, including "Maybelline, Softsheen, Garnier, CCB; luxury products Lancome, Biotherm, Kiehl's, Shue Uemura; the fragrance lines of Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Cacharel, Lanvin, Viktor & Rolf, Diesel, and YSL Beaute; professional products Kerastase, Redken, Matrix, Mizani, Shue Uemura Art of Hair; cosmoceuticals Vichy, La Roche Posay, Inneov, Skinceuticals, Sanoflore; The Body Shop; and Laboratories Ylang." The company, she strives to show, may be financially successful, but it has also been morally tarred by the fascist sympathies and anti-Semitic past of its founder and several key employees.
After these muckraking pages, Brandon again shifts to a new subject. In a chapter called "Consumers or Consumed?" she offers what is essentially a polemical essay on the modern beauty industry, taking on plastic surgery, facial treatments such as Botox and the influence of photography on our notions of physical attractiveness. She particularly stresses how much doctored digital imagery now distorts our sense of how we should look. Computer magic can lighten the skin of the singer Beyonce (as it did for a series of L'Oreal advertising pictures) or do away with the smallest defects of already glamorous models and actors. "The body," Brandon writes, "has become a mere canvas, upon which the digital-age beauty business remasters our image of what is physically possible. But since perfection is ipso facto unattainable, what is really on offer, in the world of beauty as elsewhere, is infinite discontent."
She laments that "today's women turn to the knife and the needle, liposucking off some inches here, tightening a jawline there, plumping out this fallen cheek, lifting that recalcitrant breast, in a never-ending, inevitably futile attempt to achieve the ultimate unreality: Photoshop." Moreover she notes that the beauty industry has begun to tap a new market: Products for men. "As the world gets fatter and man-boobs ('moobs') proliferate, more and more men are opting for breast reductions. ... And they're worrying about their wrinkles. "
In the final section of "Ugly Beauty," Brandon compares the old age of Helena Rubinstein and Liliane Bettencourt, Eugene Schueller's (still living) daughter and heir. She contrasts, in particular, the two women's late-life intimacies with much younger men. But Brandon judges the friendship between Rubinstein and Patrick O'Higgins as touching and genuine, while Bettencourt's obsession with the gay photographer Francois-Marie Banier is presented as a monstrous example of an idle rich woman being preyed upon -- for millions of dollars -- by a seductive charmer. Brandon concludes that Helena Rubinstein made herself into an active modern woman, hardworking and true to herself, while Eugene Schueller's social theories, tinged with male authoritarianism, simply kept his immensely wealthy daughter from becoming anything but a well-known fashion plate and an infatuated cash cow.
"Ugly Beauty" clearly tries hard to blend biography, cultural history, investigative journalism and polemical essay. While it doesn't quite manage this with any smoothness, the book is still worth reading. After all, it's by Ruth Brandon.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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