Book+Reviews+-+June+2013

Book Reviews toc June 2013

= Previous Book Reviews =

Interested in reviewing books for //Women in Libraries//? Check out our list of new and available books and review guidelines. If you would like to review, please contact Mary Jinglewski, Book Editor with a brief statement of your qualifications as a reviewer and your reason for interest in the particular item(s).

=//Georgette Heyer//= by Jennifer Kloester. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2013. Reviewed by Kate Conerton

Jennifer Kloester's new biography of Georgette Heyer provides a detailed account of the prolific novelist's personal and professional life. Georgette Heyer's historical novels established the Regency romance genre, which remains popular nearly forty years after Heyer's death. This book also discusses the state of the publishing industry throughout Heyer's fifty-year writing career.

The ten years of research which went into //Georgette Heyer// are obvious. It is remarkably thorough; keeping track of the many people moving in and out of Georgette Heyer's life would be a struggle without the comprehensive index. These details are possible because of the many letters from Heyer to friends, publishers, and agents which Kloester used in her research. Heyer’s letters to business contacts offer a fascinating look at the effort it took for Heyer to make a living and support her family through her writing. Along with these letters, many of which were not available to the author of the 1984 Heyer biography, Kloester draws on interviews with Heyer’s friends and family along with her private papers. She also had access to the complete research archive of Jane Aiken Hodge, author of the 1984 biography. Kloester's occasional asides about her research - and the short stories and other materials that she believes remain to be found - are nearly as interesting as her subject. The book includes black-and-white photographs and appendices listing Heyer's novels, known short stories, and archives of Heyer-related materials.

This biography is detailed, engaging, and clearly written. Kloester easily connects different aspects of Heyer's life. It is a worthwhile addition to the 1984 biography; the new letters and papers fill in some gaps. When Kloester’s conclusions differ from those of the earlier biographer, these differences are pointed out and explained. After the early chapters covering Heyer's childhood, the text is full of quotes from her stories and letters. These quotes are a welcome addition to the biography and Heyer fans will enjoy her distinctive voice.

While Kloester does an excellent job of covering Georgette Heyer’s life, I would have appreciated more about her impact. Most of Heyer’s books are still in print, and her style set the standard for Regency romances. While Kloester points out Heyer’s significance throughout the text as well as in the brief afterword, more details would be useful.

This biography will appeal to fans of Heyer's work and Regency romances more generally as well as to literary scholars. Recommended for academic and public libraries.

//Kate Conerton is a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies. k.conerton@gmail.com//

= = =//Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America// = by Jo B. Paoletti. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012 . Reviewed by Kate Clayborne

In Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America, Jo B. Paoletti examines the changing trends in children's clothing from the late 1800s through the present, in the process showing just how recent our assumptions about what is innately "for boys" or "for girls" really are.

Grounded in the work of scholars such as culture historian Karin Culvert and gender theorist Susan B. Kaiser, and making use of sources such as paper dolls, clothing catalogues, and baby books, this text charts the change from children's clothing as a gender neutral offshoot of women's wear to the decidedly gendered outfits we see today. Two chapters focus on specific articles of clothing: "Dresses are for Girls and Boys" chronicles the white ruffled gown, while "Pants are for Boys and Girls" covers the rise of pants as active play is encouraged for children of both sexes. The remaining chapters detail the change from pink as a "decided and stronger color" better suited to boys, and the "delicate and dainty" blue to girls; to the mid-20th Century recast of pink as purely feminine; a brief rise of unisex childrearing during the 1970s; and the once again strident bifurcation from 1985 onwards.

She notes that these trends are, of course, not universal. Most of the sources available on the topic portray only white, middle- to upper-class families, and do not account for geographic differences. What Paoletti hopes to lay out is not necessarily the reality of day-to-day life, but rather a set of societal rules and expectations, and how those rules and expectations have evolved over time.

In her introduction, Paoletti states that the book is aimed at a wide audience, hoping it will be approachable by scholars and popular audiences alike, and she mostly succeeds. While the balance does lean more towards the academic side, Paoletti takes care to explain the more complex theoretical concepts clearly and succinctly.

The author puts forth a strong argument, providing ample evidence to back up her statements. However, the book does suffer from a lack of narrative structure. As the introduction points out, this is a multi-faceted topic which cannot be simplified into a flat chronology. Still, the amount of bouncing around in time that occurs within discussions of a single article of clothing can become distracting. The text can at times also be somewhat repetitive, and might be better approached as a series of essays rather than a cohesive whole.

At only 139 pages excluding references and index, this book may not be the most in-depth resource on the intersection of fashion and gender. However, this short length, combined with the author's dedication to writing for a broad spectrum of readers, makes it an approachable, solid introduction to the topic. Pink and Blue also has an extensive bibliography, which provides an excellent jumping-off point for those wishing to learn more. Whether a scholar, a parent, or just a curious individual, this book is useful for anyone with an interest in learning more about the development of modern American culture. The highly detailed clothing descriptions, backed up by Paoletti's extensive and diligent research, will also appeal to fashion historians and enthusiasts. It is recommended for any academic library, but would also be a valuable addition to a public library's shelves.

//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Kate Clayborne is an MLIS candidate at the University of British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. She has a background in feminist and queer US history. kate.clayborne@alumni.ubc.ca //

=//Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism//= by Melissa Wright. NY: Routledge, 2007. Reviewed by Amanda Mays

In Melissa Wright’s //Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism// we are taken on an ethnographic journey inside global factories in northern Mexico and southern China. Wright, Associate Professor of Geography and Women’s Studies, opens our eyes to the world inside these factories with a particular focus on the manifestation of the myth of women as disposable workers whose labor is extremely valuable while she is simultaneously devalued. Wright’s twelve years of ethnographic research reveals a labor system that aims to develop the skills of male workers by providing job training to increase their knowledge of factory operations and incentive programs to lead them to promotion and into higher paying supervisory positions. At the same time, women workers are purposefully kept in underpaid positions working on the factory assembly line without ever being given the opportunity to rise to a higher level within the factory. Throughout the reading, a deliberately gendered division of labor emerges as the root cause of social and physiological injustices that women workers are forced to endure at work on a daily basis.

In discussing how the gendered division of labor is constructed in these factories, Wright informs us of particular epistemologies and actions that management staff employ. For instance, management staff have decided that women’s fingers are smaller than the fingers of men and therefore women would be better at holding assembly line positions that require composing tiny electronic parts that are used in televisions as well as using sewing machines that require handling tiny sewing needles that often break and pierce the same fingers that are seen as so valuable to assembly line production. As women are kept in these underpaid assembly line positions, they endure dangerous working conditions including malfunctioning equipment, dusty windowless rooms with a single (guarded) door, having to ask permission to use the bathroom and having to work ten to twelve hour days (sometimes standing) in order to earn overtime pay to make up for the lack of livable wages normally received. In her interviews, Wright reveals the management’s knowledge of this happening but only when her management interviewees mention it in complaints that women workers have high turn-over rates. With high turn-over rates, that are due to unlivable working conditions (as proven in interviews with women workers), management see it as useless to invest time in training women for more skilled, higher paid, positions and thus the cycle of sweatshop labor and the myth of disposability of women workers is perpetuated.

Overall, this book would be most appropriate in an academic library collection and would probably be more useful at an institution offering graduate classes in Anthropology, Human Geography, Sociology or other areas of the social sciences. Some main strengths of the book include the level of detail Wright provides through her interviews with management staff and factory workers, the usefulness of the research in that it provides the specifics of how larger scale global capitalism affects laborers on zoomed-in individual levels at a certain time in a certain place and its pertinence to understanding current capitalist labor trends. The book is well organized and concludes with a notes section, lengthy bibliography and a detailed index which allows quick access to specific items in the book. Weaknesses of the book might be the lack of photographs, which, in my opinion, help one to visualize the factories and if it were possible, the people that Wright includes in her research. A second downfall might be that the reader should have previous knowledge of the topics discussed to be able to understand the importance of the research that Wrights shares, for instance, having a previous understanding of discourses and terminology surrounding the topic of global capitalism. It is for this reason that I would recommend the book to students at the graduate level, although some undergraduate level programs do offer specialized courses that might prepare the reader for this book.

//<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Amanda Mays is the Reference/Interlibrary Loan Librarian at Berry College in Rome, Georgia and has a background in Human Geography and Women's Studies. amays@berry.edu //

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