Available:*
Format | Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Main Library | 810.9928 Dea | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... South Regional Library | 810.9928 Dea | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work.
These ten women--Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm--are united by what Dean calls "sharpness," the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books . It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment.
Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.
Author Notes
Michelle Dean is a journalist, critic, and the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle's 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. A contributing editor at the New Republic , she has written for the New Yorker , Nation , New York Times Magazine , Slate , New York Magazine , Elle , Harper's , and BuzzFeed . She lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Few readers could fail to be impressed by both the research behind and readability of this first book by Dean, a journalist and critic. In it, she explores the lives and work of women writers of the 20th century, including Hannah Arendt, Janet Malcolm, Dorothy Parker, and Susan Sontag. She covers a dozen women, all considered "sharp" for their intelligence and insight, but also in that they were considered-particularly by male counterparts-cutting and threatening. Dean, fortunately, doesn't keep these talented women in their own boxes, but shows many of them intersecting in the same intellectual circles, interacting and commenting-sometimes bitingly, sometimes supportingly-on each other's work. Dean provides concise synopses and comparisons of their ideas and has an eye for similarities: both Mary McCarthy and Joan Didion, for example, objected to what they saw as J.D. Salinger's triviality. The book has a few glitches-a short section on Zora Neale Hurston, for example, doesn't quite mesh with the rest. Taken as a whole, however, this is a stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers. Agent: Gary Morris, David Black Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
By portraying intrepidly and eloquently opinionated and highly influential women writers, journalist and critic Dean brings a uniquely intellectual slant to the current renaissance in women's history via group biographies, such as Andrea Barnet's Visionary Women (2018). Beginning with Dorothy Parker, who was putting people on notice before American women had the right to vote, these sharp literary warriors refused to conform to gender expectations and got their start by writing daringly frank and acerbic book, theater, or film reviews; taking on established, mostly male, figures; and presenting new and challenging perspectives. As Dean chronicles the complexly difficult, provoking, and triumphant writing lives of Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm, she tracks their supportive and vituperative interactions and reveals the vibrant matrix of culturally defining ideas generated by these bold critics of society, the arts, and politics. With the word ferocity appearing with satisfying frequency, Dean presents shrewd, discerning, fresh, and crisply composed interpretations of the temperaments, experiences, and sophisticated trailblazing works of these gutsy and transformative thinkers.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, by Antonio Damasio. (Vintage, $17.) Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, makes a case for the centrality of feelings and emotions in human history. Unlike other accounts that focus on cognition and are largely unconcerned with the role of affect, his book reframes the history of humans and the natural world, putting feelings at its core. THE PISCES, by Melissa Brodér. (Hogarth, $16.) In this darkly funny novel, a depressed and stalled graduate student finally meets her dream date - who turns out to be half fish. As our reviewer, Cathleen Schine, put it, Brodér "approaches the great existential subjects - emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends - as if they were a collection of bad habits." SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. (Grove, $17.) In breezy biographical chapters on 10 writers, including Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Pauline Kael, Dean explores their successes and failures and their relationship to feminism. Above all, she considers the doubleedged nature of the word "sharp": It's a compliment with an undertow of terror, she writes. "Sharpness, after all, cuts." THE IMMORTALISTS, by Chloe Benjamin. (Putnam, $16.) In late 1960s New York, the Gold children visit a fortuneteller known for predicting the dates when people will die. The four siblings grapple with the prophesies over the next 50 years: One heads West for San Francisco, and another becomes a scientist, researching the possibility of living forever. For each, the knowledge turns out to be both a blessing and curse, and all must try to balance their desires and choices with their predetermined destinies. NO ASHES IN THE FIRE: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, by Darnell L. Moore. (Bold Type, $16.99.) Growing up gay and black in Camden, N. J., Moore had a brutal, violent childhood. In his book, he sets out to make visible the "forces that rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful," he writes, but despite the cruelty he faced, he suffuses his memoir with humanity. THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Vintage, $16.95.) Hollinghurst's emotionally resonant novel charts nearly a century of queer life and desires in Britain. When readers meet the title character, he's an object of intense desire among a group of male friends at Oxford. Years later, a sex scandal torpedoes his political career, leaving his gay son to claim the possibilities his father never had.
Kirkus Review
A debut book about the works of 20th-century women whose lives had a deep impact on culture."I gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp," writes New Republic contributing editor Dean. At first glance, the premise seems rather elementary. Such a qualifier can't possibly carry with it the heft of a book's premise. However, by exploring the different roles that women such as Joan Didion, Hannah Arendt, Renata Adler, Susan Sontag, and Dorothy Parker occupied in the writing world, Dean makes it clear that to be called "sharp" was a steppingstone for their respective careers. All of the women are obviously extremely different: Dorothy Parker was hardly a contemporary of Susan Sontag, nor did they function within the same society. Hannah Arendt was not as progressively irreverent as Renata Adler. However, Dean reveals intriguing connections that link most, if not all, of them together. Each one of these women was involved in one way or another with Cond Nast, an extremely influential publishing group that could make or break writers' careers. In writing for the New York Review of Books or Vogue, among other publications, they were able to test out their ideas on a captive audience of fiery New Yorkers and sophisticated, fashionable women. As is often the case with geniuses, their writings were not received with open arms; there was push back from an audience used to a male authorial power. Interestingly, however different these women may have been from each other, the author ably explains the ways in which their lives intersected, the conversations they had, and the goals they shared. Unfortunately, Dean often discusses these female authors' writerly independence in relation to the men that occupied important places in their lives, an odd choice in a book of this nature. Still, the author presents engaging portraits of brilliant minds.A useful take on significant writers "in a world that was not eager to hear women's opinions about anything." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Journalist and critic Dean offers a look at the lives and careers of ten women she describes as sharp, including Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm. These women are bound by exceptional talent and helped forward American literature in the 20th century. Each chapter is part biography and part literary criticism, chronicling the personal and professional highs and lows of the women's lives and how they overlapped or intertwined. One glaring exception to this organization is the chapter "West & Zora Neale Hurston," in which Dean discusses West's veiled racism in her coverage of the Willie Earle lynching case in 1947. This sidestep highlights that all of Dean's subjects are of European descent, though from a variety of religious, political, and class backgrounds. VERDICT Dean's title is engaging and well written, but one cannot help but wish that more women of color had received attention. With that in mind, this work may be of interest to readers who enjoy biography, literary criticism, and women's or cultural history.-Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp. The precise nature of their gifts varied, but they had in common the ability to write unforgettably. The world would not have been the same without Dorothy Parker's acid reflections on the absurdities of her life. Or Rebecca West's ability to sweep half the world's history into a first-person account of a single trip. Or Hannah Arendt's ideas about totalitarianism, or Mary McCarthy's fiction that took as its subject the strange consciousness of the princess among the trolls. Or Sontag's ideas about interpretation, or Pauline Kael's energetic swipes at filmmakers. Or Ephron's skepticism about the feminist movement, or Renata Adler's catalog of the foibles of those in power. Or Janet Malcolm's reflections on the perils and rewards of psychoanalysis and journalism. * I wrote this book because this history has never been as well-known as it deserves to be, at least outside certain isolated precincts of New York. The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists: the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, the Roths and Bellows and Salingers. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering. Even in more academic accounts, in "intellectual histories," it is generally assumed that men dominated the scene. Certainly, the so-called New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century are often identified as a male set. But my research showed otherwise. Men might have outnumbered women, demographically. But in the arguably more crucial matter of producing work worth remembering, the work that defined the terms of their scene, the women were right up to par--and often beyond it. Excerpted from Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Chapter 1 Parker | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 West | p. 31 |
| Chapter 3 West & Hurston | p. 59 |
| Chapter 4 Arendt | p. 65 |
| Chapter 5 McCarthy | p. 92 |
| Chapter 6 Parker & Arendt | p. 122 |
| Chapter 7 Arendt & McCarthy | p. 132 |
| Chapter 8 Sontag | p. 146 |
| Chapter 9 Kael | p. 175 |
| Chapter 10 Didion | p. 203 |
| Chapter 11 Ephron | p. 229 |
| Chapter 12 Arendt & McCarthy & Hellman | p. 253 |
| Chapter 13 Adler | p. 260 |
| Chapter 14 Malcolm | p. 284 |
| Afterword | p. 309 |
| Note on Sources | p. 313 |
| Bibliography | p. 315 |
| Notes | p. 317 |
| Index | p. 349 |