Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America
Leslie Zemeckis, 2013
Skyhorse
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620876916
Summary
The art of burlesque is continuing its resurgence. There are thousands of performers packing venues all over the world. Yet many of the genre’s fans, and even those involved in the trade, are still in the dark when it comes to the history of the craft.
Leslie Zemeckis has decided to do something about preserving the legacy of the pioneers of burlesque with a critically acclaimed documentary Behind the Burly Q (2012). But it was just the beginning. In possession of hundreds of hours of taped interviews and rare, never-before-seen photos, Leslie knew there was more to be done. So she has documented the definitive oral history of burlesque as told by the original stars themselves in her first book.
With a foreword by burlesque’s equivalent of Lady Gaga—Blaze Starr—Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America (Skyhorse Publishing, June 2013) is a fascinating exploration of America’s “seediest” art form.
Given unprecedented access to the performers’ diaries, letters, albums, and memorabilia, Leslie’s book gathers their stories and personal photos here for the first time. In their own words, the performers confide their stories of being courted by King Saud of Saudi Arabia, and their encounters with famous fans, including Abbott and Costello, Jack Ruby, and JFK himself.
The history and the lore come alive with the accounts of “Stage Door Johnnies” who followed the performers from town to town; the infamous “flash” that made New York Mayor LaGuardia shut down the city’s burlesque clubs; and lighting their tassels on fire in a never-ending quest to “out-gimmick” other dancers.
Full of gossip and firsthand accounts of backstage treachery, rivalries, lawsuits, and debauchery, Behind the Burly Q is also a heartwarming and inspiring book about the women (and men) whose stories of “stripping” have never been told. (From the publisher.)
Read the article in Huff Post.
Author Bio
Leslie Zemeckis is an author, actress, and award-winning documentarian. Zemeckis wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning Bound by Flesh about Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton as well as the critically acclaimed Behind the Burly Q, a definitive history of burlesque.
Book Reviews
Charming....often entertaining.... The present-day interviews with these women are a delight and also poignant, partly because of the contrast between their older and younger selves, though mostly because of the lives they lived.... It’s great that she immortalized these women.
Manohla Dargis - New York Times
[M]any creatively named burlesque stars—Tempest Storm, Candy Cotton, Blaze Starr, Candy Barr, Val Valentine, Tee Tee Red, the list goes on — interviewed at poignant, amusing and enlightening length in a new book, Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America.
Rick Kogan - Chicago Tribune
Leslie Zemeckis relates the tragic and uplifting tales of the forgotten stars of burlesque's golden age.
Los Angeles Times
Utterly entertaining Behind the Burly Q is a painstakingly researched love letter to the women and men who once made up the community of burlesque performers…its treasure trove of vintage photographs and performance footage is enough to make historians and fans of classic erotica swoon…insightful, fascinating.
Ernest Hardy - Village Voice
A privileged front-row seat to the history of burlesque! Glorious ladies in their heyday....their long-ago stripteases still pack a sensual, sassy, what-the-hell punch, while juicy anecdotes run from raunchy to touching to funny to flat-out incredible.
Ronnie Scheib - Variety
Entertaining, and often poignant book.
Liz Smith
[A]comprehensive history of the golden age of burlesque. Drawing from extensive interviews conducted for [her] film, Zemeckis profiles a host of colorful dancers.... Rounding out Zemeckis’s oral history are profiles of those connected to the burlesque circuit—like comedians Abbott and Costello—and examinations of the legal and social furors and fevers kicked off by the “Burly Q.” This rich history, rife with vibrant quotes and first-hand insights from burlesque’s biggest dancers, is indispensable for fans of the ribald pastime.
Publishers Weekly
Filmmaker Zemeckis...introduces readers to a wild and varied cast of characters, many of whom she interviewed herself, such as Lili St. Cyr, Zorita, and the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee, who was immortalized in the Broadway musical Gypsy. However, the author also reveals a more vulnerable side to these larger-than-life figures, discussing unstable childhoods and marital woes.... Zemeckis offers a rich, colorful narrative that provides a vivid sense of the era. —Mahnaz Dar
Library Journal
Salty reminiscences.... Zemeckis assembled an impressive number of surviving performers from roughly the 1930s through the late ’50s to recount their experiences toiling in this often misunderstood cul-de-sac in American performing arts. An evolution of vaudeville, burlesque added striptease to the program in an effort to lure audiences back from the movies.... There is much colorful ground-level showbiz detail... and the anecdotes are never less than good fun. An affectionate and historically valuable document of an intriguing, little-served corner of American entertainment.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why has burlesque been left out of the history books? Where the performers themselves reluctant to talk about performing in burlesque or is it because of our perceptions today that burlesque was no more than a strip show with second rate comedians?
2. When does the author consider the years to be the “golden age of burlesque” and why?
3. Did most of the women revere their time in burlesque or were they ashamed of it? Did their families know?
4. How often did the performers work? Could say a hand-balancer actually make a living in burlesque?
5. Why is is considered to be the premier form of entertainment in America?
6. Why did burlesque die out? And what do we owe its growing resurgence to today?
7. Where can you see burlesque today? Which performers and television shows are burlesque?
8. What happened to the men and women when burlesque died out? Could they cross over into “legitimate” show business?
9. So many of the women talked about growing up poor and coming from abusive families did this have anything to do with their choices to go into burlesque? Did it give them opportunities they might not otherwise have had?
10. Alan Alda’s father was in burlesque, who else was in burlesque that surprised you?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)
Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife
Eben Alexander, M.D., 2013
Simon & Schuster
196 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451695199
Summary
A scientist's case for the afterlife.
Thousands of people have had near-death experiences, but scientists have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those scientists. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that NDEs feel real, but are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.
Then, Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. For seven days he lay in a coma. Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. He had come back.
Alexander’s recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.
Alexander’s story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.
This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December, 1953
• Where—Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill; M.D., Duke University
• Currently—lives in Lynchburg, Virginia
Eben Alexander, III, is an American neurosurgeon and the author of the best-selling Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife, in which he describes his 2008 near-death experience and asserts that science can and will determine that heaven really does exist.
Education and training
Alexander attended Phillips Exeter Academy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (A.B., 1975), and the Duke University School of Medicine (M.D., 1980).
Alexander was an Intern in General Surgery at Duke University Medical Center, a resident at Duke, Newcastle (U.K.) General Hospital. He was a resident and research fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital and is certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery and the American College of Surgeons (F.A.C.S.).
Academic and clinical appointments
Alexander has taught at Duke University Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the University of Virginia Medical School.
He has had hospital appointments at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and Lynchburg (Virginia) General Hospital-CentraHealth. He is currently an attending neurosurgeon.
Professional activities
Alexander is a member of the American Medical Association and various other professional societies. He has been on the editorial boards of various journals.
Proof of Heaven
Alexander is the author of the autobiographical book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012) in which he asserts that his out of body and near death experience (NDE) while in a meningitis-induced coma in 2008 proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also including butterflies and a beautiful girl in peasant dress who Alexander finds out later was his departed sister.
The current understanding of the mind, according to Alexander, “now lies broken at our feet”:
What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.
Alexander’s book was excerpted in a Newsweek magazine cover story in October 2012. (In May 2012, Alexander had provided a slightly more technical account of the events described in his book in an article, "My Experience in Coma," in AANS Neurosurgeon, the trade publication of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.)
Proof of Heaven has been on the New York Times Best Seller list since its release in October, 2012.
Criticism
In a wide-ranging investigation of Alexander's story and medical background, Esquire magazine reported (August 2013 issue) that prior to the publication of Proof of Heaven, Alexander had been terminated or suspended from multiple hospital positions, and had been the subject of several malpractice lawsuits, including at least two involving the alteration of medical records to cover up a medical error.
The magazine also found what it claimed were discrepancies with regard to Alexander's version of events in the book. Among the discrepancies, according to an account of the Esquire article in Forbes, was that...
Alexander writes that he slipped into the coma as a result of severe bacterial meningitis and had no higher brain activity, while a doctor who cared for him says the coma was medically induced and the patient was conscious, though hallucinating.
Alexander issued a statement after the Esquire article's publication:
I wrote a truthful account of my experiences in Proof of Heaven and have acknowledged in the book both my professional and personal accomplishments and my setbacks. I stand by every word in this book and have made its message the purpose of my life. Esquire's cynical article distorts the facts of my 25-year career as a neurosurgeon and is a textbook example of how unsupported assertions and cherry-picked information can be assembled at the expense of the truth.
Alexander’s book and publicity campaign have been criticized by scientists, including neuroscientist Sam Harris, who described Alexander’s NDE account (chronicled in Newsweek, October 2012) as "alarmingly unscientific," and that...
everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was "shut down," "inactivated," "completely shut down," "totally offline," and "stunned to complete inactivity." The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science.... Even in cases where the brain is alleged to have shut down, its activity must return if the subject is to survive and describe the experience. In such cases, there is generally no way to establish that the NDE occurred while the brain was offline.
Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks agreed with Harris, saying that...
to deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific—it is antiscientific.... The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case...is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.
In November 2012, Alexander responded to critics in a second Newsweek article:
My synapses—the spaces between the neurons of the brain that support the electrochemical activity that makes the brain function—were not simply compromised during my experience. They were stopped. Only isolated pockets of deep cortical neurons were still sputtering, but no broad networks capable of generating anything like what we call "consciousness." The E. coli bacteria that flooded my brain during my illness made sure of that. My doctors have told me that according to all the brain tests they were doing, there was no way that any of the functions including vision, hearing, emotion, memory, language, or logic could possibly have been intact.
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/04/2013.)
Book Reviews
Dr. Alexander, 58, was so changed by the experience that he felt compelled to write a book, “Proof of Heaven,” that recounts his experience. He knew full well that he was gambling his professional reputation by writing it, but his hope is that his expertise will be enough to persuade skeptics, particularly medical skeptics, as he used to be, to open their minds to an afterworld
Leslie Kaufman - New York Times
A neurosurgeon’s first-person account of his near-death experience after an E. coli meningitis-related seizure and seven-day coma will reassure afterlife believers, though it is unlikely to convince skeptics. Alexander’s credentials are impressive: medical school at Duke and 15 years at Harvard-affiliated hospitals. But to agnostics and atheists, Alexander may not come across as a completely objective observer. He writes that he attended his Episcopal church even as he questioned how God, heaven, and an afterlife could exist, yet the heaven he describes seeing certainly seems like a biblical one; a typical line is, “the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above.” His story includes interesting asides about past struggles with alcohol and with adoption. (His birth mother delivered him when she was 16 and for years did not want to meet him.) But the book mostly focuses on religion. It ends with a request to support Eternea, Alexander’s nonprofit that has as its mission, “increasing global acceptance of the reality of our eternal spiritual existence . . . under an all-loving God.” For believers, not skeptics. —Karen Springen
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion on Proof of Heaven:
1. Alexander opens the chapter "A Final Dilemma" with a quotation from Einstein: "I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be." Why has he included the quote and what is its significance to the book?
2. What do you make of Alexander's experience of heaven—the butterflies, clouds, sounds, and beings? What about the beautiful woman's message to him, that he is loved, he should not fear, and he can do no wrong? If you've read other accounts of NDEs, how is his experience of heaven different from, or similar to, the experiences others have written about?
3. Talk about Alexander's transformation following his NDE. How has his experience changed his life?
4. Does Alexander's medical background bolster his claims for having experienced heaven? In other words, does the fact that he is a man of science accord him more credibility than others who have had mystical NDEs?
5. Why did Alexander decide to publish Proof of Heaven knowing that he would be subjected to cricticism and would possibly risk his medical reputation?
6. Do you envy individuals like Eben Alexander and others who have had powerful religious encounters during NDEs? Have you ever had a similar mystical experience, near death or not?
7. Have you read any of the criticism directed toward Alexander after publishing Proof of Heaven? (See the author bio above.) What would you say to these critics?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)
Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Woman's Prison
Piper Kerman, 2010
Randm House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385523394
Summary
With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her.
Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules.
She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman’s story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.
The film adaptation was produced by Netflix and released in 2013. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Smith College
• Currently—
Piper Kerman is an American memoirist whose experiences in prison provided the basis for the comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black.
Kerman was born in 1970 in Boston into a family with many doctors, attorneys and educators and graduated from Smith College in 1992. A self-described WASP, in 1993 she entered into a romantic relationship with Nora Jansen, a woman who dealt heroin for a West African kingpin. Kerman laundered money for the drug operation.
In 1998, Kerman was indicted for money laundering and drug trafficking and subsequently pled guilty. Beginning in 2004, she served 13 months of a 15 month sentence at FCI Danbury, a minimum security prison located in Danbury, Connecticut.
At present, Kerman is vice president of a Washington, D.C.–based communications firm that works with foundations and nonprofits. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kerman published her best-selling memoir about her experiences in prison, Orange Is the New Black, in 2010. An adaptation of the same name by Jenji Kohan, the Emmy award-winning creator of Weeds, debuted in July 2013 exclusively on Netflix. Kerman's analogue on the series ("Piper Chapman") is played by Taylor Schilling. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Kerman neither sentimentalizes nor lectures. She keeps the details of her despair to a minimum along with her discussion of the outrages of the penal system, concentrating instead on descriptions of her direct experiences, both harrowing and hilarious, and the personalities of the women who shared them with her.
Boston Globe
Kerman puts us inside, from the first strip search...to the prison-issue unwashed underwear to the cucumbers and raw cauliflower that count as salad.... This book is impossible to put down because she could be you. Or your best friend. Or your daughter.
Los Angeles Times
Orange transcends the memoir genre's usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you. You'd expect bad behavior in prison. But it's the moments of joy, friendship and kindness that the author experienced that make Orange so moving and lovely…You sense [Kerman] wrote Orange to make readers think not about her but her fellow inmates. And, boy, does she succeed.
USA Today
Ten years after a fleeting post-Smith College flirtation with drug trafficking, Piper Kerman was arrested–a P.O.W. in the war on drugs. In Orange Is the New Black, Kerman presents–devoid of self-pity, and with novelistic flair–life in the clink as less Caged Heat and more Steel Magnolias.
Vanity Fair
Relying on the kindness of strangers during her year's stint at the minimum security correctional facility in Danbury, Conn., Kerman...found that federal prison wasn't all that bad. In fact, she made good friends doing her time among the other women, many street-hardened drug users.... Kerman's ordeal indeed proved life altering.
Publishers Weekly
Kerman finds herself submerged in the unique and sometimes overwhelming culture of prison.... Kerman quickly learns the rules...and carves a niche for herself even as she witnesses the way the prison system fails those who are condemned to it, many of them nonviolent drug offenders. An absorbing, meditative look at life behind bars. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Orange is the New Black:
1. Talk about Piper Kerman. What do you think of her? Does she deserve the sentence she received?
2. How would you describe the prison culture—its hierarchy and values. What must Piper learn in order to adapt to, or even survive, prison life? Discuss about how Piper's relationships changed—both inside the prison walls and outside prison.
3. Do you have favorites among the inmates? Least favorites? Are there any inmates you come to admire? if so, why? Are there inmates who don't deserve to be in prison?
4. Talk about the relationship of the inmates with the guards and prison authorities.
5. In many ways, this is a coming-of-age story. What are the ways in which prison changes Piper? What does she come to learn about who she is?
6. Has reading Orange Is the New Black altered your views of the criminal justice system? Or does the memoir basically confirm what you believed?
7. Why is being sent to prison frequently referred to as "disappearing down the rabbit hole"?
8. Does our criminal justice system work? Does prison work? If you could, what would you change about the legal and/or the prison system?
9. Watch the Netflix film adaptation—either selected clips or in its entirety. How does it compare with the book?
10. Talk about homosexuality, both in Piper's life and as it exists in prison.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Lena Dunham, 2014
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994995
Summary
This hilarious, poignant, and extremely frank collection of personal essays confirms Lena Dunham—the acclaimed creator, producer, and star of HBO’s Girls—as one of the brightest and most original writers working today.
In Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham illuminates the experiences that are part of making one’s way in the world: falling in love, feeling alone, being ten pounds overweight despite eating only health food, having to prove yourself in a room full of men twice your age, finding true love, and most of all, having the guts to believe that your story is one that deserves to be told.
“Take My Virginity (No Really, Take It)” is the account of Dunham’s first time, and how her expectations of sex didn’t quite live up to the actual event (“No floodgate had been opened, no vault of true womanhood unlocked”); “Girls & Jerks” explores her former attraction to less-than-nice guys—guys who had perfected the “dynamic of disrespect” she found so intriguing; “Is This Even Real?” is a meditation on her lifelong obsession with death and dying—what she calls her “genetically predestined morbidity.” And in “I Didn’t F*** Them, but They Yelled at Me,” she imagines the tell-all she will write when she is eighty and past caring, able to reflect honestly on the sexism and condescension she has encountered in Hollywood, where women are “treated like the paper thingies that protect glasses in hotel bathrooms—necessary but infinitely disposable.”
Exuberant, moving, and keenly observed, Not That Kind of Girl is a series of dispatches from the frontlines of the struggle that is growing up. “I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you,” Dunham writes. “But if I can take what I’ve learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine will have been worthwhile.”(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1986
• Where—New York City (Brooklyn), New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Awards—Golden Globe Awards (twice); Directors Guild Award
• Currently—New York City (Brooklyn), New York
Lena Dunham is an American actress, screenwriter, producer, and director. She wrote and directed the independent film Tiny Furniture (2010), and is the creator, writer and star of the HBO series Girls. She has received eight nominations for Emmy Awards as a writer, director, actress and producer and won two Golden Globe Awards for Girls. Dunham is also the first woman to win a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Director in a Comedy Series.
Background
Dunham was born in New York City, New York. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter, and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is an artist and photographer, and a member of the Pictures group. Laurie is known for her use of dolls and doll-house furniture in her photographs of setup interior scenes. Dunham has described herself as feeling "very culturally Jewish, although that’s the biggest cliche for a Jewish woman to say”; her father is Protestant, and her mother is Jewish.
She has a younger sister, Grace, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, who appeared in Dunham's first film, Creative Nonfiction, and starred in her second film, Tiny Furniture.
Dunham was raised in Brooklyn and spent her summers in a house in Salisbury, Connecticut, though her parents later purchased a weekend family home in Cornwall, Connecticut.
Dunham attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She graduated in 2008 from Oberlin College, where she studied creative writing. During her college years, Dunham worked part-time at the West Village boutique Geminola.
Career
Dunham's 2010 feature film Tiny Furniture won Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest Music and Media Conference, and subsequently screened at such festivals as Maryland Film Festival. Dunham herself plays the lead role of Aura. Her real life mother plays Aura's mother, while her real sister, Grace, plays Aura's on-screen sibling.
In early 2012, HBO gave the go-ahead to Dunham's television series Girls. The first season premiered in April, 2012, and has garnered Dunham four Emmy nominations for her roles in acting, writing, and directing the series and two Golden Globe wins for Best Comedy Series for Girls and for herself in Best Lead Actress in a Comedy or Musical Series. In February 2013, Dunham became the first woman to win a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Director in a Comedy Series for her work on Girls.
Dunham appeared in a video advertisement promoting President Barack Obama's re-election, delivering a monologue, which, according to a blog quoted in The Atlantic, tried to "get the youth vote by comparing voting for the first time to having sex for the first time". Fox News reported "intense criticism" from multiple media sources, who labeled the advertisement as "tasteless and inappropriate," but added that "not everyone was so offended". In 2014, she was named the Recipient of Horizon Award 2014 by Point Foundation for her support to the gay community.
In 2014 Dunham published a collection of personal essays, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned." She dedicated the book to Nora Ephron, a friend.
Personal life
In 2012, Dunham began dating Jack Antonoff, lead guitarist of the band Fun. She has stated that she will not get married until same-sex marriage is legalized.
Dunham was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder as a child, and continues to take a low dose of an antidepressant to relieve her anxiety. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/4/2014.)
Book Reviews
[S]mart, funny…creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls…Ms. Dunham brings a similar candor to the story of her own life, getting as naked in print as her alter ego Hannah often does in the flesh…while Hannah, an aspiring author, is constantly putting her foot in her mouth and prattling on about herself, the gifted Ms. Dunham not only writes with observant precision, but also brings a measure of perspective, nostalgia and an older person's sort of wisdom to her portrait of her (not all that much) younger self and her world…Ms. Dunham doesn't presume to be "the voice of my generation" or even "a voice of a generation," as Hannah does in the show. Instead, by simply telling her own story in all its specificity and sometimes embarrassing detail, she has written a book that's as acute and heartfelt as it is
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Not That Kind of Girl is familiar fare. Dunham chronicles her attempts to lose her virginity and lose weight. She tells gut-wrenching stories of sex. She gets a job, goes to camp, grapples with a medical diagnosis and experiments with early iterations of technology. When her sister is born, she wails “Intruder! Return Her!” As Nora Ephron said, “everything is copy,” and though such topics are well trodden, Dunham makes them shine.
Michelle Goldberg - New York Times Book Review
[W]itty and wise and rife with the kind of pacing and comedic flourishes that characterize early Woody Allen books.... Dunham is an extraordinary talent, and her vision...is stunningly original
Meghan Daum - New York Times Magazine
There’s a lot of power in retelling your mistakes so people can see what’s funny about them—and so that you are in control. Dunham knows about this power, and she has harnessed it.
Washington Post
A lovely, touching, surprisingly sentimental portrait of a woman who, despite repeatedly baring her body and soul to audiences, remains a bit of an enigma: a young woman who sets the agenda, defies classification and seems utterly at home in her own skin.
Chicago Tribune
Reading this book is a pleasure.... [These essays] exude brilliance and insight well beyond Dunham’s twenty-eight years.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Dunham has crafted warm, intelligent writing that is both deeply personal and engaging. . . . [Hers] is not only a voice who deserves to be heard but also one who will inspire other important voices to tell their stories too.
Roxane Gay - Time
Witty, illuminating, maddening, bracingly bleak . . . That great feminist icon Norman Mailer was very careful, through a lifetime’s work, not to unbury his ‘crystals,’ his prismatic lodes of psychic material: it’s the reason (he claimed) he never wrote an autobiography. Dunham’s crystals are on perpetual display, sending light shafts everywhere. . . . [She’s] a genuine artist, and a disturber of the order.
Atlantic
A lot of us fear we don’t measure up beautywise and that we endure too much crummy treatment from men. On these topics, Dunham is funny, wise, and, yes, brave.... Among Dunham’s gifts to womankind is her frontline example that some asshole may call you undesirable or worse, and it won’t kill you. Your version matters more.
Elle
(Starred review.) Touching, at times profound, and deeply funny . . . Dunham is expert at combining despair and humor.
Publishers Weekly
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, nascetur neque iaculis vestibulum, sed nam arcu et, eros lacus nulla aliquet condimentum, mauris ut proin maecenas, dignissim et pede ultrices ligula elementum. Sed sed donec rutrum, id et nulla orci. Convallis curabitur mauris lacus, mattis purus rutrum porttitor arcu quis
Library Journal
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, nascetur neque iaculis vestibulum, sed nam arcu et, eros lacus nulla aliquet condimentum, mauris ut proin maecenas, dignissim et pede ultrices ligula elementum. Sed sed donec rutrum, id et nulla orci. Convallis curabitur mauris lacus, mattis purus rutrum porttitor arcu quis
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Malcolm Gladwell, 2013
Little, Brown and Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316204361
Summary
We all know that underdogs can win—that's what the David versus Goliath legend tells us, and we've seen it with our own eyes. Or have we?
In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell, with his unparalleled ability to grasp connections others miss, uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty, the powerful and the dispossessed. Gladwell examines the battlefields of Northern Ireland and Vietnam, takes us into the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, and digs into the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms—all in an attempt to demonstrate how fundamentally we misunderstand the true meaning of advantages and disadvantages.
When is a traumatic childhood a good thing? When does a disability leave someone better off? Do you really want your child to go to the best school he or she can get into? Why are the childhoods of people at the top of one profession after another marked by deprivation and struggle?
Drawing upon psychology, history, science, business, and politics, David and Goliath is a beautifully written book about the mighty leverage of the unconventional. Millions of readers have been waiting for the next Malcolm Gladwell book. That wait is over. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 3, 1963
• Where—Fareham, Hampshire, England, U.K.
• Raised—Elmira, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto
• Currently—New York, New York, USA
Malcolm T. Gladwell is an English-Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013). The first four books were on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Gladwell's books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada 1n 2011.
Early life
Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother is Joyce (Nation) Gladwell, a Jamaican-born psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, is a British mathematics professor. Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer. When he was six, his family moved to Elmira, Ontario, Canada.
Gladwell's father noted that Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy. When Malcolm was 11, his father allowed him to wander around the offices at his university, which stoked the boy's interest in reading and libraries. During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1,500 meter title at the 1978 Ontario High School 14-year-old championships in Kingston, Ontario. In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College in 1984.
Career
Gladwell's grades were not good enough for graduate school (as Gladwell puts it, "college was not an... intellectually fruitful time for me"), so he decided to go into advertising. After being rejected by every advertising agency he applied to, he accepted a journalism position at The American Spectator and moved to Indiana. He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.
In 1987, Gladwell began covering business and science for the Washington Post, where he worked until 1996. In a personal elucidation of the 10,000 hour rule he popularized in Outliers, Gladwell notes, "I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end. It took 10 years—exactly that long."
When Gladwell started at The New Yorker in 1996 he wanted to "mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration." His first assignment was to write a piece about fashion. Instead of writing about high-class fashion, Gladwell opted to write a piece about a man who manufactured T-shirts, saying
...it was much more interesting to write a piece about someone who made a T-shirt for $8 than it was to write about a dress that costs $100,000. I mean, you or I could make a dress for $100,000, but to make a T-shirt for $8 – that's much tougher.
Gladwell gained popularity with two New Yorker articles, both written in 1996: "The Tipping Point" and "The Coolhunt." These two pieces would become the basis for Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, for which he received a $1 million advance. He continues to write for The New Yorker and also serves as a contributing editor for Grantland, a sports journalism website founded by ESPN's Bill Simmons.
Works
When asked for the process behind his writing, Gladwell has said...
I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap.
The title for his first book, The Tipping Point (2000), came from the phrase "tipping point"—the moment in an disease epidemic when the virus reaches critical mass and begins to spread at a much higher rate.
Gladwell published Blink (2005), a book explaining how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly.
Gladwell's third book, Outliers (2008) examines the way a person's environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success.
What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009) bundles together Gladwell's favorite articles from The New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996. The stories share a common idea, namely, the world as seen through the eyes of others, even if that other happens to be a dog.
David and Goliath (2013) explores the struggle of underdogs versus favorites. The book is partially inspired by a 2009 article Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker, "How David Beats Goliath."
Reception
The Tipping Point and Blink became international bestsellers, each selling over two million copies in the US.
David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today" and that Outliers "leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward." Ian Sample of The Guardian (UK) also wrote of Outliers that when brought together, "the pieces form a dazzling record of Gladwell's art. There is depth to his research and clarity in his arguments, but it is the breadth of subjects he applies himself to that is truly impressive."
Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not a scientist, and as a result his work is prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking" and said that Gladwell believes "a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule."
Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions. Steven Pinker, even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, sums up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning." Pinker accuses him of using "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in Outliers.
Despite these criticisms Gladwell commands hefty speaking fees: $80,000 for one speech, according to a 2008 New York magazine article although some speeches he makes for free. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/02/2013.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) A far- and free-ranging meditation on the age-old struggle between underdogs and top dogs.... Though the book begins like a self-help manual...it soon becomes clear that Gladwell is not interested in simple formulas or templates for success. He aims to probe deeply into the nature of underdog-ness and explore why top dogs have long had such trouble with underdogs.... In addition to the top-notch writing one expects from a New Yorker regular, Gladwell rewards readers with moving stories, surprising insights and consistently provocative ideas.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.