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Rrose... highlights most of the key issues within gender discourse as depicted through photography: gender hierarchy, origination of gender, androgyny and indifferentiation, and gender tension (both masculine and feminine manifestations).
Especially provocative are the works of Matthew Barney. However, all the works included provide a strong case for the necessity of higher states of gender-consciousness.
This book cannot, and should not, be easily dismissed.
List price: $12.95 (that's 20% off!)
He's the perfect hero for a novel of the nineties--"a medium kind of guy, all in all," attractive, laid back and fundamentally nice. Also fundamentally ineffectual. His guilt drives him off the track of modest middle-class success and into a quasi-Christian cult, where destiny is clearly drawn for him: the opportunity to earn salvation by caring for the children of his dead brother.
Anne Tyler sets modest goals, and surpasses them. Her characters are sympathetic and winsome enough to draw a reader into their lives, though unlikely to linger in memory far beyond the final page. The story unfolds in episodic flashes, skipping up to ten years in the turn of a chapter yet meandering in detail, with the endearing clutter of everyday life. It's a perfectly valid way to tell a story, though less than satisfying to those of us who crave a strong resolution. Saint Maybe, like Ms. Tyler's other novels, doesn't conclude so much as muddle to a stop, with the characters smiling ruefully. Along the way, the vississitudes of his life have shaped Ian into the sweet, bemused beatification of the title. Very early in the book, he wonders "if there was any event, any at all, so tragic it could jolt him out of the odious habit of observing his own reaction to it." The answer is No; his self-absorption does not lessen, it only changes form. At the end, he still hasn't figured out much of anything, but the family is all together and Life Goes On.
Toward what? The reader may think about it briefly, in a nineties kind of way, close the book and go forth clueless.
On the plus side, the author does an excellent job explaining the queens religous views. Still, there are better biographies of this facinating subject to be read.
The story of Queen Elizabeth, both as a historical figure and a woman of 16th century England, is a interesting one and Anne Somerset makes it an easy and thoroughly enjoyable read. She goes into great detail and has many annotations to support her statments about Elizabeth, yet at the same time, the reader doesn't feel as if she is reading a scholarly work. It was such a pleasure to read and I found it difficult to put down.
For those of you out there who are either intimidated by biographies and other books about historical figures, or think them dull, this is a great place to start your journey into these kinds of books.