On My Reading List

Tonight I'm just sharing a few titles from my personal Reading List. Honestly though, I don't think I'll ever get around to even starting any one of these books. But maybe one of you can let me know how these turn out? ;-) Anyway, thanks to my friend Cyndi for recommending 'A Return...' After checking out some reviews, I just might borrow your copy sometime soon - after you finish it first of course.

(Note: The following Synopses and Reviews courtesy of BarnesandNoble.com)

An intimate and revealing portrait of America's most memorable first daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth lived her entire life on the political stage and in the public eye, earning her the nickname "the other Washington monument."

"Princess Alice" was a tempestuous teenager. Smoking, gambling, and dressing flamboyantly, she flouted social conventions and opened the door for other women to do the same. Her husband was Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth but-as Cordery documents for the first time-she had a child with her lover, Senator William Borah of Idaho. Alice's political acumen was widely respected in Washington. She was a sharp-tongued critic of her cousin FDR's New Deal programs, and meetings in her drawing room helped to change the course of history, from undermining the League of Nations to boosting Nixon. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, her legendary salons were still the center of political ferment.

A Thousand Splendid Suns Hosseini's depiction of Mariam and Laila's plight would seem cartoonishly crude if it were not, by all accounts, a sadly accurate version of what many Afghan women have experienced. The romantic twists and fairy-tale turns are not so accurate. But, as in The Kite Runner, they are precisely what make the novel such a stirring read. Childhood promises are sacred; true love never dies; justice will be done; sisterhood is powerful. It's unrealistic, and almost impossible to resist.

A Return to Modesty is a deeply personal account as well as a fascinating intellectual exploration. From seventeenth-century manners guides to Antonio Canova's sculpture, Venus Italico, to Frank Loesser's 1948 tune, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," A Return to Modesty unfolds like a detective's search for a lost idea as Shalit uncovers opinions about this lost virtue's importance, from Balzac to Simone de Beauvoir, that have not been aired for decades. Then she knocks down the accompanying myths one by one. ...And modesty is not prudery, but a way to preserve a sense of the erotic in our lives. With humor and piercing insight, Shalit invites us to look beyond the blush and consider the new power to be found in an old ideal.

Norah Vincent
[We] are likely to take one look at this title, snarl and move on to Elizabeth Wurtzel's more rage-filled Bitch, Katie Roiphe's more simpatico Last Night in Paradise or Naomi Wolf's hip Promiscuities. But, although the terminology in these latter books might suit us better superficially, their arguments, if they can be said to have arguments at all, will do nothing for us in the long run. We'll feel patted on the back for being bad girls, but the pain and loneliness we feel as young women won't have been assuaged in the least. Now, that's not to say that Wendy Shalit's book is the nostrum for what ails us either. It isn't. But it is the first book of its kind the first argument by a third-waver to blaze down the center of the postfeminist battleground between left and right.