Book report
[Sorry if you saw the earlier version of this I deleted; I was editing it so heavily that I decided I'd better just start over.]
I finished Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry today, and although I enjoyed the heck out of it, I feel like I don't have much more to say about the events it covers that I didn't already say back when the 2008 election was happening. Although in way, having followed the story so closely at the time added to the pleasure of reading it, because I felt like I knew the players: the candidates, the feminist leaders, the bloggers, the talking heads. Another aspect familiar to me was Traister's own work; she drew heavily from the articles that she wrote about the elections, articles I remembered reading, and particularly one on being undecided between Clinton and Obama that influenced my own thinking on the issue. And although she and I came to different conclusions (she voted for Hillary, I voted for Barack), many of the emotions she described feeling about the election -- about Clinton's rise and fall, about the nomination of Sarah Palin, about the Democratic establishments failure to call out the sexism media until after the end of primary season -- resonated with me, both in my memory and now.
I did review it on GoodReads (and was the first person to do so -- it hasn't even received any other star ratings yet), and if the topic interests you even a little, I definitely recommend picking it up.
I finished Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry today, and although I enjoyed the heck out of it, I feel like I don't have much more to say about the events it covers that I didn't already say back when the 2008 election was happening. Although in way, having followed the story so closely at the time added to the pleasure of reading it, because I felt like I knew the players: the candidates, the feminist leaders, the bloggers, the talking heads. Another aspect familiar to me was Traister's own work; she drew heavily from the articles that she wrote about the elections, articles I remembered reading, and particularly one on being undecided between Clinton and Obama that influenced my own thinking on the issue. And although she and I came to different conclusions (she voted for Hillary, I voted for Barack), many of the emotions she described feeling about the election -- about Clinton's rise and fall, about the nomination of Sarah Palin, about the Democratic establishments failure to call out the sexism media until after the end of primary season -- resonated with me, both in my memory and now.
I did review it on GoodReads (and was the first person to do so -- it hasn't even received any other star ratings yet), and if the topic interests you even a little, I definitely recommend picking it up.