Review by New York Times Review
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: A People's History, 1962-1976, by Frank Dikötter. (Bloomsbury, $20.) This volume spans a period from Mao's reassertion of political control to the Cultural Revolution's shiftfrom cities to the countryside. As our reviewer, Judith Shapiro, put it, "The book paints such a damning portrait of Mao and Communist Party governance that if it were widely circulated in China, it could undermine the legitimacy of the current regime." RICH AND PRETTY, by Rumaan Alam. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Two longtime friends attempt to maintain their relationship, even as their lives sharply diverge in this debut novel. Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy family who works at a charity, is planning her wedding, while Lauren, single and adrift, bristles at her maid-of-honor expectations. The friendship is tested, in part by a surprise pregnancy and conflicting values. WHO COOKED ADAM SMITH'S DINNER?: A Story About Women and Economics, by Katrine Marçal. Translated by Saskia Vogel. (Pegasus, $15.95.) "Feminism has always been about economics," Marçal, a Swedish journalist, writes in the prologue to this book. "Virginia Woolf wanted a room of her own, and that costs money." In this lively analysis, she argues that economics (and economists) consistently devalue women's contributions, in both the United States and Europe. BEFORE WE VISIT THE GODDESS, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. (Simon & Schuster, $15.99.) Three generations of unlucky women - from Bengal, India, to Houston - repair their connections to each other in this novel. Sabitri, a poor girl in a rural village, loses her chance to seek an education after a fateful mistake. Years later, her daughter, Bela, tries to make a new life in the United States; when plans go awry, they have lasting consequences for her own child, Tara. DINNER WITH EDWARD: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship, by Isabel Vincent. (Algonquin, $14.95.)When Vincent, a journalist for The New York Post, arrived in New York, she faced an unwelcoming city and an unraveling marriage. But she also met Edward, a widower in his 90s and her friend's father, whose conversation - and sumptuous, home-cooked dinners - were a welcome contrast. HERE I AM, by Jonathan Safran Foer. (Picador, $17.) In overlapping story lines, the Blochs - the multigenerational family at the center of Foer's brilliant novel - are linked to modern Israeli politics and broader Jewish culture. Our reviewer, Daniel Menaker, praised the novel's "emotional intelligence and complexity" and "certain set pieces that show a masterly sense of timing and structure and deep feeling."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
The butcher who prepared Adam Smith's steak may have been paid for his labor, but what about the woman who cooked it? Journalist Marçal takes on the father of economics and those who followed his capitalist worldview in this no-holds-barred critique of how modern economic theory has largely excluded the contributions of women. From Smith through John Maynard Keynes and all the way to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Marçal contends that economic theories revolving around the idea of economic man are divorced from reality. The fallacy of economic man, she claims, is that he is believed to behave rationally in his own self-interest, when in truth both men and women act in ways that do not always fit this model. Following this flawed premise, she says, created an economic divide between love and money, in which caregiving work such as nursing, teaching, and housework, which women disproportionately perform is paid less. She drives her point home with the ferocity of a hammer striking an anvil: economic man is a fiction that excludes women.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Marcal won several awards for the original Swedish edition of this book, but the translation, although wittily written, is meandering and slow-paced, making it a tough match for an American audience. Using Adam Smith's iconic "economic man" as a trope on which to hang her argument, Marcal discusses the appeal of the narrative of the driven, profit-making man, which has left women-whose jobs have only shifted from in-home to out-of-home relatively recently-lagging. She suggests that "maybe the changes achieved by the women's movement in the last 40 years... have simply highlighted an inherent contradiction in society between care work and competition." Marcal's discussion of the economic philosophy behind the gender wage gap and the "broken promises" of feminism is interesting, but the framing device of using historical figures such as Adam Smith (and the person in question who cooked his dinner-Margaret Douglas, his mother) never really gets off the ground. More narrative than prescriptive, more food for thought than fount of answers, this ambitious but too-slim book will have a hard time finding readers outside of the European market. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Marçal, a columnist for the Swedish paper -Aftonbladet, examines the age-old economics question, "How do you get your dinner?" with thought-provoking results. Considering philosopher Adam Smith's concept of the "economic man," who was able to act in his own self-interest because there was always someone else there to prepare his meals, Marçal posits that as a result of not including other members of the population, this theory has produced a flawed model on which the world of business and economics is based. The author asserts that it isn't possible simply to replace "economic man" with "economic woman" because economic models don't account for work traditionally performed outside of the labor market, including housework and childcare. -Marçal's analysis chronicles how this system of capitalism came to exist and demonstrates why the idea of the economic man may no longer be a solid fit. This humorous and accessible examination of serious issues at the crossroads of economics and gender equality is intended to stimulate questions more than to provide answers. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in business, economics, feminism, and gender roles.-Elizabeth Nelson, McHenry Cty. Coll. Lib., Crystal Lake, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Swedish political and economic writer shows why "feminism's best-kept secret is just how necessary a feminist perspective is in the search for a solution to our mainstream economic problems.Maral, lead editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, begins with the definition of the "economic man" first posited by Adam Smith and then refined by the Chicago school of economics in the 1950s. The so-called economic man is a rational individual calculating and pursuing his own self-interest, in constant competition with others. For Maral, the one-dimensional Chicago definition is a "caricature." Though he may not be "like ushe clearly has emotions, depths, fears and dreams that we can completely identify with." For her, human identity can only be constructed in relation to others. The economic man is totally dependent because he must compete to prove to himself that he is worthwhile. He is also "aggressive and narcissistic. And he lives in conflict with himself," nature, and others, defining himself by what he is not. His primary characteristic, writes the author, is "that he is not a woman. Economics has only one sex." Where men act out of supposed self-interest, "woman has been assigned the task of caring for others, not of maximizing her own gain." This includes cooking, cleaning, raising children, and other unpaid activities that do not result in the production of exchangeable goods. "Women's work," she writes, "is a natural resource that we don't think we need to account forwe assume it will always be there." However, to function well, a society must have people, knowledge, and trust, all resources made possible by unpaid domestic work. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky debunked the Chicago caricature nearly 40 years ago, but it persists. Maral takes up the cudgels to propose that we "wave economic man off from the platform and then build an economy and a society with room for a great spectrum of what it means to be human." An exciting reassessment of the global economy that provocatively extends the frontiers of the feminist critique. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
