Nghề Biên Kịch tải xuống LIT miễn phí

David Castillo _ — I have a hard time reading manifesto style books. I tend to find hyperbole for non-comedic purposes irritating. I'm just not very radical, I suppose. This book suffers too from being dated; some of the ideas are obviously still very relevant, but they've since been written about and reformulated in ways I find much more interesting, or at least less shrill. Wolf alternates between really piling on with the statistics and data, and writing melodramatic stories about her own life. Neither tone worked very well for me. Mostly, in a broad sense, I agree with her thesis that the societal pressure on women to look a certain way is purposely Sisyphean and consumer driven. I also thought Wolf did a good job of discussing the ways in which "health" has been elided into beauty; Shape, Women's Health and, for that matter, Men's Health may as well be Glamour. This has only expanded, I think, in the time since Wolf wrote the book. I'm hardly anti-medicine, but the "health" market is probably the next great consumer myth. Also, I thought Wolf did a reasonable job of including the detrimental affects on men in her discussion. True, it was a small focus, but her book was aimed at women and expanding the discussion of men's issues would have been inappropriate. She did repeatedly state that individual men are not responsible for the beauty myth, and that the beauty myth harms men as well. Her writing did have the unfortunate tendency, common to sociological and political tracts dealing with large, impersonal forces, to make it sound as though the problems she was lamenting were being instituted by some evil cabal that runs society from the top down ( I, personally, pictured the Springfield Republican Party w/ Mr. Burns, Count Dracula, Sideshow Bob and Arnold Schwarzenager whenever the writing leaned too far in this direction -- try it, it makes it more managable.) But it's hard to both avoid the passive voice and the tendency to make it sound like these are unchangeable, natural forces, and to avoid sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, so I'll cut her some slack. I will not cut her slack on some of her ridiculous statements, however. For instance, her belief that the beauty myth comes between couples and makes it harder for them to bond is one thing, but expanding that to an assumption that the military industrial complex needs the beauty myth to keep men and women apart because it "depends on men choosing the bond with one another over the bond with women and children"(p. 144) is seriously overplaying her hand. The beauty myth is not the root of war, are you kidding me here? Perhaps the single most irritating moment of hyperbole in the whole book was the paragraph that begins with this sentence: "Nothing justifies comparison with the Holocaust; but when confronted with a vast number of emaciated bodies starved not by nature but by men, one must notice a certain resemblance"(p. 207). If nothing justifies comparison to the Holocaust, then just don't make the comparison. She later compares plastic surgery to torture and dieting to famine in ways that are equally irritating. I know she's trying to shock, and, especially in the dieting/famine comparison, I think there are probably appropriate ways to relate the two. I've been known to point out that Audrey Hepburn's much admired figure was largely a result of childhood malnutrition during WWII. And, just this week, there's been an uproar over the Bush administration's justification of providing starvation level rations of food to detainees by pointing out that Western women choose to diet at that level, as noted here. But Wolf is so over the top that it gets offensive. I also find her haphazard endnotes to be offensive. Several times she mentioned something inflammatory that I would have liked more context to, and either cited it with the least information possible or not at all. Specifically, she mentions offhand that a woman was ordered by a judge to lose 3 pounds a month (or some similar figure) to keep her job, and the endnote for that claim just cites a random Newsweek article, with no elaboration. That's at least a citation, if kind of irritating, but later she states that the AMA in 1978 claimed a preoccupation with beauty is the same as a preoccupation with health, and doesn't bother to cite that assertion at all. Complaints aside, I am glad I read this book. I don't think it's particularly good, mind you, but it is a widely referenced book on an issue that concerns me. I read a fair amount of feminist media that rehashes these sorts of discussions regularly, and in spite of that, this book did make some points, on the health/beauty spectrum and female rape fantasies in particular, that I had not thought of in quite that way before.

Jeffrell Soliveres the_artpanda — I hate to give the genius Milan Kundera 2 stars... But I just finished this book and it's still fresh in my memory. Where the sex plots are interesting in Immortality, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Life is Elsewhere (to name a few), the opposite goes for this book.. Not that I'm reading it for the sex plots. But I'd be too embarrassed to recommend this book solely because of them. The sexual stories are a little odd. And somehow, I have a feeling that that funny little genius Kundera is sitting back, drinking rum, and laughing at us for going with the grain and saying that this book somehow relates to something larger and abstract.

çiğdem Cavlak superisi — This is one of those books I don't even have to read to a)know I hate and b)know is an utterly worthless steaming pile of recycled new-age psudo-philosophical ersatz-eastern-spirtualism tripe masquerading as "personal development" reading. Why? Because this sort of book is published every few years with a new title, a new cover, and the same dumbed down easy promises. The real Secret? There is no Secret. Put that in your koan and smoke it.

Sangho Heo heosangho20e0 — "...Because you can't argue with all the fools in the world. It's easier to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention." "Without fear there cannot be courage."

Anthony Nguyen tungdesign — Good for an occasional laugh, but little more. Neilan's short novel pays homage to the traditional crime novel and skewers corporate America, but the author is true to the title - too apathetic to push the narrative in any concise direction.