s/t: Women Who Changed the World Through the Eyes of Great Women Writers This intimate collection of portraits reveals both writer and subject in fifty inspired pairings. Novelist Susan Orlean compares notes with Joan Didion, Orna Feldman marvels at Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Elizabeth Hardwick rediscovers Zelda Fitzgerald, and dozens more are memorably revealed. Each piece is accompanied by a lush, full-page duotone by such eminent photographers as Annie Leibovitz, Matthew Rolston, Brigitt LaCombe, and Michael Collopy. These fifty women come from all walks of life: art, politics, literature, fashion, science, and sports, but they all have one thing in common: they have made legendary contributions to our world.
John Miller has edited a number of intriguing anthologies for Chronicle Books, including Lust and White Rabbit. He runs Big Fish Books, a packaging company in San Francisco.
I enjoy reading of women who are breaking barriers and making the world a better place or at least more equal. I'm more of a Rosa Parks over the Raquel Welch kind of reader, but we all have our part to play. I think I should have read Legends (the original book), but then I did find this in a op shop for $5.
Not sure what the inclusion of Hollywood women and entertainers have to do with "changing the world." This is a coffee table book, which is fine for its genre, but it feels like a franchise, and is unsatisfying. Reads and views like leftovers. The writers who are billed as great may well be, but the pieces are too short to have weight and substance. I'm glad it's a library book, and I can take it back to "returned."
Moved house: Going through my bookshelf, catching up goodreads to match. This is a very pretty coffee table book with a stunning picture of Cate Blanchett on the front of mine, but the stories alongside are wispy, substanceless things. I can't handle a book with the subtitle "Women who have changed the world through the eyes of great women writers" being insipid.