3.90 avg rating — 4,342 ratings

"Erma Bombeck is still recent memory. Kerr mostly in the late 50s/early 60s. She was a Broadway playwright and the wife of a drama critic, and the essays are from both these experiences and her personal life/"

4.05 avg rating — 264 ratings

"He does, doesn't he?"

3.87 avg rating — 177 ratings

"This includes the essay on how she and her husband taught the children not to fear poetry."

3.90 avg rating — 10 ratings

"The 'wenches with wrenches' were Rosie The Riveter and her many sisters. Many things have changed: but much remains the same, and many of the problems and the proposed solutions remain pin-bright"

4.03 avg rating — 7,494 ratings

"I bought this for the title essay (I loved learning why the fruits are called 'apricots'), but many of the others are still current"

3.68 avg rating — 56 ratings

"Uncle Tom's Cabin was heavily fictionalized. This book is explication, discussing sources, defending the factuality of what many people regarded as pure melodrama, etc."

3.96 avg rating — 42,838 ratings

"I didn't always agree with Mill: but then, he didn't require it. He presented his evidence and his arguments, and left it to the reader to draw conclusions."

3.88 avg rating — 3,739 ratings

"One illustration sticks in the mind: Mill, in discussing the 'nature' of women, asks how we would understand the 'nature' of a plant reared half in a hothouse, and the other out on a frozen slope. It's a good reminder of the dangers of trying to parse the 'nature' of cultivars: and humans definitely count as cultivars."

3.92 avg rating — 146 ratings

"This is 'essays' in the sense that each chapter can be read independently, despite the unifying theme."