Synopses & Reviews
In the last two years, the United States—its history, assumptions, prejudices, and vocabulary—have all cracked open. A woman won a state presidential primary contest (quite a few of them, actually) for the first time in this country's history. Less than a year later, a vice-presidential candidate concluded her appearance in a national debate and immediately reached for her newborn baby. A few months after that, an African American woman moved into the White House not as an employee but as the First Lady. She is only the third First Lady in American history to have a postgraduate degree, and for most of her marriage, she has out-earned her husband.
In Big Girls Don't Cry, Rebecca Traister, a Salon.com columnist whose election coverage garnered much attention, makes sense of this moment in American history, in which women broke barriers and changed the country's narrative in completely unexpected ways: How did the volatile, exhilarating events of the 2008 election fit together? What lessons can be learned from these great political upheavals about women, politics, and the media?
In an utterly engaging, razor-sharp narrative interlaced with her first-person account of being a young woman navigating this turbulent and exciting time, Traister explores how—thanks to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and the history-making work and visibility of Michelle Obama, Tina Fey, Rachel Maddow, Katie Couric, and others—women began to emerge stronger than ever on the national stage.
Review
"Traister does a fine job in showing that progress does not proceed in straight lines, and, sometimes, it's the unlikeliest of individuals who initiate real change." ---Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Salon.com reporter Rebecca Traister provides a social commentary on how the 2008 presidential election brought issues concerning women, power, sexism, and feminism to the fore.
About the Author
Rebecca Traister, a staff writer for Salon.com, covered the 2008 campaign from a feminist (and personal) perspective, receiving a huge response to her pieces on Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, the media's coverage of the candidates, and the role of women within the media. She has written for a range of national publications, including Elle, the New York Times, Vogue, and the Nation. Traister has appeared on CNN, CNN Headline News, MSNBC, NPR's The Brian Lehrer Show, and others, and she speaks regularly at prominent events. She lives in Brooklyn. Kirsten Potter, a graduate of the Boston University School for the Arts, has performed on stage, film, and television, including roles on Medium, Bones, and Judging Amy. An award-winning audiobook narrator, Kirsten has won AudioFile Earphones Awards for her reading of The Snowball by Alice Schroeder and her performance as Barbara in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. Her other titles include The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson, Sammy's House by Kristen Gore, and Madapple by Christina Meldrum, which was a Booklist Editors' Choice for Best Audiobook 2008. Kirsten has received recognition from the American Academy of Achievement and the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, as well as numerous regional awards.
Rebecca Traister on PowellsBooks.Blog
I grew up in a home with 30,000 books in it. This isn't an exaggeration. It's the count my father offered when I asked him in a fit of irritation, sometime when I was in high school and feeling particularly irked by the stacks and stacks and cases and cases of volumes amidst which I was trying to live my sulky teenaged life. I don't know how...
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