Well, I put this in Women's Fiction, but it should be in Women's Studies.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic for The New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book, Bitch is a celebration of the defiant, rock & roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages from The Oresteia to O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character (Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Schindler's List, Oliver!, Carousel, and Andrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious. Bitch is like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11. --Tim Appelo--

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I LOVE this book! As far as I'm concerned it is a MUST READ for every woman who has stood against cultural expectations. I love the section on O.J. and Nicole and I adore Wurtzel's exploration of the Samson and Delilah story.

I'm gonna start a bookray with this one - hopefully a perpetual bookray!

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have a bookray!
If you're interested, pm me! I would appreciate it if we can all be flexible about international shipping. I have tried to work with preferences and if there is a huge problem, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Just check back here to find whose next and then pm them for their address. If you don't hear from the next person within a week, let me know. Generally we'll wait two weeks before skipping someone, but we don't want to hold up the book that long if we don't have to. If you know you won't be around, either send me or the person above you your address ahead of time! Thanks!

The List:
Luintaurien
Silverstarry
KarenZero
discomicky
RoryG
iiwi
okyrhoe
gaysocialworker

RELEASE NOTES:

Mailed to fellow bookcrosser for Bookray!

Caught it today. Thank you. Will read and pass on ASAP.

Can't seem to get into this so sending it on. Sorry for the length of time I had it.

RELEASE NOTES:

Just received this in the mail today - can't wait to read it!

I really wanted to like this book, but I didn't. I really had to force myself to continue reading - and that was just the introduction. The author seems frantic to prove how smart she is to the reader, to the point that she insists on using words like defenestrate. I kicked ass on my SAT verbals many moons ago, so, yes, I know what the big words mean, but she comes off as painfully insecure and desperate to impress. Despite her attempt to portray herself as an Ivy League smartypants, the book is rife with grammatical errors such as split infinitives and comma splices. She is fond of lists as evidence, and some of these lists go on for almost a page. In addition, many of her sentences are full of dashes and parentheses, which means that most of her sentences are five to seven lines long, although fifteen line sentences aren't unusual either. In contrast, she attempts to appeal to the casual reader with her frequent use of qualifiers such as basically and pretty much, as well as the ever dismissive Clueless catchphrase whatever.

More problematic than her writing style are her arguments. While I agree with the premise of many of her statements, the structure and support of her arguments remind me of an English composition class, but not in a good way. I know my professor would have had a field day with the fallacies. As much as I want to go through them one by one, that would make for a long and boring book review. She also contradicts herself - after spending an entire chapter railing against domestic abuse, she says, "What scares me now is that fear and defensiveness guide everything, nobody meets anyone halfway anymore. In the fifties, a bad relationship meant people killing each other; now it means people avoiding each other. Stories of Edmund Wilson smacking Mary McCarthy in a drunken rage, and then telling her, as she bursts into tears, to stop it or he would give her something to really cry about - awful as this sounds, the deep engagement of this sick love sounds comparatively appealing to me."

She discusses feminism throughout the book, but it seems that her feminist ideals ("Women as a rule are so sexual, they are such natural erotic objects") apply only to attractive women. Beauty is a theme that she comes back to several times. She says she doesn't care that Nicole Brown Simpson was uneducated and lacked ambition because she was beautiful. When she disputes the reports of Amy Fisher's beauty, she says that Amy was cute, the kind of girl who would be a cheerleader but not the homecoming queen. I found that to be an interesting statement in itself because it assumes that girls who are less than beautiful will never reach the exalted social heights of cheerleader or homecoming queen status. Perhaps that is the author's experience, but at my high school, the cheerleaders were the girls who could cheer, dance, stunt, and do backflips, while the homecoming queens were the nicest girls in the senior class. Some of them were prettier than others, but none of them qualified as the most beautiful girls on campus, and none of them obtained those positions or titles based on their beauty alone. This was a major problem I had with the author's arguments - she projects a lot of her personal experiences onto the entire female population. Just because something was true for her doesn't make it true for all women, but she makes sweeping statements that we are supposed to take as fact when they are her opinions.

Another huge issue I had with this book was the title of the book versus the actual text. "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women" seems to imply that the book will be about bitches and that the author will praise these bitches who are difficult women. Although the author states that she feels it is her right to act out, be selfish, and carry on however she pleases, the women she profiles don't really do these things and she doesn't praise them or their actions. Instead, she rationalizes and justifies their behavior. She spends a huge part of one chapter discussing Amy Fisher, who she describes as a victim. I agree that Amy Fisher was the victim of Joey Buttafuomo, a married man who seduced, manipulated, and pimped a teenage girl. Does shooting his wife make Amy a bitch? Maybe, maybe not, but the author doesn't classify Amy Fisher as a bitch and she certainly doesn't praise her. The same is true of the other women who take center stage in this book (Delilah, Margaux Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Hillary Clinton, Nicole Brown). I have no problem with a book about troubled women, but I dislike how misleading the title of the book is because it doesn't accurately describe Elizabeth Wurtzel's 400+ page rant which she uses to overgeneralize, blame, make statements like "I think a lot of leading free-speech feminists who are against the censorship of pornography because they believe in the First Amendment are actually reluctant to admit that they like X-rated movies and dirty magazines themselves," and complain about feeling societal pressure to marry.

Lastly, her four and a half pages of acknowledgements read like an extended high school yearbook shout out. Normally I like reading an author's acknowledgements, but hers were longer than most liner notes.

As I said, I really wanted to like this book and I do agree with some of her statements, but obviously there were a lot of things about this book that I didn't like. I wouldn't read it again, but I am glad that I finally had a chance to read this book. Thanks to enlith for sharing this book!

Mailed to KarenZero today!

DC# 0304 1070 0002 4159 5173

Will read ASAP!

11/29: will send off soon!

12/1: Discomicky isn't currently an active bookcrosser, so I have PM'ed RoryG and am waiting for her address.

On its way to RoryG! Thanks very much enlith for sharing the book.

The book has reache Finland. I have few rings before this, but I hope to get to this soon. But please bear with me if I don't.

Well, this wasn't quite what I expected. I was looking forward to more of a Heartless Bitch kind of view (www.heartless-bitches.com), but this sure wasn't it. I'm still really not sure what the writer wanted to say and what she thinks qualifies as a bitch. There was a lot of conflicts in her writing, the examples were long and didn't quite come to a point and arguments weren't really well founded. Also I found annoying her arrogant attitude and clear lack of knowledge of things non-american. This comes exceptionally clear in her sentence: "...the United States, which I still believe to be the only nation founded on the principles of democracy..." This she says of a country that has only two parties in a parliament and the candidate getting the most votes, isn't elected to be the president. I wonder if the writer has ever been to Europe?

Also, I didn't like the way the writer wa almost accusing Nicole Brown of getting shot. Domestic violence is a much more complicated issue than just get out of the house and leave. This case was a perfect example how hard it is to leave, when you have no support from the people who are supposed to care about you. It's not always that there is no one to turn to but usually the victim has been convinced of that there isn't. I mean when Nicole tried to talk about her problems, everyone just told her to stick with the marriage and it sounded like this was because he was rich and helped out the less fortunate relatives and friends.

Also, I was a bit confused about the writer's opinions relating to relationships and marriage. I mean she admires Simone de Beauvoir for being against marriage, even though this was basically Sartre's idea, so that he could fool around and didn't have to commit. She also talks about how real love is getting old with someone and really knowing someone (with this I agree), but then just a little later she talks about how important it is to know love, even for just a little while and about the moments of passion. I really didn't get that.

To sum it up, I think there were lot of important issues in this book, but the presentation could've used some work. This was more of flow of mind than serious argumentation.

Well, I have the next person's address, so I'll take this to the post office on monday (27.2.2006).

In the mail today!

I liked Prozac Nation, which actualy was bitchy. But this book wasn't realy my cup of tea. I probably lack some American cultural background, not living there, to enjoy it fully.

I have the adress of okyrhoe and will send the book today.

Arrived today. Thanks enlith (for starting the bookray) & iiwi (for posting the book to me)!

I agree with silverstarry that the title of this book is substantially misleading. It is not about 'bitches', not even by Wurtzel's concept of the term, and there is not much praise of her subject matter - the depressed and/or victimized women the author has selected for commentary and analysis. These women are not to be admired or imitated; they are far from the 'bad-girl heroine' status that the title claims Wurtzel is writing about.

Furthermore, this book is not a manifesto or tract, as some of the blurbs state, nor an 'operating manual', as Wurtzel claims in her introduction. Rather, it is a compendium of observations on the limitations of female consciousness & actualization in contemporary American culture, despite of the advances achieved by the feminist movement. And, as Wurzel says, the condition of women in the Great American Dysfunction is a complex and multifacted one, which cannot be summarized or limited to a single, unifying conclusion.

If Wurtzel is unable to come up with a central thesis regarding the state of women and the state of the feminist movement in the 1990's, I have to say it's not the fault of the author. This is just the way things are, and the attempt to write a well-ordered, single-focused treatise would be beyond most writers' abilities (and/or intentions).

I had just finished reading Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs prior to starting Bitch, and the contrast in content and writing style is revelatory. Yes, Wurtzel's arguments often go off on various tangents - making for a possibly frustrating but in no way confusing read. But that's an accurate reflection of the situation. On the other hand, Levy's perception of the current trends in American culture are in many ways simplified and limiting, and that is reflected in the less demanding concentration Levy's book requires of the reader.

Often Wurtzel writes feverishly, her thinking is overactive, wound up, and one is ready to stop reading and imbibe a stiff drink to calm down. That's not to say Wurtzel's line of reasoning is muddled, or any way incorrect. On the contrary, her analysis is sharp, thoughtful, and honest, and there is very little to disagree with in her commentary. I appreciate the way she uncovers the complex realities of Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Nicole Brown Simpson, Margo Hemingway, etc., hidden behind the media-constructed narratives of these women's lives.

My primary objection to Bitch is the choice of Delilah as the starting point for her argumentation. As literary or historical analysis, Wortzel's comments are fine, but it really is beside the point to include what is for all intents & purposes a fictionalized (or at the very least a suspect) narrative of a historical character as the basis for actual contemporary attitudes towards 'difficult' or 'bitchy' women. For me, that connection is tenuous.

Added Oct 2006 --> I also joined another ring for the same book.

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On its way to gaysocialworker.

Arrived! Thanks -- look forward to reading.

Passing along to Scoobs-buddy, as part of the LGBT bookbox. While this is not an LGBT book in the strictest sense of the word, I think it is appropriate. Enjoy!

Thanks!

I can't give this book an honest rating because the best I've done is a quick skimming look at it- read some parts that interested me. I think (I hope) this might be of interest to the winner of the happy day rabck competition so I'm going to send it off to her.

RELEASE NOTES:

I'm sorry for taking so long to get this to you Rockbird- but congrats on winning the happy day rabck competition!!!!

Thank you! I've been eyeing this book at the shop for quite some time now, and I look forward to reading it.

Happy holidays and a healthy and joyous new year.