The Red Menace: How Lipstick Changed the Face of America
by Ilise S. Carter | Nonfiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 1633887111 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 1633887111 Global Overview for this book
1 journaler for this copy...
I really wanted to like this book because I found the premise very interesting. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my hopes/expectations.
The first few chapters read like a very light cultural history written for a senior thesis (lots of unnecessary quotes, lots of endnotes). There are some interesting anecdotes in the middle chapters. The last few chapters seem like they were written later with the intention of being used on a blog.
This book really could have used an editor. I was tempted to go back and count how many times the author used the word "moreover" to begin a sentence. I was taught old school proper grammar which includes never starting a sentence with the word "so," which is why I noticed how often it was done (particularly after the first few chapters). In addition, she has a lot of sentence fragments that begin with "which." A good editor would have eliminated these things, or at the very least reduced the frequent usage.
The book never actually fulfilled the promise of its title so I guess we'll never know how lipstick changed the face of American history. Although I did enjoy a few of the factoids and anecdotes (there was a car marketed specifically for women that came with a matching coat, umbrella, and lipstick), this book left me wanting a lot more. Chapters 4-12 each covered one decade from the 1920s to the 2000s, but they were mostly summaries of the time with a little bit of makeup history thrown in.
There are eight pages of color photos in the center and a few black and white pictures sprinkled throughout the book, but of the public domain variety (sources include the Library of Congress, Wikipedia Commons, etc). The historical advertisements were interesting but was that seriously the best free picture of AOC available on the entire internet? Was a black and white copy of a painting of Martha Washington really useful or informative?
Overall, I was disappointed in this book. The subject material had such potential and I liked the little that I did learn about the history of lipstick (like Hazel Bishop, a chemist who invented the first long lasting lipstick in 1948 by adding bromo acids) but I felt like I learned very little new information in the 165 pages.
The first few chapters read like a very light cultural history written for a senior thesis (lots of unnecessary quotes, lots of endnotes). There are some interesting anecdotes in the middle chapters. The last few chapters seem like they were written later with the intention of being used on a blog.
This book really could have used an editor. I was tempted to go back and count how many times the author used the word "moreover" to begin a sentence. I was taught old school proper grammar which includes never starting a sentence with the word "so," which is why I noticed how often it was done (particularly after the first few chapters). In addition, she has a lot of sentence fragments that begin with "which." A good editor would have eliminated these things, or at the very least reduced the frequent usage.
The book never actually fulfilled the promise of its title so I guess we'll never know how lipstick changed the face of American history. Although I did enjoy a few of the factoids and anecdotes (there was a car marketed specifically for women that came with a matching coat, umbrella, and lipstick), this book left me wanting a lot more. Chapters 4-12 each covered one decade from the 1920s to the 2000s, but they were mostly summaries of the time with a little bit of makeup history thrown in.
There are eight pages of color photos in the center and a few black and white pictures sprinkled throughout the book, but of the public domain variety (sources include the Library of Congress, Wikipedia Commons, etc). The historical advertisements were interesting but was that seriously the best free picture of AOC available on the entire internet? Was a black and white copy of a painting of Martha Washington really useful or informative?
Overall, I was disappointed in this book. The subject material had such potential and I liked the little that I did learn about the history of lipstick (like Hazel Bishop, a chemist who invented the first long lasting lipstick in 1948 by adding bromo acids) but I felt like I learned very little new information in the 165 pages.
