GOVERNMENT GIRL: book review

January 28, 2010

Title: Government Girl
Author: Stacy Parker Aab
ISBN: 978-0061672224
Pages: 304
Publisher: Ecco; Original edition (January 19, 2010)
Category: memoir
Review source: ECCO
Rating: 4/5

Girls like me loved everything about George. We had come to Washington, D.C., to study politics, so he was our role model. We admired his brains and his meteoric rise, yes. But we loved his person, too. His hair. His gold-rimmed glasses. His calmness facing down the daily press storm.

In the open and thoughtful GOVERNMENT GIRL, author Stacy Parker Aab describes her years working in the Clinton White House—first as an intern for George Stephanopoulos while studying at George Washington University– then as staff when she became Special Assistant to Paul Begala. The memoir reads exactly as one imagines Stacy’s experience to be: first a fresh, young wide-eyed 18-year-old becomes a White House intern. Powerful men [not many women unfortunately] like President Clinton. George Stephanopoulos, Rahm Emanuel, Vernon Jordan are all in her midst. She ends up asking Jordan for a recommendation and has some interaction with the others. Nine years later, by the end of her experience, she doesn’t particularly enjoy her job which is more administrative than using her skills as a writer [been there/ done that] and the sparkle and luster have fallen off the White House after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

I realized then that I was just like those other dreamers at the president’s sleeves that hoped to alchemize his power into success for themselves. Yet I had only wanted to share. To enjoy his nurturing approval. Look what I’ve done since I’ve left, Mr. President.
The President was handing me a cold bottle of water.
The moments slowed and brightened like a videotape flooded with light. I still felt I could finesse the situation. If at any moment something went wrong, if this somehow turned sexual and anybody knew, this would be nuclear. And people always knew. The Starr Report had shown us that the light investigators and journalists shined on this man burned away any lies. Stories like these died in half-lives. Just ask Monica. No one wanted to go through what she had. To live with the shame of not just adultery but worldwide humiliation. To always know what others imagined when they saw you.

Parker Aab doesn’t speak of sexism, however there aren’t very many women in positions of power at all. In some of her stories on the road, she gets hit on by married Secret Service men and has an awkward encounter with the President in 2000 in Japan. She doesn’t speak of any contact with any women in particular besides some lower level staff members. This makes me sad and I hope that young women in the Obama White House aren’t experiencing the same thing but guess what? Many of the young guys [Rahm Emanuel from the Clinton White House] now work the Obama White House. It most likely is just that she worked in communications with George. She spoke of Dee Dee Meyers but Meyers did not stay very long. As an African-American, she also says that she faced no racism, which is fairly easy to believe for the Clinton White House.

Most of her challenges were due to her age and experience. How can a young woman be expected to take on these responsibilities? Stacy proved herself to the right people and had numerous unique and challenging experiences especially when she worked on the Advance Team and traveled with the President and his staff. She would go ahead to make sure the accommodations were just right: she traveled to Africa, Japan, and several other places including Steven Spielberg’s home in the Hamptons.

Those stacks were like hay that needed to be spun into gold. No firstborn child was at stake, but my reputation was, and all my possibilities in politics, because, having been handed this assignment at eighteen, I believed that my whole future in government rested on how well I performed—for what else did these people have to judge me on? Just my performance.

I wish Stacy had touched more on what she learned while in the White House instead of the day to day. After finishing the memoir, I was jealous of her experience and knew she did a lot of constituent outreach [which I’ve done on a local level]—by answering letters. She did say she was excited to be part of anything to do with the White House and its administration. And I know that many of her responsibilities allowed her to take on greater challenges later on. However, I still didn’t have enough of a grasp on her learning curve during her nine years there. But she chose GOVERNMENT GIRL to be about her experience as a woman learning to navigate the intricacies and dangers of power and privilege. She entered the White House perhaps naïve and awe-struck at 18 and left at 26 with a completely different attitude. For anyone interested in politics or the inner sanctum of the White House, GOVERNMENT GIRL is the ideal memoir.

GOVERNMENT GIRL review appears as part of The TLC Book Tour

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Posted by Amy Steele

Guest Post: author Stacy Parker Aab [GOVERNMENT GIRL]

January 28, 2010

Thank you, Amy, for inviting me to guest post on your site. I appreciated your questions very much. To start off, you asked about what I learned personally and professionally from working in the White House.

I think it all comes down to power. As we learned in school, so much of presidential power is the ability to persuade, to use the bully pulpit to set the national agenda and convince us that the president’s way is the best way forward. He can negotiate with individual lawmakers. Or, he can appeal directly to the public. If he makes his case well enough, the public will in turn push their representatives to support his agenda.

I majored in Political Communication at The George Washington University, with my freshman dorm literally three blocks away from the White House complex. It was heady stuff to study the history of White House institutional power, and then go to my internship and see the current practitioners at work. I watched them wrangle with Congress over health care reform, balanced budgets, NAFTA, and all kinds of other issues. As they did so, they spent their sweat and brainpower crafting messages that they hoped would sway the public. Meeting after meeting was devoted to fine-tuning ideas and crafting the language to sell them. Communication was key. My bosses attended meetings for long-term message, short-term message, and message of the day. Again, if they could just convince enough Americans that what we wanted to do was best, with the help of their phone calls and letters to their representatives, we could pass our legislation.

There was power in the collective, for sure. The president could multiply his will in the world through the work of his staff and much of his administration. But the power I enjoyed watching the most belonged to the man himself. Nothing made me happier than seeing the president at his best.

One moment stands out most in my mind, and I write about in the book. We were in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2001. The President was now “former” but he was still formidable, and he was attending an AIDS conference. A teenaged boy began to speak. He shared details of his life with the HIV virus. He spoke of how members of his community, of his own family, wouldn’t touch him for fear of his disease. He spoke of how painful his life has been, and how despite this, he persevered. He refused to give up. He remained happy and hopeful. I wiped away tears as he finished, and I know I wasn’t the only one. While the audience applauded him, the president, unplanned, walked right out on stage and hugged him, and hugged him hard. I could feel the click, click, click from the audience as picture after picture was taken. I was moved because I knew that the next day, that picture would be run in newspapers all over the country. With one action, and one image, the President would make people not just think, but feel: if one of the most powerful men in the world could touch this young man with ease, why were they so afraid? It was a mighty thing to witness the President use his personal power for good, and I treasure each time I was able to do so.

You also asked me how my White House work changed me as a woman. That’s a tough question to answer. Let’s try it this way. My first year there, I aspired to be the smartest shadow in the room. I wanted to anticipate every need and to never be a problem. While I loved my work, I lived in fear of disappointing my bosses, believing that one mistake could sour how a senior staffer saw me and ruin my career in politics. That was a lot of pressure for a young woman, but that’s how I lived. I think if I had stayed on for longer, I could have grown out of this by virtue of being given more managerial responsibility and being pushed to be a boss and not support. But I was an assistant when I left in 1998. It would take leaving the White House to learn how assert myself as a whole person at work, and in my writing. It’s taken subsequent years to grow into someone who deeply respects others’ guidance and opinions, but doesn’t need everyone’s approval in order to act. I hope that the person I am today is not as afraid as the person I was before, that I know in my heart that even in the deepest crisis “this too shall pass.” In politics, where failure can be both shameful and spectacular, it’s easy to forget that.

Thank you again, Amy, for reading GOVERNMENT GIRL and for allowing me to visit with you on your site.

For more information: visit Stacy Parker Aab’s website.

This post is part of the TLC Book Tour.

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Posted by Amy Steele

The Last Dickens: book review

January 26, 2010


Title: The Last Dickens
Author: Matthew Pearl
ISBN: 978-0812978025
Pages: 416
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (October 6, 2009)
Category: literary thriller/ historical fiction
Review source: Random House
Rating: 4.5/5

The whole world awaited it, as had been true of each Dickens novel since The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist placed the former court reporter’s name before the public thirty-five years before. Dickens alone, among all the writers of popular fiction of the day, could employ wit and discernment, excitement and sympathy, in equal parts in each one of his books. The characters were no mere paperdolls, nor were they thinly veiled extensions of Charles Dickens’s own persona. No, the characters were utterly themselves. In a Dickens story, readers were not asked to aspire to a higher class or to hate other classes than their own but to find the humanity and the humane in all. That is what had made him the world’s most famous author.

The Last Dickens engulfs readers and transports us to times and methods gone by in the writing and publishing world and the rather seedy opium business. Who knew that there were Bookaneers [scrappy people who stop at nothing to access unpublished works by various authors] and such vengeful publishers about? Today of course there are bidding wars between publishing houses for someone’s memoir or novel but it is not the pirate-like business in which author Matthew Pearl describes in The Last Dickens. The novel inventively imagines what might have happened if Charles Dickens’s Boston publisher Ripley Osgood attempted to discover the final pages to Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1870 after Dickens death.

From the brownstones and cobblestone streets of Boston to dark corners and publishing houses in New York to opium fields in India to opium dens in London and Dickens’s estate in England, Pearl captivates the reader with a story that is so dense with information about Dickens and the publishing industry that one feels simultaneously educated and entertained. Pearl is an impressive, brilliant, creative author with an eye for detail and adoration of Dickens that catapults this page-turning literary thriller. Pearl provides us with a front row seat for Dickens speaking tour of America. He includes an element here and there that enriches the experience set forth by his flourishing words. The Last Dickens remains engaging, detailed and riveting right up to its surprising ending.

[This was a difficult review for me to write because whatever I say about The Last Dickens, I feel I will not honor author Matthew Pearl’s exhaustive research and dedication to the subject matter. I also respect and admire him greatly as a writer.]

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Posted by Amy Steele

Radha Mitchell Q&A for Surrogates: on DVD/Blu-Ray January 26

January 25, 2010

RADHA MITCHELL INTERVIEW FOR SURROGATES
provided by Click Communications

With the Surrogates Blu-ray & DVD about to be released, we sit down to chat with actress Radha Mitchell. How does the action star handle stunts in high heels? What’s it like to be a sex symbol? Read on for Radha’s insights into bruises, bungee jumps, Bruce Willis and lots more…

What can you tell us about your new Blu-ray & DVD, Surrogates?
The movie is a sci-fi, action thriller and I play an FBI agent called Peters. The device of the story is that there is a surrogate technology being used in the world and the population is addicted to using it. You plug into a device, which is basically a robot, and that robot goes and performs all of your daily tasks for you. When that happens, you can manicure your life. You can organize and control how you want to live and how you want to feel. However, something goes wrong in this society and my character works alongside Bruce Willis’ character to figure out who committed a murder.

Tell us more about the surrogates… When the story begins, the technology of surrogates has been around for years. It has been promoted because it’s considered extremely safe. You can have any kind of experience and not feel a thing. For example, you can jump out of a plane, but you’ll never be in physical danger because it’s all done vicariously. However, something terrible has happened to shake up this world – and it’s up to my character and Bruce Willis’ character to find out how and why this murder has occurred.

What would you use a surrogate to do for you? Perhaps you’d like to jump out of a plane?
I think you’d lose part of the experience if you used a surrogate for something like jumping out of a plane. Part of the experience is about risking your own mortality. I’d love to use a surrogate to do all of the boring things in life that I’ve done thousands of times before, like cleaning or household chores. However, I think I’d want to do all of the exciting stuff for myself.

Are you a daredevil at heart?
I haven’t jumped out of a plane, but I did consider it in the past. A friend of mine jumped out of a plane when I was in high school and I remember him coming back with the video, so I thought about doing it back then. Since then, I feel like there’s enough uncertainty in my life as it is without needing to add to the drama. But who knows? Maybe if the opportunity came along, I’d consider it again.

Did you have many action scenes in Surrogates?
I have one action sequence, which was a lot of fun to shoot. I had to drive around downtown Los Angeles on the top of a bus – and my character had to jump from the bus to a car. It was all done in purple high heels, too. That’s the only way to do action scenes!

How much of the stunt work were you allowed to do?
I did some of the stunt work, but there was also a stunt girl on hand. The girl who did my stunts had to swing from ropes between buildings and things like that. There were lawyers on the set making sure I didn’t do too much, but I was allowed to run around in between fast cars and I was strapped to the top of the bus driving through the city. I discovered that I can jump from elevated sections onto targeted marks in high heels, which was fun.

Did you get any bruises along the way?
Yes, I did. I even got a scar. I got scratched jumping onto the back of a car where all of the windows had broken, but I was fine. You live with these things.

Are you an action fan?
I’m not a huge fan of action, but I like it when it’s well done. I like Asian action.

Do you like action roles where you get to kick butt?
I do. I filmed another movie recently where I got to shoot a fight sequence with a zombie and that was a lot of fun. Stunt men really shine in fight sequences and I got to fight a guy in full zombie regalia in a car wash. It was very dramatic and very fun, but I wasn’t in high heels for this one. If you can do it in heels, that’s always a plus.

How much fun did you have shooting Surrogates?
We shot a lot of the movie in Boston, which is a real gritty city where the people are great. I had a driver who had a duel life as a cage fighter, so he was certainly a lot of fun to hang out with every day. We were also near New York, so we could always disappear and visit the Big Apple if we wanted to. It was a big movie, so the sets were elaborate and it was bizarre to play these robots.

Why is it difficult to play a robot?
It’s difficult to play a robot and still keep drama within a scene because what’s robotic is not necessarily dramatic. However, it’s certainly interesting to watch a bunch of robots sitting around talking to each other. It’s an interesting concept to say the least. Playing a robot was a tricky challenge because you have to cut out any idiosyncrasies we have as human beings. You can’t slouch or shake your arms when you move. Robots are clipped, manicured and purposeful in their movements – and there was always someone on set to tell us if we weren’t doing it right.

What was it like to work alongside Bruce Willis?
That was a great experience. He’s the consummate action star and he’s a very funny man. He’s very similar to a lot of the characters he plays and it was a lot of fun to work with him. It was really interesting to see him in the dynamic of the set when he was there.

What DVDs should everyone have in their collection?
I love the way that you can watch a whole season of a TV show in one sitting on DVD. In that respect, I really like shows like True Blood and Mad Men. However, when it comes to movies, everyone should have Blade Runner, The Matrix and Surrogates in their DVD collection.

Does this mean you are a big fan of sci-fi?
I’m not really, but Blade Runner and The Matrix are epic movies that have changed modern cinema. You should have some other classics in your collection, too.

SURROGATES is Available on Blu-ray & DVD January 26th!

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Posted by Amy Steele

Choice Quote: The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

January 24, 2010

Protect our authors: Fields’s mandate above all else. That is what Osgood thought about as they walked. His efforts in England were not only for the financial life of the company and all its employees, it was for the authors, too—Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Stowe, Emerson, and others. If the publishing house plummeted from its current financial precipice, how would the orphaned authors fare? Yes those writers were beloved, but would the breed of publisher represented by Major Harper care about them. Without Fields and Osgood to protect them, would they be buried by obscurity, like Edgar Poe or once promising Herman Melville? The true future of publishing was not publishers as manufacturers, as Harper foresaw, but publishers as the authors’ partners—the joining of the upper and lower half of the title page.

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Posted by Amy Steele

12 Reasons to Adore Whip It!– on DVD

January 24, 2010

Title: Whip It!
Written by: Shauna Cross
Directed by: Drew Barrymore
Starring: Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, Drew Barrymore
Running time: 111 minutes
Release date: January 26, 2009
ASIN: B002VPTJOA
MPAA: PG 13
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Rating: A

  1. Directed by Drew Barrymore– Whip It! is simultaneously edge-of-your-seat exciting and inspirational. Just like Drew has been all her life. Drew [who also plays Smashley Simpson in the film] chose a great project, script, cast for her directorial debut.
  2. Written by Shauna Cross based on her novel. Just the right mix of cool and touching.
  3. Organized sports are empowering for girls and young women. Being involved helps to build self-esteem and encourage female-bonding. [I played soccer from age 8 through college and also competed in equestrian events, often as part of a team, through Groton Pony Club.]
  4. Kristen Wiig as Maggie Mayhem—she’s the sweet “aunt” figure for Bliss. Charming performance. More of this Kristen, less SNL please. Juliette Lewis as Iron Maven—she’s scary fierce. You don’t want to mess with her but you also want to hang out with her.
  5. The realistic love-hate mother-daughter relationship between Bliss Cavendar [Ellen Page] and her mom, Brooke Cavendar [Marcia Gay Harden]. It is okay for a teen to love her mom and not like the choices her own mom made in her life. It is okay for a teen to disagree with her mom. It is okay for a teen to be someone different than who her mom envisions her to be.
  6. Departure from Juno for Ellen Page. Here she’s not so precocious and witty, but she’s smart and determined.
  7. Friendship between Bliss [Page] and Pash [Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development]. This is what high school friendships are like. You cry to each other. You disappoint each other. You hold each other’s hair when you puke for the first time at a party. You are honest.
  8. Women are not sex objects. Women are powerful as jocks. They kick ass on skates and that attracts the men. Sure, they wear fishnets but it has little to do with their overall appeal.
  9. Bliss falls for a band guy [unappealing and uncharismatic Landon Pigg] and he hurts her and she doesn’t take him back. After letting him know that he blew it. Big time.
  10. Bliss has a wonderful, loving, understanding Dad [Daniel Stern].
  11. Other derby girls: Eve as Rosa Sparks, Zoe Bell as Bloody Holly, Ari Graynor as Eva Destruction
  12. Feminist through and through. Girl power. Women power: directed by a woman, written by a woman, starring women and produced my women.

DVD Special Features: alternate ending, deleted scenes

OUT ON DVD JANUARY 26, 2010

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Posted by Amy Steele

Joshua Ferris and The Unnamed

January 23, 2010

My interview with Joshua Ferris is NOW UP at The L Magazine.
Go read it. He’s great.
Leave a comment while you’re there.

I didn’t review The Unnamed as it is a conflict of interest due to my interview for The L Magazine.
However, please read my friend Julie’s review at Booking Mama.

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Posted by Amy Steele

The Female Thing: quickie review [orgasms and the clitoris]

January 20, 2010

[this is an older book that I read for a challenge related to books on women's studies]

Title: The Female Thing
Author: Laura Kipnis
ISBN: 978-0375424172
Pages: 192
Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition (October 12, 2006
Category: gender studies
Review source: own copy
Rating: 3/5

In The Female Thing, author Laura Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University researches what she calls the “female thing.” To her she considers that the female psyche although much of the book focuses on the vagina through research and discussion on orgasm, rape, and sexual equality for women in pleasure, cleanliness, and confidence. I didn’t find any of her research or theses new but simply reminders that women still do not get the attention we need and desire in the bedroom. Kipnis also is quite funny in her wording and the way she addresses all the issues she brings up in The Female Thing. She breaks it up as: Envy, Sex, Dirt and Vulnerability. I found the sex chapter most interesting.

A few tidbits:

Please read what follows as an account of the female psyche at the twenty-first century mark, which is to say, in the aftermath of second-wave feminism and partway to gender equality, both factors having put many female things into question lately. [p.vii]

Face it, we all inhabit at post feminist world: it was, after all, feminism that brought women equal treatment under the law, voting rights, access to public life, some progress toward pay equity, and so on, and even the most diehard “I like being a woman” set, you don’t find too many arguing with the right to own property or wanting to hand back the vote or anything silly like that. [p. 6]

She wants to have orgasms the womanly way: during penetration, even though the therapists assure her that some 75 percent of women don’t. [p. 40]

Most recent studies still put the number of women who don’t consistently have orgasms as high as 58 percent (The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality) [p. 42]

While not an insurmountable obstacle, some percentage of the male population has yet to fathom these female anatomical complexities, despite the ongoing education efforts. And why were the organs of sexual pleasure and those of sexual intercourse not combined into one efficient package, as with the lucky male? [p. 44]

Many report that they simply can’t have orgasms with a penis inside them because they often dislike, distrust, or don’t want to “open up to” the men on the other end of them . . . [p. 55]

She Comes First is similarly girl-friendly: here men learn how to identify the eighteen parts (!) of the clitoris . . . [p. 56]

Orgasms are, needless to say, the Holy Grail, and male ineptitude the dark forest of ignorance through which the hero must traverse. Men! If only they could find the clitoris, the blundering idiots. [p. 57]

Proto-feminist novelist Doris Lessing also devotes a fair amount of attention to the dual-systems issue in her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook. Ella, a novelist, resents her lover Paul’s attempts to provide her with clitoral orgasms, which she regards as his flight from commitment and emotion. Even though the clitoral orgasms are far more powerful and thrilling, there’s “only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, for the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all her response.” [p. 60]

The G-spot is basically where the clitoris should have been located—this is, if sexual intercourse actually made sense from the standpoint of efficient female pleasure. [p. 63]

If you’re a chick, you’re sitting on some pretty valuable real estate. Is any other human body cavity so laden with symbolic value, not to mention actual monetary worth, particularly for exclusive access? [p. 123]

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Posted by Amy Steele

Veracity: book review

January 20, 2010

Title: Veracity
Author: Laura Bynum
ISBN: 978-1439123348
Pages: 384
Publisher: Pocket (January 5, 2010)
Category: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Review source: Simon and Schuster/ Pocket Books
Rating: 2/5

Every few years, it’s another go. Another test to see if we’re ready. If we’ve been able to put aside our emotions, like computers, and read a scene properly, without the filter of compassion. With our eyes as well as our ears, in real time, and without the crutch of playback.

When I first read Veracity‘s description, I thought it would be a creepy, fascinating imagination of 2045. The concept of this government with ludicrous rules on language and decorum starts out strong in the first 100 or so pages and then it grows tiresome. I really enjoyed learning about the new government and its rules and control but Veracity needed editing. In 2012, a pandemic spread throughout the world and eliminated most of its inhabitants—basically ridding the world of the weak. Now in 2045, there are banned words, no books, little education, no emotions and Big Brother is literally in the head of each inhabitant. Everyone is implanted with a chip that keeps track of things they say and do [there are Red-Lists of illegal words] and if something is done that the government dislikes, those people are swiftly erased. Sex and drugs [doled out and controlled by the government]placate the people. It’s a miserable existence but no one has a choice or knows any different. Harper Adams, whose daughter Veracity was taken from her early on by the government, and she was chosen to be a Monitor for the government. She has control over deciding whether someone is guilty or innocent and she deals out punishment. Harper also has special powers: she can read people’s thoughts and feelings through an aura of color that surrounds them. She’s integral to the government. One day the government Red-Lists the name of Harper’s daughter Veracity and she soon turns to an underground resistance group where the people who run it have names like Lazarus, Ezra and Noah and follow a banned book called The Book of Noah. This part just drew on too much religious philosophy for me. They had books and dictionaries but I couldn’t get behind the choices of names as the leaders for this resistance movement as if 2012 is the end of the world and this is a new beginning to some degree. I quickly lost interest. Some blurbs compared it to 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m not sure what book these reviewers read but I ended up being disappointed by Veracity. The promising premise behind Veracity quickly became too drawn out and slow. I didn’t care if the resistance regained control over the government or whether Harper reunited with her daughter or not.

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Posted by Amy Steele

Great Quote: Meryl Streep at Golden Globes

January 18, 2010

I’ve made it clear that I am the vessel for telling other women’s stories and other women’s lives.
–Meryl Streep on accepting Golden Globe, Best Actress Comedic Performance, Julie and Julia

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Posted by Amy Steele

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