DEFINED BY DESIGN: The Surprising Power of Hidden Gender, Age and Body Bias in Everyday Products and Places by Kathryn H. Anthony sounded right up my alley. Instead the first half of the book mostly does nothing but list bad product design — did you know, for instance, that high-heeled shoes are bad for women’s health and many children’s toys can choke a kid? The book comes alive when it discusses gender-segregated toilets, potty parity and ways to redesign bathrooms but overall this was a disappointment.
WHAT IT IS … WHAT IT WAS: The Black Film Explosion of the ‘70s in Words and Pictures by Gerald Martinez, Diana Martinez and Andres Chavez collects some spectacular posters from the black films of the 1970s (there’s a good discussion of painted posters then vs. photo-based posters now) along with reminiscences from Melvin Van Peebles (creator of the groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadaaass Song), Isaac Hayes, Pam Grier, Roger Corman and retrospectives from younger fans such as Ice-T, director John Singleton and Samuel L. Jackson.
Almost everyone interviewed hates the term (coined, according to one interview, by the head of the NAACP) “blacksploitation” (“All those good ol’ boy films with Burt Reynolds — nobody calls them whitesploitation, do they?”) and laments that when the market ran dry, Hollywood dropped black films rather than finding new genres or styles to tap the same market. Very good.
ZOE BRENNAN, FIRST CRUSH by Laura Piper Lee falls between the two romances I read last week in terms of how much I liked it. Zoe is a small-town Georgia lesbian struggling to keep her vineyard/winery open and stressed out from lack of a love life. She destresses one night with a blindfolded three-way, then discovers the next morning that one of the other parties is her teenage crush … and her new vintner.
“Crap, I slept with my coworker!” is a common romantic set-up and it’s pleasant to watch as Zoe struggles for both romantic and professional success. However (and in contrast to last week’s Rent a Boyfriend) Lee wraps things up by not only having Zoe tackle her personal demons but everyone’s family problems miraculously untangle (everyone really loves each other, they Just Didn’t Understand). I can see the appeal of that as a resolution but it doesn’t work for me.
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