Are Men Necessary?

September 26, 2005
Dowd's Bushworld
, collecting her amped New York Times
op-eds, hit big during the 2004 presidential campaign. This follow-up is as slapdash as the earlier book was slash-and-burn. What Dowd seems really to want to do is dish up anecdotes of gender bias in the media, which she does with her usual aplomb—everything from how Elizabeth Vargas was booted out of Peter Jennings's vacant chair at ABC during his illness ("I'm not sure if she has the gravitas," opines an exec) to the guys who won't date Dowd because she's got more Beltway juice (and money) than they. The rest is padding: endless secondary source and pundit quotes ("In Time,
Andrew Sullivan wondered: 'So a woman is less a woman if she is a scientist or journalist or Prime Minister?' "); examples of gender relations gone wrong in books, film and TV; random interview blips ("Carrie, a publicist in her late twenties from Long Island, told me...."); little musings from girlhood that are rarely revealing enough; endless career rehashes of everyone from Anita Hill to Helen Gurley Brown. A chapter on dating is a mishmash of everything from The Rules
to He's Just Not That into You
; one on reproductive science (that asks the title question for real) ends up referring a lot to orgasm. It's intermittently entertaining, but neither sharp enough nor sustained enough to work as a book. Agent, Esther Newberg.

November 1, 2005
Dowd ("Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk"), a Pulitzer Prize -winning columnist for the "New York Times", here presents her funny, biting, and incisive take on women's place in American society today. In the style of her columns, Dowd's writing races along as she presents academic studies on the Y chromosome and on the relationship between a woman's IQ and the odds she will marry alongside essays on popular culture in which she considers, for example, how society moved from Gloria Steinem and -no-makeup - feminism to "Desperate Housewives "and Botox injections today. Dowd ponders why girls dominate in high school but women fail to dominate in the adult world, why the three network news anchor jobs were again filled by white men, and why Hillary had to be a victim to become a senator. Her long journalism career and her Washington connections allow Dowd to give the reader an inside glimpse of influential publishing figures such as Katharine Graham and Helen Gurley Brown, as well as an insider's view of Washington politics. Readable, provocative, and entertaining; recommended for public libraries." -Debra Moore, Cerritos Coll., Norwalk, CA"

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2005
Sex is a topic generally considered unsuitable for polite conversation. Ah, but the intrepid " New York Times " columnist, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, steps up to the plate to hit some fly balls well out of the field as she discusses sexual realities and absurdities, doing so with the same verve and nerve with which she handled the other hot-button topic--politics--in her 2004 best-seller, " Bushworld" . Dowd is hilarious, cutting, and provocative--in other words, perfectly willing to express her vision of the truth without an ounce of reservation. And isn't that why readers gravitate to her? Her new book arises from her " New Times" columns, and her observations on how men and women relate lead to pithy commentary on the contradictory path feminism has taken ("the new urban legend is about a young man who loses a girl by asking her to split the check"), the superior suitability of women as political leaders ("women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day"), and other topics more timid conversationalists would stay away from. Thank goodness " she" doesn't. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)