Bitch In Praise of Difficult Women, Elizabeth Wurtzel. (Paperback 0385484011) Book Reviews,

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Bitch In Praise of Difficult Women
Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel

No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel. — Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior.  By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations.  Beginning with Delilah, the...  more » first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines.

In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson.  Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth.

She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame.  She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself.  Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress.  She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do?  Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock."

Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love.  Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core.  In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.

ISBN-13: 9780385484015
ISBN-10: 0385484011
Publication Date: 5/18/1999
Pages: 448
Rating:

Currently 3.4/5 Stars.

3.4 stars, based on 73 ratings

Publisher: Anchor
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

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Esme S. (esme) reviewed Bitch : In Praise of Difficult Women on 4/20/2007 + 44 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 9

I found this almost unreadable. I'm sure she has some good ideas, but I had to read 30 rambling pages before I got to her thesis, and even then I was underwhelmed. I'm sure I agree with a lot of what she's saying. Unfortunately, too many references, too much flowery language and a manic pace do not make me wait to hear her point.

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Gabrielle I. reviewed Bitch : In Praise of Difficult Women on 1/18/2006 + 8 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

From the writer of Prozac Nation...

"Wildly exuberant, and exciting...This is a bitch of a book."

-The Washington Post

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Marni P. reviewed Bitch : In Praise of Difficult Women on 3/15/2007 + 6 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

This book will help any woman embrace the bitch in her.

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Mary C. (marycat) reviewed Bitch : In Praise of Difficult Women on 12/16/2005 + 9 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

Frustrating, demanding and irresistible.

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Shannon N. reviewed Bitch : In Praise of Difficult Women on 9/22/2006 + 10 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

entertaining and informative! a nonfiction i actually bought for fun AND finished it! that usually never happens with me! only other book i've done that with, i believe was Fast Food Nation.

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Alli T. (neugotik) reviewed Bitch : In Praise of Difficult Women on 3/12/2009 + 13 more book reviews

This book is so much more then I expected - it's very historic and academic & I'm very pleased with it ~ It does take a mental mindset to get into though: not a "easy read self-help" book!

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