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threeara's review
3.0
This book gave an overview of interesting critics, which is what I was looking for, but I think the structure felt repetitive rather than additive, and I wish it was more thoughtful about intersectionality and expanded its scope to include far more women of color.
annacochran's review
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
2.0
my eyes flew over the pages so fast bc i was just bored tbh, was rushing to finish my the third chapter bc the writing was too flat for my taste
siria's review
3.0
Sharp brings together a dozen women authors and critics from the twentieth century—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, Janet Malcolm, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lillian Hellman—who were, in various ways, professionally opinionated. Michelle Dean has an excellent eye for pulling quotations both from the work of these women and from the other literary figures with whom they interacted, and that was one of the principal pleasures of this book. It's a decent primer to the careers of most of the women depicted here, many of whom should be better known than they are.
However, Sharp doesn't really cohere as a book. What threads bring this group of women together, what argument can be made about them, beyond the fact that they were all once described (or critiqued as being) "sharp"? This was then, and is now, just another way of saying "being a woman in public." A brief aside in the introduction also shows that Dean is aware that she's chosen to focus largely on middle-class white women, most of whose careers centered on New York. She also doesn't seem to care very much about that. After all, Zora Neale Hurston can only be called a "marginal" literary figure if you've got very determined ideas as to where the centre lies.
However, Sharp doesn't really cohere as a book. What threads bring this group of women together, what argument can be made about them, beyond the fact that they were all once described (or critiqued as being) "sharp"? This was then, and is now, just another way of saying "being a woman in public." A brief aside in the introduction also shows that Dean is aware that she's chosen to focus largely on middle-class white women, most of whose careers centered on New York. She also doesn't seem to care very much about that. After all, Zora Neale Hurston can only be called a "marginal" literary figure if you've got very determined ideas as to where the centre lies.
canadiantiquarian's review against another edition
2.0
Sharp is dull. Worse, it firmly rests in that vein of nonfiction where the artistry of the subject has no influence on the writer. No flair to its language, nor opinion that truly brings these fascinating women alive. It’s a barrage of moments without scenes, without context, and sometimes even without names.
This is a maddening book that manages to be too superficial for fans of these women while requiring too much knowledge to fill in the blanks Dean peppers through the book.
But above all else, how does a book celebrating women who made an art of having an opinion constantly define said women by their relationships with men?
This is a maddening book that manages to be too superficial for fans of these women while requiring too much knowledge to fill in the blanks Dean peppers through the book.
But above all else, how does a book celebrating women who made an art of having an opinion constantly define said women by their relationships with men?
elizabeth_spinner's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to love this book—but was a bit disappointed. There wasn’t enough depth to the portrayals of any of the women to get a really satisfactory understanding. Perhaps it would have been better to focus on one of them as the main subject and introduce the others in their relationship with that woman.