cover image The Power of Beauty: A Cultural Memoir of Beauty and Desire

The Power of Beauty: A Cultural Memoir of Beauty and Desire

Nancy Friday. HarperCollins Publishers, $27.5 (589pp) ISBN 978-0-06-017140-7

Bestselling author Friday (My Mother/My Self) here turns in a hefty, ambitious tome, an uneasy mix of cultural analysis, autobiographical confessional, pop psychology and sexology, loosely built around the theme of society's overvaluation of personal appearance and physical beauty. She ruefully notes women's dissatisfaction with their bodies; boys and men, she observes, are less involved in their looks. Scolding feminists for abandoning the quest for women's sexual freedom, she paradoxically argues that they should stop debunking beauty and instead recognize its pervasive influence in our lives and make better use of it. There is much here on women's culturally conditioned sexual guilt and self-hatred, girls' suppressed rage at their mothers, adult erotic fantasies--themes familiar to readers of Friday's previous books. She also comments in passing on a multitude of topics from fashion and the beauty industry to incest, envy, popular movies, women in the workplace, Hillary Clinton, the swinging 1960s and sibling rivalry. While devoted fans will be captivated, others may be stupefied by a free-floating meditation filled with capsule summaries of other writers, facile generalizations, platitudes and repetitive gush. $175,000 ad/promo; translation rights: HarperCollins; author tour. (June)