The New York Times knew exactly who was the perfect Sunday reviewer for the new Ivanka Trump book on Women Who Work. It was a radical feminist writer named Jessa Crispin, whose Twitter account is “The Book Slut.” What are the chances we’re going to get a thumbs-down? 100 percent. But would this review treat the author with any respect? No, she sounds like “the scrambled Tumblr feed of a demented 12-year-old.”
Complicated thinkers like Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou and even Friedrich Nietzsche get reduced to paper dolls that you can dress up to insert into any scenario.
In her latest book, Ivanka Trump, first daughter and senior White House adviser, seems to like playing with paper dolls a lot. Ms. Trump’s Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success is full of bullet-point lists, meaningless business-speak and inspirational quotation after inspirational quotation. It reads more like the scrambled Tumblr feed of a demented 12-year-old who just checked out a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from the library.
The Book Slut protested on Twitter that this newspaper somehow forced her into this foul deed:
This bitter feminist can’t seem to avoid putting an insult in every paragraph about what a foul human being Ivanka is:
These inspirational guides for working women are all the rage, and somehow they manage to be successful even when the women behind them are not. In that sense, there is not much difference between the Ms. Trump who oversaw a now-abandoned building project in Azerbaijan and #Girlboss Sophia Amoruso, whose business filed for bankruptcy protection last year.
Both want to make themselves icons of the new working women, and both use their shiny image to distract you from their apparent reluctance to let their employees take maternity leave. Or their associations with corrupt systems of power — it’s all so trivial.
The New York Times paints itself as venerable “legacy media,” but this review sounds more like a radical snarkfest at Jezebel than an august newspaper evaluation. It continues:
But who needs context anyway? All we need are these soothing words of wisdom to help us get through the day. Here’s a good one, in “Women Who Work”:
If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission. — Eddie Colla, street artist
One wonders if Ms. Trump put this on a magnet for her father before he started signing executive orders barring immigration from predominantly Muslim countries and ruining our health care system:
If family comes first, work does not come second. Life comes together. — Anne-Marie Slaughter
What does that even mean? It doesn’t matter if you feel inspired by it.
Then Crispin makes a decent point, that Ivanka’s borrowing quotes from leftists out of context (Slaughter worked for Hillary at the State Department, after all). Conservatives might joke that Ivanka was a liberal in good standard until about 2015. By Crispin’s standard, all of her leftist friends should be banned from quoting any Founding Fathers, ever.
Even The Book Slut’s conclusion is all snark:
Later, she quotes unironically from one of the greatest minds of history, who demanded you question every assumption, every firmly held belief.
As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. — Socrates
Indeed.
This is nothing but glorified hate mail. You don’t have to like Ivanka to acknowledge she is bilingual and graduated cum laude from the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. The Times wouldn’t tolerate a book reviewer suggesting Dearest Chelsea was a “know-nothing,” but all is fair in hate and war with the Trumps.
No one would expect the hidebound leftists at the Times to rave about a “success” book by a woman whose entire career revolves around her father. Not if they’re Republican. Chelsea Clinton? That’s an entirely different matter. Chelsea Clinton has written a book on activism for middle-schoolers called It’s Your World and has a children’s book coming at the end of the month called She Persisted. The only book she’s authored for adults was called Governing Global Health, which sank like a stone with almost zero promotional help from Chelsea Clinton. The Times avoided reviewing any of these books.
But in February, they puffed her in the Sunday Book Review's "By The Book" interview, asking her deep-thoughts questions such as "What are the best books about global health?" And "If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?" Chelsea humble-bragged that she's in the middle of roughly eight books: "Those are the physical books on my night stand. I’ve a much larger — an embarrassingly large — virtual pile on my Kindle."
PS: This is actually the second review of Ivanka's tome. The other, by Jennifer Senior of the Times, is also a thumbs-down, appeared in Wednesday's paper headlined "Inspiration from Ivanka, Humility-Free," but it sounds less like an angry Twitter troll:
This is the sort of feminism that drives some women bananas, having less to do with structural change than individual fulfillment and accessorizing properly; perhaps it can even be achieved by wearing her fine jewelry or apparel, which she repeatedly mentions throughout the book (as well as her family’s tremendous hotels). There’s certainly a market for it. There’s also family precedent for it. Her father nearly annihilated his millions, and went on to write many successful business books. Why not Ivanka?
