Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I read this book through the end waiting for some redemption of content and character - let me save you the trouble - there is none. The author spends a lot of time establishing, emphasising and reiterating that she was an outsider who achieved insider status. That's all fine and dandy if you use it to reveal a meaningful or at least an amusing portrait of a culture even if it is more realistically an NYC subculture. But the observations are largely superficial and it is far more important for Dr. Wednesday Martin to lay out her anthro-creds than tell a good story. For example Dr.Martin discusses Physique 57 in great depth but neglects the fact that it's wildly popular because it doesn't mess up a blowout! Even if a reasonable reader decided to ignore the author's latent hostility against women who have chosen to be "only" mothers and wives on an admittedly grander scale the big issue is that reading this book makes you feel like you're listening to a mean-spirited gossip rather than the anthropologist gone native. This is frankly an abuse of the memoir format and she has compassion for no-one outside herself. I felt sorry for her late-stage miscarriage and when I read how the other women rallied around to help her I felt that she totally betrayed all her friends. More than being unfunny or wearing too heavily the curse of anthropological knowledge what this book is centrally is unsisterly and unkind. Specifically given the base torment she went through to get her Birkin, sharing with us her condescension to a shopgirl who she believed would never get one make me dislike her even more. I wish that shop assistant identifies herself and Dr. Martin is forced to hand over the Birkin she can no longer carry (on the advice of a Parisian doctor no less) in the spirit of justice. The women on Park Avenue are no better or worse than women anywhere else who choose to be full-time mothers and wives. They have more money and it's nice to know that rather than succumbing to some Betty Friedan Feminine Mystique (much better book) nightmare baking and wasting away, they are at least taking care of themselves by working out a lot. What the author doesn't mention is that these highly educated women also spend a considerable portion of their time keeping the city's philanthropic machine alive - it's a sad fact but cultural institutions like the ballet, museums and opera need private funding to thrive and the energy and taste of these women is crucial to maintaining these traditions into the future. Regarding the most controversial aspect of the book's press the "wife bonus", I feel that wives and mothers do important work and are totally irreplaceable in their roles and get no respect in our materialistic cultural moment because they are unpaid. The love that motivates their efforts is an unpriced positive externality to marriage and is totally taken for granted. It was respected and cherished in the past but I see from the subtext of this book that it is undermined. A wife bonus may trivialise this great love but I am confident that it is not commensurate with the impact they have on their families. I do not usually write bad reviews because I respect the hard work writers put in to produce work but this book outraged me and doesn't deserve to be read no matter how pithy its title.