"Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, like much of Kasson's earlier work, makes an important scholarly contribution and has great potential for classroom use. He engages an important subject about which most readers know something and peels back layer upon layer of meaning to reveal a complex social world of individuals, dreams, anxieties, and action . . . The result is a fine cultural history of masculinity . . . by examining turn-of-the-century masculine ideals and images and by reflecting on the ways social and cultural change shaped men's attitudes toward their bodies, fired their imaginations, and inflamed deep-seated anxieties. Kasson's study is not merely about the ideal of manly strength, survival, and resistance—it is about the multivalent performance of identity."—Susan Curtis, Purdue University, Journal of American History

"Combining micronarrative with feminist theorizing, impeccable research with passionate engagement, Linda Kerber reshapes the history of American political development . . . A model study."—From the Citation for the AHA's 1999 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize

"The Meaning of Wife styles itself in the tradition of Backlash and The Beauty of Myth: It’s pop-culture-literate survey of the last twenty-five years that serves up feminist ideas with a lively touch."—The Village Voice

"LaSalle's marvelous Complicated Women is the best kind of film book, making us see with fresh eyes the women of pre-Code Hollywood, a truly revolutionary lot by any standards. LaSalle wittily and insightfully celebrates the multiform 'New Woman' of the late '20s and early '30s."—Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

"JT LeRoy's deft and imaginative first novel is astonishingly confident. His language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt [and] turns the tawdriness of hustling into a world of lyrical and grotesque beauty."—Catherine Texier, The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant, gifted and profound . . . [JT LeRoy] is the witness to all the tales that go on in the dark, and for all of us, long may he have the courage to remember."—Vanity Fair

"In nearly 400 fast-paced pages of wonderfully evocative prose, much of it in the words of her six subjects, all teen mothers, Lipper has actually conveyed the social and personal history of a growing class of Americans for whom there is little help and less hope. But [these] people [possess] inner lives, and this is what Lipper is so deft at communicating . . . [Her book] will burden the conscience of its readers."—The New Republic

"Astro Turf works well as a brief, clear history of a field and the lab that embodied it. It works even better as a piece of cultural criticism. [It] works best of all, though, as a moving memoir of the difficult love between a daughter and father."—The New York Times Book Review