What do You think about Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography Of A Real Doll (2004)?
Forever Barbie started out like just my cup of tea- a sociological look and gender construction and culture through the evolution of a disputed plastic icon. Unfortunately, the book devolved into a disorganized collection of interviews with obscure performance artists and lots of assumptions on the part of the author that Barbie is so popular because with her pointed toes she resembles ancient fertility icons. The solid cultural criticism of the first few chapters became a hodgepodge of disparate theories, and lessened the impact of the entire piece.
—Rose
I thought this would be interesting but instead it was very dull! There were a few illuminating points, but only a few in the entire book. I was relieved to finish this most scattered essay of arguments. Her chapters were random and didn't lead on from one another, it seems like she just started writing without any sort of a plan. The pictures, too, were irrelevant most of the time or corresponded to a completely different part of the book.The beginning of it was written quite objectively, like an essay, and then suddenly the first person comes in a few chapters in. She starts talking about herself and her mother. While this writing was good, it was very incongruous and out of the blue, disappearing just as quickly as it appeared.I don't know what the message of the book would be, if at all. She doesn't seem to make any definite conclusion, any summation of some of the, admittedly, curious facts she raises.Well researched, badly drawn together.
—Amy
Barbie is already made of material that will never decompose, but she is lifted to real immortality by the dea-ex-machina of the sublime writer/critic/memoirist/historian MG Lord, who proves a point I have always struggled to make, which is that one doesn't need pubes or a navel to make a real impact in the world. The book is hilarious, but only when Lord wants it to be. It is also as deeply serious as Leon Edel's five volume biography of Henry James. It takes the measure of this odd object who emerged from the ur-conscious of postwar Germany, found its way over here, and crashed into the psyche of an entire culture, always somehow surviving, always torquing and morphing just enough to both reflect its (her) times and transcend them. Objects like Barbie appear when a culture is in need of them without knowing it, and Lord sublimely tells us why Barbie, how Barbie, and whither Barbie.(Her book on Elizabeth Taylor, which isn't really a book on Elizabeth Taylor, but is REALLY a book on Elizabeth Taylor, is also a five star doozy. THE ACCIDENTAL FEMINIST. Remind me (someone) to tell you my one Liz story, based on an astonishing nine minutes with her in 1989.)
—Richard Kramer
