Reviews for Modern algebra and trigonometry

The average rating for Modern algebra and trigonometry based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-28 00:00:00 Steve Logan With reference to famous male bodies -- John Travolta, Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, and others -- Susan Bordo offers in this book an insightful analysis of how, and why, men at the end of the 20th Century have become equally as insecure about their bodies as women have been for centuries before. She admits that because she is a woman her perspective is both limited and enhanced; she has no penis of her own, but perhaps that means she can more "objectively" analyze the penises of other people. The fact that I've just used the word "penis" twice in one sentence should tell you something about the book -- its first half (roughly) is dedicated almost entirely to that particular organ and the various meanings it has developed over the course of human development. It's helpful to remember that Bordo is a feminist who has spent much of her career analyzing female body issues, for her analysis of male anatomy is comparative. In one of the book's more memorable sections, she contends that public nudity has come to serve a different purpose for men than women: Whereas an exposed vagina often means vulnerability, an exposed penis nearly always means power. (You can tell by the expression on the person's face.) Bordo here references fashion advertisements. However, her arguments are applicable across the board. I read the book while traveling Italy -- land of the naked statue -- and I confess: While standing in front of Boticelli's Venus, and Michaelangelo's David, I was thinking less about artistic style than I was about Bordo's book. My complaint is that after its stellar first half (about the penis/phallus), it veers in the second half into territory I found less interesting and only tangentially related. Bordo devotes her final hundred pages or so to sexual harassment and, ultimately, to her defense of Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Her claims are well-explained and persuasive; however, this rather long section felt to me more like its own separate work than a continuation of the book I had been reading up to that point.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-13 00:00:00 James Dickinson The Male Body begins with a moving account of Bordo's memories of her father's body. After that she charts the changes in culture, especially in the 1990s which have put the male body very much on display. It was written in 2000 and already seems dated. Calvin Klein ads have now been taken over by Armani for example, and the Spawn of Sporno is what we see everywhere we look. I liked her refs to film in particular with some interesting observations about The Crying Game and Boogie Nights -Dirk Diggler's Dick deconstructed. But I didn't like her attachment to feminist and 'gay' analysis of men's bodies in culture. She mentioned my friend and compadre Mark Simpson once briefly, in relation to gay porn. But really the story of the display of the male body in contemporary culture is completely reliant on his theories of metrosexuality to make any sense at all. So without that, Bordo's arguments were incoherent. www.marksimpson.com This is an update. Having read Male IMpersonators by Mark Simpson, I think Bordo's The Male Body is a complete rip off of that book. It uses all the same subjects - The Crying Game, Tom of Finland, Gay porn, Calvin Klein, Marky Mark, Bill Clinton, and never references Simpson's work.