Bennetta Jules-Rosette

Early on, Jules-Rosette says that this book is not a biography. Well, heck. I signed up for a biography. Instead I got this academic treatise that "offers critical reflections on the symbolic Baker and the images that she and her collaborators constructed during the era of modernity and for the post modern future." Ignoring the academic jargon, I plowed on in the hope that I would learn something about Baker. But the going was too tough for me, and I didn't get far. I didn't sign up for a university course and was in no mood to begin a study of Baker that uses "the tools of sociosemiotics to excavate the narratives, images, and representations that trace the story of her life and fit together as a cultural production" as it says on the back cover. I wish I had read that before I bought the book.… (mere)