Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown

An Amazon Best Book of July 2016:It reads like the plot of a B-movie from the 1950s. Plain girl from a poor Midwestern family, scarred by the horrific accident that killed her beloved father, grows up to be a hot-shot, trailblazing New York executive, marries a movie mogul and rules the world. But if those are the bare outlines of the life story of the late Helen Gurley Brown, groundbreaking editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, Gerri Hirshey s brilliantly journalistic biography of Brown adds nuance and subtlety and cultural history; Hirshey s Not Pretty Enough (the description that dogged poor Helen all her life) treats Brown who seemed to some nothing more than a courtesan-in-training for rich and important men very seriously as a feminist and a cultural force. A working woman before those words were a clich , an unabashed believer in women s rights to their sexual desires, and an all-around tough businesswoman who took care of her ailing mother and sister long after she d left them far behind, the Helen Gurley Brown who emerges here is both an anachronism and a trailblazer all at once. It is to Hirshey s great credit that she lets us see Helen being Helen in all her glamorous, glorious contradictions. Sara Nelson, The Amazon Book Review