This was the perfect book to peruse - perhaps with a bottle of wine after a hard day at the office. It is one of those attractive coffee table books, packed with visual treats from a well-known and talented photographer; all quite stunning and depicting women in a diverse range of activity, age and demeanor. It is not a book of nudes or beauty or glamour – she portrays lawyers and prostitutes and artists and politicians and doctors and kitchen workers and body builders.

The pictures speak for themselves, and Susan Sontag adds that political feminist angle to make us cogitate some more.

Susan Sontag writes a characteristically intelligent essay to start off the book, with her razor sharp and agile mind, describing the ‘post-judgmental ethos gaining ascendancy in societies whose norms are drawn from the practices of consumerism.”

She also explores stereotypes that are still attached to the expected role of women – beauty, power, economics, domestic violence, and so on. She states; "A man ages into his powers. A woman ages into no longer being desired."

Sontag ends her essay in summary: “A book of photographs; a book about women; a very American project; generous, ardent, inventive, open-ended. It’s for us to decide what to make of these pictures. After all, a photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?”

If you enjoy Sontag’s intellectual acrobatics, or Leibovitz’s honest and compelling photography, this is worthwhile. ( )

Ms. Leibovitz knows her stuff! This is a wonderfu collection of representatives of the women around us.. from first ladies to body builders to prostitutes to surgeons to astronauts! ( )

A book of photographs of women that explores real women without idealizing them or trying to make them into allegories of femininity. This is not a book of nudes, or pretty pictures.

Explores stereotypes that are still attached to the expected role of women. Susan Sontag describes it well: "A man ages into his powers. A woman ages into no longer being desired." ( )