Easy Beauty

November 1, 2021

Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis that affects the lower spine, thus reducing her stature and altering how she walks, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Whiting Award-winning philosophy professor Jones experiences pain both physical and mental--she must contend daily with the idea that she's somehow seen as lesser by others. When she unexpectedly became a mother, Jones decided to change her perspective, reclaiming a world that others often disallowed her--and that she initially disallowed herself. Leaving Brooklyn, she sought out places of meaning to her, whether for fun, for beauty, or to bear witness, from a rousing tennis tournament in California to Rome's grand sculpture gardens to Cambodia's devastating Killing Fields. Along the way, she mused on the myths that shape our understanding of beauty and those shaping disability, asking if she herself has sometimes bought into them. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 10, 2022
Jones, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for feature writing, takes aim at beauty standards in her dazzling debut. Born with a rare congenital condition that left her with a curved spine and “mismatched hips,” Jones became accustomed early on to “triggering pity” and stares from others around her. “Measure and proportion are everywhere identified with beauty and virtue,” Jones writes. “My body did not fit into any narrative of order, proportion, plan.... disorder threatened beauty.” But just as she defied doctors’ claims that she’d never walk or stand on her own (even getting the “classic college experience” and, later, having a child), she challenges society’s rules of attraction with razor-sharp wit and intellect. Framing her physical appearance within the context of British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet’s theory of “easy beauty”—which describes the “plain straightforward pleasure” brought by the “apparent and unchallenging”—she makes a thrilling defense of “difficult beauty,” where “one often encounters intricacy, tension, and width.” As Jones explores this paradigm, she experiences the “blunt, triumphant beauty” of Beyoncé at a concert in Milan and the “energy of the aggrieved” of Bernini’s Proserpine, while a Cambodian massage moves her to consider her own complicity in the “fixed distance” she seeks to dismantle. This makes a brilliant case for the beauty of complexity. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME.

January 15, 2022
Cooper Jones ruminates on and reckons with her disability as well as her identity as a whole. It's impossible not to be struck by the opening: "I am in a bar in Brooklyn listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether or not my life is worth living." Almost 20 pages later, she explains, "I was born without a sacrum, the bone that connects the spine to the pelvis." Due to her physical disability, "people simply felt it was hard to include me and easier to leave me on the margins, invisible. I learned to preempt the inevitable and exclude myself." The book is divided more geographically than temporally. The author writes about her solo trips to Italy and Cambodia; living in New York with her husband and son; conversations with her mother; stories about her childhood, in Kathmandu and then Kansas; and her relationship with her absent father. Cooper Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and philosophy professor, quotes myriad authors and philosophers on the subject of beauty, including Plotinus, Kant, Iris Murdoch, Maria Popova, and others. She takes her title from British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet, who described "easy beauty" as "apparent and unchallenging." Difficult beauty, comparatively, requires greater endurance and bandwidth of perception. Parts of the book are repetitive. For example, she writes, doctors "told my mother I'd never be able to get pregnant....My parents listened to the doctors, believed their predictions"; in a subsequent chapter, "Doctors had told me my entire life that I couldn't get pregnant....My parents believed the doctors and so did I." The author ultimately discovered her own pregnancy five months into it. The book's second part is named "The Kestrel," plucked from a Murdoch passage that leads Cooper Jones to realize that "by paying attention to beauty, I could break free of myself." Near the end, she acknowledges the realness of the life we've all been given ("dreadfully normal and sublime") and resolves, "I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise." By turns revelatory, tedious, entertaining, and entirely human.

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March 1, 2022

Cooper Jones (finalist for a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing) presents, with unflinching honesty, this memoir about living with disability. Cooper Jones was born with sacral agenesis, a rare congenital spine condition affecting her outward appearance and causing great physical pain. She describes struggling to fit into an American society that relegates people with disabilities to otherhood. She also confronts her own complicity in contributing to disability stereotypes--especially stark after she unexpectedly became a mother. Cooper Jones recalls, with humor and candor, the journeys and far-flung adventures on which she explored the world and her place in it--traveling from her home in Brooklyn to see Beyonc� perform in Milan, to attend a tennis tournament in California, and to visit the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh. Cooper Jones's travels take her, mentally and physically, far from where her memoir began--in a bar with her friends, engaging in a philosophical debate about whether her life is worth living. Readers will appreciate the book's portrayal of self and of living with disability, and the author's honest confrontation of beauty standards and motherhood. VERDICT Cooper Jones's book will encourage readers to view bodies (their own and others') in a new, more graceful light. Recommended for most memoir collections.--Mattie Cook

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2022
Journalist Jones' soul-stretching, breathtaking existential memoir chronicles her reclaiming of body, mind, and self. Born without the bone that connects the spine to the pelvis, Jones lives with physical pain and social pain, against which she self-protects by mentally retreating into "the neutral room." After a lifetime of hearing motherhood is a nonoption for a body deemed disabled, Jones becomes pregnant with and welcomes her son Wolfgang. A while later, at a stunning dinner, Jones listens to two fellow students in her philosophy PhD program discuss if fetal bodies like her own should be aborted. Three months after this night, alone in Italy, Jones looks at Bernini sculptures as the dinner and her son's existence catalyze to a profound, impressive, and wiser-than-wise contemplation of the way Jones is viewed by others, her own collusion in those views, and whether any of this can be shifted. She shares her ultimate answer--yes--in superlative writing, rendering complex emotion and unparalleled insight in skillfully precise language. Jones moves in spaces previously denied to her (such as ""find yourself"" travel), reflects on key life moments and her embodied life, and engages her study of philosophy. Her debut is a game-changing gift to readers.

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