Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, MyShelf.Com
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"Beauty Bites Beast" Improves on "Sleeping Beauty"

Self Defense Advocate Offers the Quintessential Best
Of her Experience to Women-and Men

Ellen Snortland says she has not written a how-to book for women. She calls it a "how-come" book, but by virtue of the fact that humankind has a tendency to handle itself better when it understands a process, it becomes a how-to book. The quintessential how-to book.

I read it. I gave it to my daughter (who was mugged in full daylight in fresh, newly lighted parking garage at her college). I recommend it to women and to men who want to know more about women, more about our culture that both sexes have molded and/or allowed to be molded over eons of time.

This is a book that teaches self-defense and assertiveness and…well, you get the idea. It is mostly a book that helps women understand why we are "beauties" that must "bite" the beast and how that can be changed to benefit us all.

The author is well equipped to give advice. She received her J.D. degree at a time when women attending her Loyola Law School were in a small minority. She is a self-defense advocate and instructor. She is an actress, a producer, and a director. She rails-humorously-against injustices each week as a columnist for the "Pasadena Weekly" and she is a professor of Communication Studies at California State University at Los Angeles. Communication is, in fact, the crown that "Beauty" wears that covers all of these pursuits. Beauty Bites Beast is the culmination of Snortland's abilities and need to communicate in an area that-even after several decades of progress-still has room for a whole lot of improvement.

Oh! You should also know: It is absolutely entertaining-from beginning to end.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of "This is the Place" and "Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered"