REVIEWS (cont.)
A Wider View of Authorship: Eroticizing the Past
An internationally renowned Irish poet, and a major feminine voice in contemporary English-language poetry, Eavan Boland has devoted much thought, evident throughout her work, to women’s marginalization and female authorship.
Got Milk? The Gender Politics of Pleasure Dairies
It is a testament to Meredith Martin’s talent as both writer and scholar that the pleasure dairy has now become so vivid in my imagination, a part of our political and cultural history, that I feel as if I have always known about the phenomenon, Martin’s book serving as an exquisite reminder.
Women Writing War
Kingstone, Lemmon, Barker, Sebba, and so many women writers throughout the world make the silence surrounding women, especially in war zones, a little less deafening.
A Soul Turned Inside Out: Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous, and L’écriture Féminine
Benjamin Moser’s thorough biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World, struggles, and wonderfully fails, to bring us closer to the writer he describes as, “weird, mysterious, and difficult, an unknowable mystical genius far above, and outside, the common run of humanity.”
Our Generalized Amnesia
Inseparable is a magnificent act of textual archeology, an exquisite excavation of literature. Donoghue’s focus is on what has been ignored regarding the theme of love between women.
Holly Golightly Needs a New Dress
Sam Wasson’s Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman is a little black dress of a book: sleek, suggestive, and elegantly subversive.
Our Cleopatra Moment
We are in a Cleopatra moment. Three books featuring the notorious Egyptian queen have been published in the past few months of which Cleopatra: A Life by Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Stacy Schiff is generating bombshell-size buzz.
Very Like A Sloth
Feminism is very like a sloth; in order to take a step forward, she first takes several steps backward. It seems after a long while in retro mode, feminism may be experiencing one of her periodic advances. This is the heartening message of two feminist political thinkers, one a cartoonist, Nicole Hollander, author of The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama, the other, Rebecca Traister, a journalist covering politics and gender for Salon, and author of Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women.
Cordelia Fine, Neurosexism, and My Mother (again)
According to cognitive neuroscientist Cordelia Fine’s explosive new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, gender bias has potentially worsened by going underground, becoming unconscious and unintended.
Lisbeth Salander, the Millennium Trilogy, and My Mother
My mother had been urging me to read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Like her, I love a good thriller but a ways into the first book, I had my doubts. There just wasn’t much thrill in this thriller.
Jenny McPhee 