The Women's Review of Books articles from April 1999

The Women's Review of Books archives from April 1999

Before 'The Second Sex.'.(author Simone de Beauvoir)
April 1, 1999... "Simone de Beauvoir - wasn't she Rimbaud's girlfriend?" It was the second meeting of my class on Sexual Revolutions, the first with a reading assignment. Before I could jump in and point out the anachronism, the sexual incongruity and the sheer...

A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Simone de Beauvoir, New York: The New Press, 1998, 557 pp., $27.50 hardcover. "Simone de Beauvoir - wasn't she Rimbaud's girlfriend?" It was the second meeting of my class on Sexual Revolutions, the first with a reading assignment....

America Day by Day.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Carol Cosman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999, 390 pp., $27.50 hardcover. "Simone de Beauvoir - wasn't she Rimbaud's girlfriend?" It was the second meeting of my class on Sexual...

Letters of Intent: Women Cross the Generations to Talk about Family, Work, Sex, Love, and the Future of Feminism.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Edited by Anna Bondoc and Meg Daly. New York: The Free Press, 1999, 236 pp., $23.00 hardcover. Virginia Woolf once wrote that "the best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published." Woolf's warning hovers over this...

Elegy for Iris.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By John Bayley. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, 275 pp., $22.95 hardcover. Iris Murdoch died in February, not long after John Bayley had published his account of their marriage, four years after her decline into Alzheimer's. With...

Separate but equal.(John Bayley's elegy to his wife, author Iris Murdoch)
April 1, 1999... Iris Murdoch died in February, not long after John Bayley had published his account of their marriage, four years after her decline into Alzheimer's. With fortunate timing, he seized the short period when a book such as his could be written: an...

The Poisonwood Bible.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Barbara Kingsolver. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998, 546 pp., $26.00 hardcover. The Poisonwood Bible begins with a mysterious command: "Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened." The opening lines invite us in - "First,...

Women Managing for the Millenium.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Sally Garratt. London: HarperCollins Business (distributed in the United States by Trafalgar square, Vermont), 1998, 176 pp., $14.95 paper. In women managing for the Millennium, business consultant Sally Garratt includes a number of...

Success on Our Own Terms: Tales of Extraordinary, Ordinary Business Women.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Virginia O'Brien. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998, 269 pp., $22.95 hardcover. In women managing for the Millennium, business consultant Sally Garratt includes a number of case studies, the favorite teaching device of management...

Women's Studies and Business Ethics: Toward a New Conversation.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Edited by Andrea Larson and R. Edward Freeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 191 pp., $42.00 hardcover. In women managing for the Millennium, business consultant Sally Garratt includes a number of case studies, the favorite...

The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Rachel P. Maines. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 181 pp., $22.00 hardcover. When President Clinton testified that he did not have sexual relations with "that woman," Monica Lewinsky, he was lying. True, they did not...

Parlor massages.(the vibrator's role in women's sexual satisfaction)
April 1, 1999... When President Clinton testified that he did not have sexual relations with "that woman," Monica Lewinsky, he was lying. True, they did not engage in sexual intercourse. But as the world now knows, they certainly did engage in a number of other...

Soon: Tales from Hospice.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By A.G. Mojtabai. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 1998, 190 pp., $22.00 hardcover. A. G. Mojtabai is the author of six novels and a highly regarded nonfiction book about the effects of nuclear weapons on popular consciousness. Her work is...

In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Silvana Paternostro. New York: Dutton, 1998, 326 pp., $25.95 hardcover. Silvana Paternostro, a New York City-based journalist, was born some 37 years ago into the sheltered and mannered society of the land-owning Colombian coastal...

Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Edited by Joyce Antler. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England 1998, 301 pp., $45.00 hardcover, $21.95 paper. Harder even than fighting stereotypes is determining their relationship to reality. My strapping,...

Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Edited by Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998, 320 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper. Those who love family dramas mixed with politics will find a great deal in this collection of brief memoirs by...

The Lost Land: Poems.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Eavan Boland. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, 66 pp., $21.00 hardcover. Eavan Boland's The Lost Land is no loose gathering of poems. It works as a single, highly constructed, highly conceptual work of art. It has three subject matters -...

The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Edited by Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998, 310 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper. The day in intensive care had been particularly nightmarish. My daughter lay stiff as a wax doll,...

Fetish Lives: Stories.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Gail Jones. New York: George Braziller, 1998, 178 pp., $20.00 hardcover. Is obsession the mother of beauty? Is desire salvation, after all? In Gail Jones' exquisitely crafted collection of short stories, the answer, often as not, is...

Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Edited by Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragone. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, 264 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $18.50 paper. Twentieth-century technological innovations in the science of life, coupled with a social...

Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Edited by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit. New York: Routledge, 1998, 349 pp., $22.99 paper. Twentieth-century technological innovations in the science of life, coupled with a social climate that is increasingly intolerant of women who...

After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Nancy Venable Raine. New York: Crown, 1998, 278 pp., $23.00 hardcover. It is not news that rape is a horrific crime. The best research suggests that at least one in eight women will experience a rape in adulthood, and the National...

Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape.(Review)
April 1, 1999... By Charlotte Pierce-Baker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, 284 pp., $23.95 hardcover. It is not news that rape is a horrific crime. The best research suggests that at least one in eight women will experience a rape in adulthood, and the...