The Women's Review of Books articles from April 2004

The Women's Review of Books archives from April 2004

Longing for persimmons.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003, 673 pp., $45.00 hardcover. Durwood's was a stuffed-full dry-goods store in the mountains of...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... To the Editor: I read Meryl Altman's musings on Sappho with interest and I very much appreciate her praise for my novel, Sappho's Leap. Though I never respond to reviews anymore, I am tempted to respond to a thoughtful woman critic. Would...

Living her best life.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... She's Not There: A Life In Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan. New York: Broadway Books, 2003, 320 pp., $24.95 hardcover, $14.95 paper. When novelist James Boylan was a young boy, he played a game in which he pretended to be an...

Gender immigrant: a conversation with Jennifer Finney Boylan.(Interview)
April 1, 2004... Light on political theory but full of stories about the ways gender politics trickle into our daily lives, She's Not There, which became a New York Times bestseller, is subversive, illuminating, poignant, and funny. The book's working title was...

Is science objective? The Bush administration has been criticized for mixing science and politics. But is this really the problem?
April 1, 2004... October 2002: The so-called Data Quality Act takes effect. The law, slipped unnoticed into a 2001 spending bill, sounds innocuous. It says that government agencies must meet standards for "quality, objectivity, utility and integrity." Under the...

A Renaissance woman.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Olympia Morata: The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic edited and translated by Holt N. Parker. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003, 275 pp., $22.50 paper. Remember the old college application essay question that asked you to...

The special camera.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, 209 pp., $22.00 hardcover. Russia has figured mightily in the American imagination, but, perhaps consequently, it is still rarely chosen as a place of zeal...

No magic wand.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Sari by Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller. Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 2003, 279 pp., $39.95 hardcover. Six yards of fabric draped around you without hook, stitch, of pin-that's how the sari was described to us as children. And the riddle of...

The end of HRT.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth by Barbara Seaman. New York: Hyperion, 2003, 277 pp., $24.95 hardcover. In July 2002, I spent day after day talking to reporters about the results of the Women's...

The Janeite lens.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Jane Austen on Screen edited by Gina Macdonald and Andrew F. Macdonald. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 284 pp., $25.00 hardcover. What makes Jane Austen's novels so popular and so readily adaptable to film? Linda...

Teaching and learning.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Livelihood by Phoebe MacAdams. Los Angeles: Cahuenga Press, 2003, 94 pp., $12.00 paper. Embellishments by Virginia Chase Sutton. Aptos, CA: Chatoyant, 2003, 71 pp., $12.00 paper. What is teaching anyway?" Phoebe MacAdams asks in the...

Me and my uterus.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Am I Still A Woman? Hysterectomy and Gender Identity by Jean Elson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004, 247 pp., $19.95 paper. Hysterectomy," Jean Elson tells us, "is currently the second most commonly performed [major] surgical...

Modernist and modern.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars edited by Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 259 pp. $65.00 hardcover, $29.00 paper. In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes showed she knew a...

Getting to be a habit.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns by Elizabeth Kuhns. New York: Doubleday, 2003, 228 pp., $23.95 hardcover. For nuns, donning the distinct ensemble is not just a 24/7 routine; it's an act of daily devotion, despite...

The view from above.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The World: Travels 1950-2000 by Jan Morris. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 458 pp., $27.95 hardcover. Jan Morris, author of several dozen books of travel and history and hundreds of articles about place and politics, is no casual traveler....

The bookshelf.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Bookshelf provides a sampling of books of interest by and about women that we've received in our office recently. For a more extensive listing, please visit our website, www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview. Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez,...