The Women's Review of Books articles from December 2000

The Women's Review of Books archives from December 2000

Women's lives in music.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2000... Emma Goldman famously called for a revolution that included, its fair share of dancing--to-which we would surely want to add singing, playing and music-making of every kind. Taking more literally than usual the classic feminist injunction...

Opera queen.(Interview)
December 1, 2000... Frederica von Stade retraces a remarkable career Mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade didn't imagine a career as an opera singer until, in her early twenties and singing off-Broadway, she applied to the Mannes College of Music, intending to...

Keeping the faith.(Interview)
December 1, 2000... Mary Chapin Carpenter talks about song walking, performing and looking back Although she was born in Princeton, singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter has been the Washington DC area's "hometown girl" since she moved there in the early...

All kinds of blue.(Interview)
December 1, 2000... Ernestine Anderson reflects on a lifetime of singing jazz Ernestine Anderson has been singing jazz for over five decades and is still going strong. Born in Houston in 1928, she sang gospel as a child and was on the road with the Johnny Otis...

Playing for keeps.
December 1, 2000... Women jazz musicians break the glass ceiling The once notoriously macho jazz world has changed its tune about talented women musicians. Nothing is perfect for most of them yet. But whatever they need to give them full parity with men, the...

When women band together.(Interview)
December 1, 2000... Three jazz artists share their stories International Women in Jazz grew out of a seminar on women in jazz held at St. Peter's Church in New York City in September 1995 and attended by a number of women prominent in jazz. So many issues...

Listeners' delight: Ten writers choose their "desert island disks".
December 1, 2000... Emmylou Harris: Giving the broken heart its due I've been listening to Emmylou Harris for 25 years now. Her first album caught me on the highway of life just as I'd hit a slick curve of transition and reconfiguration, the realization that...

Inheriting a tradition.
December 1, 2000... Rising world-music star Rokia Traore made her first tour of the United States this past summer. The Women's Review asked her to comment on her music and her international success. Angel Romero of worldmusicportal.com describes the genesis and...

Consider the alternative.(alternative country musicians)
December 1, 2000... Alt-country musicians transcend country music stereotypes American country music (once known as "country and western") justly claims its origins in Celtic and Appalachian balladry and in its cousinly relation to folk music, gospel and...

Rebuilding a life.(singer becomes conductor)
December 1, 2000... Susan Davenny Wyner replays her transformation from singer to conductor In his review of Susan Davenny Wyner's Boston orchestral conducting debut in 1997, the Boston Globe's Richard Dyer wrote, "She has learned to play the most difficult...

An accidental pianist.
December 1, 2000... A latecomer enters the world of professional jazz Music was my earliest passion (my mother said that as an infant I'd sway to the cycles of the vacuum-cleaner motor; at three I began playing the piano by ear), but I was discouraged from...

Hungry for more.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Cherry by Mary Karr. New York: Viking, 2000, 276 pp., $24.95 hardcover. The plot is an ordinary plot: American girl traverses the tricky terrain of adolescence. First bra, first pimple, first love, first kissing game, first date, first...

Soul in torment.(Review)
December 1, 2000... The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath edited by Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000, 752 PP., $18.00 paper. If Sylvia Plath had lived, she would have been 68 on October 27, 2000. I find it hard to imagine her as an older...

Stage managers.(Review)
December 1, 2000... The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 by Nadine George-Graves. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, 183 pp., $45.00 hardcover. In 1975,...

Free spirit.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Cruel Banquet: The Life and Loves of Frida Strindberg by Monica Strauss. New York: Harcourt, 2000, 264 pp., $25.00 hardcover. She was born in Vienna in 1872, the daughter of a powerful editor and drama critic, whose brains and drive she...

Deadlier than the male?(Review)
December 1, 2000... Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power by Benjamin DeMott. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 256 pp., $26.00 hardcover. In 1980, Benjamin DeMott published a piece in Psychology Today entitled "The...

Ordeal by television.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Survivor: The Ultimate Game by Mark Burnett with Martin Dugard. New York: TV Books, 2000, 235 pp., $17.95 paper. As feminists have come to learn, what the media giveth with one hand (which usually isn't very much), they always taketh away...

Radicals on record.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon. New York: Basic Books, 2000, 319 pp., $30.00 hardcover. Free 24-hour, community-controlled day care. Abortion on demand. Wages for...

Beginning at home.(Review)
December 1, 2000... In Her Hands: Craftswomen Changing the World by Paola Gianturco and Toby Tuttle. New York: The Monacelli Press, 2000, 255 pp., $60.00 hardcover. Walking along a dirt road to attend a village meeting of a women s "thrift society" in the...

Reasonable women.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking by Elizabeth M. Schneider. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, 300 pp., $29.95 hardcover. When the United States Supreme Court struck down the violence Against Women Act last May, its decision...

Tape of My Dead Father's Voice from an Old Answering Machine.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... He keeps telling me he's not at home, that he'll reply soon. He doesn't know he's lying, that what's hiding between the space of words is space he's gone to. He repeats his name, which is not the name I call him. I call him...