The Women's Review of Books articles from December 2001

The Women's Review of Books archives from December 2001

Charmed life: Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
December 1, 2001... Nancy Milford. New York: Random House, 2001, 550 pp., $29.95 hardcover. The first biography I remember feeling I couldn't put down was Nancy Milford's Zelda. The first poems I remember being bowled over by were Edna St. Vincent Millay's....

Letters.
December 1, 2001... To the Editor: I am grateful to you for publishing Rosalind Petchesky's article, "Phantom Towers: Feminist reflections on the battle between global capitalism and fundamentalist terrorism" [November 2001]. It just may be the most important...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
December 1, 2001... Rosalind Petchesky has informed us of a factual correction to her essay, "Phantom Towers." A sentence about US support for international conventions and treaties should read: "The US, along with Afghanistan, is one of only a small number of...

Power points; The Way of the River: Adventures and Meditations of a Woman Martial Artist.
December 1, 2001... B.K. Loren. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2001, 206 pp. $22.95 hardcover Most Americans think martial arts mean violence, and power, whether their images are Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, or Steven Segal. Readers of The Women's...

I do, I don't: A Walk Down the Aisle: Notes on a Modern Wedding & Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique.
December 1, 2001... Kate Cohen. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, 206 pp., $22.95 hardcover. Jaclyn Geller. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001, 415 pp., $15.00 paper. Kate Cohen and Jaclyn Geller seem at first to offer irreconcilable accounts of...

Welcome to my world.(interview with social activist Merk Hoffman)(Interview)
December 1, 2001... Anthrax attacks, real and faked, fill the news headlines. Suddenly "we" are told to fear mayhem, in the mail, in the sky or anywhere in between. But women have been living with terror since long before September 11th and its aftermath--and the...

A legend and her legacy: Sarah Winnemucca.
December 1, 2001... Sally Zanjani, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, 366 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Srah Winnemucca was on of the most visible and complicated Native American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Educated among Euro-Americans as...

Shrinking shelves: What's happening to feminist bookstores?(Interview)
December 1, 2001... For over thirty years, feminist bookstores have been on the front lines of the women's movement. Sometimes these stores are the closest thing to a Women's Center that their community has, offering information about everything from family...

Who stole Feminism?: Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement.
December 1, 2001... Ann Russo. New York: Routledge, 2001, 226 pp., $19.95 paper. It will not surprise you: context matters. The tsunami of recent events is bound to affect the way any reviewer responds to a book that promises "a call to action for the feminist...

Mixed messages: Women and Dieting Culture: Inside a Commercial Weight Loss Group .
December 1, 2001... Kandi Stinson. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001, 228 pp., $22.00 paper. Is it possible to have your cake and eat it, too? Or to put it another way, is it possible to engage in rigorous feminist critique of the weight-loss...

Amazing Grace; Walking Home: A Woman's Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail.
December 1, 2001... Kelly Winters. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001, 335 pp., $14.95 paper. Tibetan teacher Trungpa Rinpoche once advised those in his audience who had not yet started on a spiritual path to get up and leave. But those who had already begun, he...

Unsentimental journey: Travels with a Medieval Queen.
December 1, 2001... Mary Taylor Simeti. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, 306 pp., $25.00 hardcover. Part history, part travelogue, Mary Taylor Simeti's book retraces the journey of a twelfth-century queen from her husband's center of power in Germany...

Compassion.(Poem)
December 1, 2001... Bottomless word, a well easier to see in give to-- as at the end of an old story when I opened my eyes at the sentence I could not say and saw another in sympathy with me-- or a week before my father's stroke the...

Still in the dark: The Camera My Mother Gave Me.
December 1, 2001... Susanna Kaysen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 159 pp., $21.00 hardcover. Your vagina is the story of your life, no doubt about that," Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, claims with the exaggeration to be expected of one...

Dressing for democracy: A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America.
December 1, 2001... Jenna Weissman Joselit. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001, 243 pp., $26.00 hardcover. One day when I was ten, my grandmother, an accomplished seamstress, reached into a trunk and pulled out a long, black silk dress from the 1890s. It had...

Desert of the heart: Flying Sparks: Growing Up on the Edge of Las Vegas.
December 1, 2001... Odette Larson. New York: Versa, 2001, 279 p4., $23.00 hardcover. The story of my life, like that of mountain formation, was one of random collisions. When one path became jammed I would give up going that way and go another, my changes of...