The Women's Review of Books articles from December 2003

The Women's Review of Books archives from December 2003

Tales of the city.(Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 by Nan Alamilla Boyd. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 319 pp., $27.50 hardcover. In Wide Open Town, Nan Alamilla Boyd presents queer San Francisco as the product...

Letters.
December 1, 2003... Dear Editor: As a Montana native who has spent most of my life in Western states such as Idaho, California, and Colorado, I was greatly amused to read A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. To anyone familiar with Western...

Remembering Carolyn Heilbrun.
December 1, 2003... Many readers of The Women's Review of Books were saddened to learn of the death of pioneering feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun. For us on the staff, losing her means losing a part of our history: She was instrumental in founding the Women's...

Quintessentially noir.(Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson. London: Bloomsbury, 2003, 534 pp., $32.50 hardcover. Critics of suspense fiction are inclined to divide all such works, with more neatness than precision, between "noir" and...

Highsmith: another view.(Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s by Marijane Meaker. Cleis Press, San Francisco, 2003, 207 pp., $14.95 paper. In 1959, when Patricia Highsmith and Marijane Meaker met at a dyke bar in Greenwich Village, they were already household names to...

Philosophy of the heart.(Love)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Love by Toni Morrison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 208 pp., $23.95 hardcover. What is this thing called love that cannot stand alone, but depends on modifiers and conjunctions to complete it, to give it heft and meaning? There is...

Dykes to watch out for.(Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out )(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Lisa London talks to Alison Bechdel about 20 years of cartooning and her new book, Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2003, 128 pp., $13.95 paper). In 1982, recent college...

The comedy of perspective.(The Unprofessionals: A Novel )(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... The Unprofessionals: A Novel by Julie Hecht. New York: Random House, 2003, 240 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Mel Brooks defines tragedy as, "when I have a hangnail." Comedy, he says, is "when you fall off a cliff and die." The joke is about our...

La Duse.(Eleanora Duse: A Biography)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Eleanora Duse: A Biography by Helen Sheehy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 400 pp., $32.50 hardcover. Onstage, she almost never used rouge, powder or any other make-up, and that alone was enough to mark the young Italian actress Eleanora...

Subject vs. object.(The Lightning Field)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... The Lightning Field by Carol Moldaw. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2003, 69 pp., $15.00 paper. The Cloud of Knowable Things by Elaine Equi. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2003, 849 pp., $15.00 paper. In American poetry, a...

The first September 11th.(My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile by Isabel Allende. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, 224 pp., $23.95 hardcover. This year marked the 30-year anniversary of the US-supported coup that brought down the democratically...

Rediscovering Lucy Stone.(Woman's Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Woman's Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement by Joelle Million. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2003, 360 pp., $49.95 hardcover. In 1858, the most famous and accomplished advocate for...

Creating "gay-bies".(Buying Dad: One Woman's Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Buying Dad: One Woman's Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor by Harlyn Aizley. Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2003, 256 pp., 14.95, paper. One of the great advantages of being a lesbian is that, if you wish to be a parent, you needn't...

December.(Poetry)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... December The woman who complains aging means the end of sex makes her husband take up ballroom dancing. It is dawn, it is December, everywhere hunters are in the woods; they are armed, they are stalking, heavy and...

You change.(Poetry)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... You Change You change your life, but vow to hold on to what you care for, old patterns, pastimes, friends. You are only an hour from the city you lived in, there are trains, you have a car. But it's frightening to...

Learning from the particular.(Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 312 pp. $21.95 paper. Chandra Talpade Mohanty envisions a world of racial equality and economic...

The Hepburn enigma.(Kate Remembered)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Kate Remembered by Scott Berg. New York: Putnam, 2003, 370 pp., $25.95 hardcover. When I took on the task of editing Notable American Women in 1997, I began a deathwatch: Would Katharine Hepburn die in time to make it into the volume so I...

Resisting globalization.(Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation, Bio/Diversity)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation, Bio/Diversity by Susan Hawthorne, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2002, 464 pp., $19.95 paper. There is no modernity without coloniality. So argue Latin American subaltern...

Midwestward, ho!(We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-1890)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-1890 by Jana Harris. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 2003, 109 pp., $14.95 paper. In two previous books of poetry and one novel, Jana Harris wrote in the voices of 19th century pioneers...

The Bookshelf.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Attentive readers will note that we now have a new format for the Bookshelf, which aims to provide you with a little more information than in the past about books we've received in our office recently. As always, the Bookshelf is only a partial...