The Women's Review of Books articles from July 2001

The Women's Review of Books archives from July 2001

For richer or poorer.(personal finance)
July 1, 2001... The lessons we learn about money are hard to leave behind Sign of the times. Berkeley, a dinner party, a group of academics. The talk turns to money. The Dow, the Nasdaq. Diversification, profit margins. What's happening with technology...

Underpaid and undercover.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001, 221 pp., $23.00 hardcover. My eighth-grade Latin teacher, a diminutive, white-haired woman, liked to offer life lessons to her...

Down and out in America.(social classes)(Interview)
July 1, 2001... Barbara Ehrenreich talks about life as a minimum wage employee Nickel and Dimed began as a magazine article for Harpers--an investigation into what has become of former welfare recipients who are now required to take whatever jobs they can...

Our money, ourselves.
July 1, 2001... When it comes to dealing with money ignorance is not bliss Money is often a thorny subject for women. Many women I know, quite accomplished and proactive in most areas of their lives, cannot negotiate, cannot manage, cannot talk about it....

Taking inventory.(Nazi records)
July 1, 2001... An annihilated world resurfaces in a catalogue of confiscated property Three years ago an enterprising cousin decided to seek restitution of Aunt Clare's art collection, which vanished from Leipzig during the Second World War. The time...

The economy sucks.
July 1, 2001... Why should virtue be its own reward? I confess to a certain derogatory intent, but the title of this essay conveys a truth: caregivers in general and mothers in particular subsidize the market economy. And there is a sense in which the...

A step in the right direction.(how US tax policy impacts women)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... A year ago, Social Agenda, a think tank and advocacy organization focusing on issues of economic justice including income distribution, especially for women, launched its National Caregiver Credit Campaign to support all caregivers of adults...

Caught in the middle.(race and poverty)
July 1, 2001... A love-hate relationship that won't go away Had we been white, perhaps characters in a nineteenth-century novel, my family's financial condition would have been described as one of genteel poverty. My father's civic-minded work paid a very...

Profits and principles.(interview of mutual fund president Amy Domini)(Interview)
July 1, 2001... Amy Domini wants socially responsible investors to save the world Amy Domini went from being a secretary at a Boston investment firm in the early 1970s to president and chair of the board of her own mutual fund; along the way she has...

Nothing succeeds like excess.(fat metaphors used in economic literature create poor image)
July 1, 2001... Corporate greed goes unchecked in a fat-phobic society One day in the late eighties, I drove half-way across the state for an emergency meeting of administrators of battered women's shelters. The governor had proposed a budget that cut...

Following the money.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Money Makes the World Go Round: One Investor Tracks her Cash Through the Global Economy from Brooklyn to Bangkok and Back by Barbara Garson. New York: Viking, 2001, 342 pp., $24.95 hardcover. At street level, the war over globalism is...

Going with the flow.(interview of author Barbara Garson)(Interview)
July 1, 2001... Barbara Garson reflects on what became of a $29,500 investment In what may be a first for an enterprising author, Barbara Carson turned the royalties on a book into the subject of the book. She took a 829,500 advance from her publisher and...

The bottom line.(interview of publisher Nancy Bereano)(Interview)
July 1, 2001... Nancy Bereano talks about the challenges of feminist publishing on a shoestring Nancy Bereano founded Firebrand Books in 1985. After fifteen years in which she published over a hundred titles including work by Dorothy Allison, Pat Parker,...

Raw Meditations on Money.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Things sold still have a soul. They are still followed around by their former owner. --Marcel Mauss 1. She Speaks: A School Teacher from Southern India Portions of a mango tree the storm cut down, a green blaze bent into, mud &...

Re: wind.(Review)
July 1, 2001... The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001, 210 pp., $23.00 hardcover. A lice Randall's The Wind Done Gone almost joined a curious historical subset of literature: the category of banned books. Instead, it now...

Jingles all the way.(Review)
July 1, 2001... The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less by Terry Ryan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, 351 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Did you know that some women in the 1950s made a living by entering...

West side stories.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems by Fatema Mernissi. New York: Pocket Books, 2001, 220 pp., $25.95 hardcover. In her 1994 memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, Moroccan sociologist Fatema...

The past recaptured.(Review)
July 1, 2001... A Long-Gone Sun: a poem by Claire Malroux, bilingual edition, translated by Marilyn Hacker. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2000, 184 pp., $15.95 paper. Just when poetry reviewers in America--and many poets too--have begun...

Northern lights.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast by Nancy Lord. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999, 192 PP., $13.00 paper. The Man Who Swam with Beavers by Nancy Lord. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2001, 220 pp., $14.95 paper. ...

Unsentimental journeys.(Review)
July 1, 2001... The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978 edited by Michael Steinman. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001, 347 pp., $27.50 hardcover. I It seems that with each publication of a volume of her...

A fork in the road.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 274 pp., $25.00 hardcover. Wasn't it strange how certain moments, now and then--certain turning points in a life--contained the curled and waiting seeds of...

School of Wales.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Everything You Need by A. L. Kennedy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 549 pp., $25.95 hardcover. As its title suggests, Everything You Need strives to be an all-encompassing book: a big, exhaustive, no-stop-unturned examination of the...

Things fall apart.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Beloved Stranger by Clare Boylan. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001, 309 pp. $24.00 hardcover. Like Clare Boylan's earlier novels, Holy Pictures (1983) and Room for a Single Lady (1997), her sixth, Beloved Stranger, revolves around the...

Frozen in time.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Afterimage by Helen Humphreys. New York: Henry Holt, 2001, 240 pp., $23.00 hardcover. When orphaned Irish housemaid Annie Phelan arrives for work at the country estate of Isabelle and Eldon Dashell in the summer of 1865, her expectations...

A life to remember.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Here's to You, Jesusa! by Elena Poniatowska, translated by Deanna Heikkinen. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 303 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Here's to You, Jesusa! was originally published in 1969 as Hasta no verte Jesus mio. Elena...

Umbilical chords.(Review)
July 1, 2001... In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menendez, New York: Grove Press, 2001, 229 pp., S23.00 hardcover. In Cuba I was a German Shepherd balances upon the established life-line of Cuban-American literature: the hyphen between there and...

Weird and weirder.(Review)
July 1, 2001... The Shape of Things to Come by Maud Casey. New York: William Morrow, 2001, 257 pp., $24.00 hardcover. In the category of novels about thirty-something women who grow disillusioned over the state of their careers and love lives, Maud Casey...

Love story.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 264 pp., $22.00 hardcover. We are led to believe by the prologue to Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for You that a love affair between a seventeen-year-old would-be...

Seven lively sins.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Troublemaker and Other Saints by Christina Chiu. New York: Putnam, 2001, 278 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Sainthood is a status conferred after death, but it's easy to be labeled a troublemaker here in this earthly life. There are plenty of...

Unparalleled lives.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage By Elaine Showalter. New York: Scribner, 2001, 384 pp., $27.50 hardcover. Everybody's doing it: in the fourteenth century, Boccaccio did it in tales of 106 famous women that...

Chutzpah with attitude.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Oreo by Fran Ross. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000, 212 pp., $15.95 paper. Fran Ross's Oreo, one of the few books of satire penned by an African American woman, is a true twenty-first century novel. Its wit is global, hybrid...

Beyond good and evil.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna by Betty De Shong Meador. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000, 225 pp., $40.00 hardcover, $22.95 paper. As many American feminists are aware, the first...

Roads to freedom.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Rape, Incest, Battery: Women Writing Out the Pain edited by Miriam Kalman Harris. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 2000, 312 PP., $17.95 paper. In the last decade we have been making more efforts to record the stories of...

Stan Most (Old Bridge) & Always Close By.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... Stan Most (Old Bridge) After dark, the dogs bark east of the equator and in the absence of lilacs and of rivers encircling the earth the orphans do not sleep well. The grandmothers listen beside the stone bridge. What...

Solitary splendor.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001, 87 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Jane Hirshfield's new poems are notably different in tone from her earlier ones. She is the author of four previous books of...

The Best Artist in Sixth Grade.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... When I was seven I was smitten with an older girl named Kathy Hannan: sister of my classmate Doug and the best artist in sixth grade. She looked like a child in a Victorian picture book- long auburn hair brushed up...

Nothing You Want Anybody To See.(Poem)
July 1, 2001... The baby sleeping in his chair in the beauty shop has a sucking blister on his upper lip. Two weeks old. His mother cutting hair. Women saying how sweet the baby. What a good baby. He whimpers. His mouth opens, sucks air, goes...

Dislocation, dislocation, dislocation.(Review)
July 1, 2001... The Hero's Walk by Anita Rau Badami. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2001, 368 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Smell by Radhika Jha. New York: Soho Press, 2001, 320 pp., $24.00 hardcover. In these intricate, dramatic novels, Anita Rau Badami and...