The Women's Review of Books articles from July 2004

The Women's Review of Books archives from July 2004

A Canadian original.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Klee Wyck by Emily Carr. Berkeley, CA: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003, 152 pp., $8.95 paper. The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland. New York: Viking, 2004, 333 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Emily Carr, painter, writer, eccentric, and enigma, was born...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... Dear Women's Review of Books: In response to Adele Logan Alexander's review (May 2004) of the 3 recent biographies of Harriet Tubman, including my own (Bound For the Promised Land) I would like to offer a few comments and correct some...

Menaced love.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Pushkin and the Queen of Spades by Alice Randall. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 320 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Near the middle of Alice Randall's Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, her narrator, Windsor Armstrong, declares, "I am way past...

Our living treasure.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Up to Speed by Rae Armantrout. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, 69 pp., $28.00 hardcover, $13.95 paper. Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 by Marilyn Hacker. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 122 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Technically,...

Smelling the coffee.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... America's More: the Life, Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers by Rick Kogan. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, 260 pp., $23.95 hardcover. A Life in Letters: Ann Landers' Letters to Her Only Child by Margo Howard. New York: Warner, 2003, 393...

Finding her voice.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003, 307 pp., $23.95 hardcover. In Nigeria, a country once known for its rich literary heritage, a younger generation of writers has proclaimed...

Unknown no more.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel by Sanora Babb. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004, 222 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Sanora Babb's quietly powerful novel about the Dust Bowl farmers of the Oklahoma Panhandle and their reluctant...

The failure to communicate.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Little Black Book of Stories by A. S. Byatt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 240 pp., $21.00 hardcover. The varied ways in which human beings can be mute are difficult to convey, especially on the page. The unintelligible mutterings of the...

Love, always complex.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Referred Pain and Other Stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Counterpoint, 2004, 271 pp., $24.00 hardcover. In the tide story of Lynne Sharon Schwartz's new collection Referred Pain (her 17th book in roughly 25 years) Richie...

Jazz at Bradley's.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2004... Jazz at Bradley's Between sets the brass swan sleeps propped against a wall long neck drinking in the darkness that must be swallowed to make a song digress from melody until the veins on the players' necks...

A lady astronaut tests for space.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2004... A Lady Astronaut Tests for Space Secret women's Mercury Project, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1961 Science is good to a point, but how do you measure guts? Can numbers predict who'd dive through a fire to rescue a child? How...

Rendering truth.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Double Vision by Pat Barker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 258 pp., $23.00 hardcover. Double Vision showcases Pal Barker's novelistic strengths and passions: intense psychological and moral responses to world affairs; the...

Brontes through the ages.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Emma Brown by Clare Boylan and Charlotte Bronte. New York: Viking, 2004, 437 pp., $25.95 hardcover. The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller. New York: Knopf, 2004, 351 pp., $25.95 hardcover. On March 31, 1855, a 39-yearold woman died in...

On The Moors, The Brontes.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2004... ON THE MOORS, The Brontes Some shun it here-- call it tree-starved, stunted, drizzled in mist. In untrammeled air, curlews cry. Over bilberry, gorse, spikes of purple heather, the earth is a bog that...

Charlotte Bronte Speaks Of Poet Laureate Robert Southey, 1837.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2004... CHARLOTTE BRONTE SPEAKS OF POET LAUREATE ROBERT SOUTHEY, 1837. How I hungered for his reply! When he informed me I possess in no inconsiderable degree the faculty of verse, my hopes escaped from their cellar,...

Walking on rough water.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Trembling Air by Michelle Boisseau. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2003, 74 pp., $16.00 paper. Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse by Thylias Moss. New York: Persea, 2004, 152 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Bend by Natasha Saje....

Paradises lost.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Little Edens by Barbara Klein Moss. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, 329 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, 247 pp., $23.95 hardcover. W. W. Norton has given us, in the...

Manzanar as metaphor.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Legend of Fire Horse Woman by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. New York: Kensington Books, 2003, 329 pp., $23.00 hardcover. During World War II, nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were born and raised in the United States, were...

Old friends.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... A Seahorse Year by Stacey D'Erasmo. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 360 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Stacey D'Erasmo's new novel stayed with me in the way of an evening spent in good conversation with new friends visiting from San Francisco. I...

People's enemy? Feminist hero?(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Empress Orchid by Anchee Min. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 336 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Reinforcing the notion that truth is stranger--and more entertaining--than fiction, Anchee Min's latest project is to rehabiritate the reputation of...

Fascinating rhythm.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin. Boston: Shambhala Books, 2004, 301 pp., $16.95 paper. Ursula K. Le Guin's recent collection, The Wave in the Mind, is published,...

A novel by chance.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... !Caramba! A Tale Told in Turns of the Card by Nina Marie Martinez. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 384 pp., $25.95 hardcover. In Lava Landing, the imaginary California town of Nina Marie Martinez' first novel, eruptions--volcanic and...

Inge Joseph Bleier and David E. Gumpert, Inge: a Girls Journey through Nazi Europe.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Inge Joseph Bleier and David E. Gumpert, Inge: A Girls Journey through Nazi Europe. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004, 277 pp., hardcover. In his introduction, Gumpert explains that his family is better at writing than other forms of...

Denise Brennan, What's Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Denise Brennan, What's Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 280 pp., paper. Traveling to the town of Sosua on the northern coast of the Dominican...

Wayne Enstice and Janis Stockhouse, Jazzwomen: Conversation with Twenty-one Musicians.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Wayne Enstice and Janis Stockhouse, Jazzwomen: Conversation with Twenty-one Musicians. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004, 368 pp., hardcover. Enstice and Stockhouse endeavor to remove the mantle of obscurity that the women of jazz...

Kim Gutschow, Being a Buddhist Nun: the Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Kim Gutschow, Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 333 pp., hardcover. Gutschow lived for three years among a group of Buddhist nuns in the Indian Himalayas,...

Herta Nagl-Docekal, Feminist Philosophy.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Herta Nagl-Docekal, Feminist Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004, 250 pp., paper. In a "post-feminist" world in which women are equal under law, Nagt-Docekal details the still very much in existence gender hierarchy that keeps women...

Natalya Reinhold, ed., Woolf Across Cultures.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Natalya Reinhold, ed., Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004, 307 pp., paper. Inspired by the Virgina Woolf Across Cultures symposium in Moscow that the editor attended in June 2003, this book gathers together articles...

Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Michele K. Spike, Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa. New York: Vendome, 2004, 300 pp., paper. Written partly as a travelogue, and partly as a biography of a woman of somewhat mythical proportions, Spike...