The Women's Review of Books articles from May 1999

The Women's Review of Books archives from May 1999

Love in Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Edith Anderson. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999,408 pp., $29.50 hardcover. The current flood of memoirs threatens to drown a great literary tradition in a sea of commerce, whether it's a celebrity surrendering her story to a...

In search of Utopia.(80-year-old writer Edith Anderson's memoir of her life in East Berlin, Germany)
May 1, 1999... The current flood of memoirs threatens to drown a great literary tradition in a sea of commerce, whether it's a celebrity surrendering her story to a professional journalist testifying in her name, or the memoirist herself disclosing a central...

Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Steven Weisenburger. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998, 340 pp., $25.00 hardcover. When Toni Morrison's sixth novel was first published in 1987, few of her readers knew the real life story upon which the narrative was based. That is no...

Remembering rebellion.(runaway slave Margaret Garner, Toni Morrison's supposed inspiration for the character Sethe in her book 'Beloved')
May 1, 1999... When Toni Morrison's sixth novel was first published in 1987, few of her readers knew the real life story upon which the narrative was based. That is no longer the case. Between the numerous interviews that the Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel...

Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory and the Perils of Looking Back.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Janice Haaken. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998, 332 pp., $26.00 hardcover. Women's madness has continually exceeded the attempts of medical science to categorize it. The history of psychiatry is peppered with...

To speak the unspeakable.(post-traumatic stress disorder)
May 1, 1999... Women's madness has continually exceeded the attempts of medical science to categorize it. The history of psychiatry is peppered with successive efforts to codify and contain female malaise - hysteria, chlorosis, nervous exhaustion, PMS,...

Anne Frank, the Biography.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Melissa Muller, translated by Rita and Robert Kimber. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 1998, 318 pp., $23.00 hardcover. When I was Anne Frank's age, I hated Anne Frank, and so did other disaffected American Jewish girls...

Plaster saint.(Anne Frank)
May 1, 1999... When I was Anne Frank's age, I hated Anne Frank, and so did other disaffected American Jewish girls in the 1950s; but some of us used her too, to escape from lives we thought were awful, and for this callowness I still cringe. The most...

Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Daphne Patai. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998, 254 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Daphne Patai lives, or claims to, in a grim and frightening world created by late twentieth-century feminists. Frustrated, she explains, by an...

Second thoughts.(heterophobia and sexual harassment)
May 1, 1999... Daphne Patai lives, or claims to, in a grim and frightening world created by late twentieth-century feminists. Frustrated, she explains, by an "unprecedented rapprochement" that promised to end discrimination against women, these feminists...

Slow Dance: A Story of Stroke, Love, and Disability.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Bonnie Sherr Klein in collaboration with Persimmon Blackbridge. Berkeley, CA: Page Mill Press, 1998, 321 pp., $24.95 hardcover. In August 1987, on a campaign trip with her husband to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary, Bonnie...

Coming to terms.(stroke victim Bonnie Sherr Klein)
May 1, 1999... In August 1987, on a campaign trip with her husband to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary, Bonnie Sherr Klein fell ill. She staggered when she walked, her right eyelid drooped and her speech was slurred. Her husband Michael, a...

Cereus Blooms at Night.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Shani Mootoo. New York: Grove Atlantic, 1998, 272 pp., $23.00 hardcover. The legacies of colonialism have wreaked havoc on every population involved, dictating value systems and hierarchies of color and entitlement that exact a...

The Pagoda.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Patricia Powell. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, 251 pp., $23.00 hardcover. The legacies of colonialism have wreaked havoc on every population involved, dictating value systems and hierarchies of color and entitlement that exact a...

Dramas of diaspora.
May 1, 1999... The legacies of colonialism have wreaked havoc on every population involved, dictating value systems and hierarchies of color and entitlement that exact a devastating personal toll. The recent publication of these two novels gives us the chance...

Mrs. Dumpty.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Chana Bloch. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, 69 pp., $17.95 hardcover. The poems in Chana Bloch's third book, Mrs. Dumpty, are satisfyingly arranged in a circle of emotion and history as seamless as a wedding ring....

Four Testimonies.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Kate Daniels. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998, 100 pp., $11.95 paper. The poems in Chana Bloch's third book, Mrs. Dumpty, are satisfyingly arranged in a circle of emotion and history as seamless as a wedding...

Conflicting emotions.(poetry anthologies by Chana Bloch and Kate Daniels)
May 1, 1999... The poems in Chana Bloch's third book, Mrs. Dumpty, are satisfyingly arranged in a circle of emotion and history as seamless as a wedding ring. Chronicling the dissolution of a long marriage, the book is a gallery of photographs of the couple...

Havana Dreams: A Story of Cuba.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Wendy Gimbel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, 224 pp., $24.00 paper. History has not been kind to Cuba. The universal afflictions of con quest and colonialism have been accentuated in Cuba's case by geography: the island's location,...

Scattering the Ashes.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Maria del Carmen Boza. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1998, 370 pp, $15.00 paper. History has not been kind to Cuba. The universal afflictions of con quest and colonialism have been accentuated in Cuba's case by...

Gone but not forgotten.(Cuba)
May 1, 1999... History has not been kind to Cuba. The universal afflictions of con quest and colonialism have been accentuated in Cuba's case by geography: the island's location, only ninety miles away from the US mainland, has forced Cubans into a continuing...

Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Christine Wallace. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 333 pp., $26.00 hardcover. I still remember the intense excitement I felt when I read The Female Eunuch. It must have been in the fall of 1971, because it was the paperback...

Tilting at the windmills.(Germaine Greer)
May 1, 1999... I still remember the intense excitement I felt when I read The Female Eunuch. It must have been in the fall of 1971, because it was the paperback edition, with its famous headless and limbless torso. I still have that battered copy, its loose...

Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum Security Prison.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Members of the AIDS Counseling and Education Program of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998, 400 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Perhaps you've never been to a maximum security prison. If you go, even...

Life sentences.(women prisoners with AIDS)
May 1, 1999... Perhaps you've never been to a maximum security prison. If you go, even as a visitor, you'll feel as if you've left the world behind. Chances are you'll turn off a remote two-lane highway onto a long and unmarked entrance drive, pass through a...

To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Linda O. McMurry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 391 pp., $30.00 hardcover. Now that the US Postal Service has added yet another emblem to the memorial iconography surrounding Malcolm X - his uncompromising visage now appears...

Checkered career.(19th-century African American woman activist Ida B. Wells)
May 1, 1999... Now that the US Postal Service has added yet another emblem to the memorial iconography surrounding Malcolm X - his uncompromising visage now appears on the nation's first-class stamps - one wonders why Ida B. Wells-Barnett has yet to claim a...

Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998, 276 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper. This long-awaited feminist history of Partition documents women's experiences of that event through the personal...

Divided and conquered.(Indian women during the partition of India and Pakistan)
May 1, 1999... This long-awaited feminist history of Partition documents women's experiences of that event through the personal testimonies of those who lived through the trauma of one of India's bloodiest times. In August 1947 the simultaneous independence...

Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Nora Gallagher. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, 241 pp., $23.00 hardcover. According to a brief biography on the endpage of Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, Nora Gallagher is a journalist who has covered such major events...

Ordinary time.(journalist Nora Gallagher's return to her childhood religion)
May 1, 1999... According to a brief biography on the endpage of Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, Nora Gallagher is a journalist who has covered such major events as the Patricia Hearst trial and written for such major periodicals as Life and The...

Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the Problem of Sex.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Adele Clarke. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, 438 pp., $40.00 hardcover. Ever since Linda Gordon suggested two decades ago in Woman's Body, Woman s Right (Viking, 1976) that the alliance of birth-control activists...

Sex and science.
May 1, 1999... Ever since Linda Gordon suggested two decades ago in Woman's Body, Woman s Right (Viking, 1976) that the alliance of birth-control activists with eugenicists transformed the politics of the movement, feminists have been trying to understand the...