The Women's Review of Books articles from May 2002

The Women's Review of Books archives from May 2002

Letters.
May 1, 2002... To the Editor: I was a little bemused to see different kinds of heat generated by the ad from Spinsters Ink announcing the new expanded edition of Look Me in the Eye and naming my late partner Barbara Macdonald as "the first to address...

Star of India.
May 1, 2002... Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, 592 pp., $35.00 hardcover. One of my earliest childhood memories is that of sneaking up on Indira Gandhi. The Congress Party Session had...

Sisterhood is powerless.
May 1, 2002... Woman's Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chesler. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, 551 pp., $22.95 hardcover. Envious, competitive, aggressive, hostile, indifferent, malicious, hateful, sadistic, tyrannical,...

In love with mathematics.
May 1, 2002... Nihilist Girl by Sofya Kovalevskaya, translated, by Natasha Kolchevska with Mary Zirin. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001, 139 pp., $8.95 paper. Perhaps more than any other woman in the nineteenth century, she...

Public transportation.
May 1, 2002... The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts by Sian Rees. New York: Theia/Hyperion, 2002, 236 pp., $23.95 hardcover. It was difficult enough to get by in...

Jumped-up smarty-pants.
May 1, 2002... Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 219 pp., $18.00 hardcover. Margaret Atwood's latest book offers her answer to an old cultural question: What is a writer? For the...

The language of occupation.
May 1, 2002... Refugees in our Own Land: Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem by Muna Hamzeh. London, UK and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001, 165 pp., $25.00 hardcover. In 1990, expatriate Palestinian American Muna Hamzeh decided to...

Uncompromising talent.
May 1, 2002... Open the Door: The Life and Music of Betty Carter by William Bauer. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 456 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Betty Carter stands with musicians like Miles Davis as one of jazz's true revolutionaries....

Experiments in feminism.
May 1, 2002... Drafts 1-38, Toll by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001, 278 pp., $35.00 hardcover, $17.95 paper. The modernist era is rife with long-poem projects, including Eliot's The Waste Land, H.D.'s Trilogy and...

Breaking the rules.
May 1, 2002... Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks by Alice Echols. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 303 pp., $17.50 paper. How bad does Alice Echols dare to be? Pretty baaaad, even if she seems almost conciliatory at...

To the ends of the earth.
May 1, 2002... It's been almost no time since publication of the first modern studies of those rare and peculiar creatures, the "lady travelers." Dorothy Middleton's Victorian Lady Travellers laid the groundwork in 1965. Dea Birkett followed in 1989 with...

Women become human.
May 1, 2002... Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective edited by Marjorie Agosin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001, 339 pp., $25.00 paper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of the earliest of American feminist theorists with a...

Commerce.(Poem)
May 1, 2002... Once upon a time I was a lady. --Naila Kljaho, 61, Dobrinja, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1997 Her day is spent aiming for trade. Naila collects brass cartridges that once tore through her days, dizzy with powder and fire. ...

When we smoked.(Poem)
May 1, 2002... We were happier when we smoked, when we lit up, toked a Camel between classes, or froze our asses off on someone's late December party porch. We were happier when the cigarette box was crammed into our pockets, when we socked...

Forced choice.
May 1, 2002... Women in Combat: Civic Duty or Military Liability? by Lorry M. Fenner and Marie E. deYoung. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001, 207 PP., $19.95 paper. The United States is now fighting America's New War. What's new...

Mothering on the edge.
May 1, 2002... Breeder: Real Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers edited by Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender. Seatde, WA: Seal Press, 2001, 268 PP., $16.00 paper. Most books, magazines and web sites on mothering go for the mainstream, assuming a...

The limits of liberation.
May 1, 2002... Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982 by Jane Gerhard. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 192 pp., $17.50 paper. There was a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s...