The Women's Review of Books articles from November 2004

The Women's Review of Books archives from November 2004

A letter from the editor.(Editorial)
November 1, 2004... Dear Friends, I'm writing to tell you the disheartening news that The Women's Review of Books will be suspending publication after we put out our December 2004 issue. Like many feminist and progressive publications, the Women's Review...

Against interpretation.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 320 pp., $24.00 hardcover. Although Cynthia Ozick is commonly known as a novelist, her reputation as a writer of imaginative prose really rests on her...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2004... Dear WRB: I want to add one thought to AnaLouise Keating's moving tribute to Gloria Anzaldfia. As a writer, Gloria was fierce, insisting on her primary commitment to her writing. She stunned me several times by quitting or refusing jobs...

Getting ahead.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 216 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Necessary Dreams: The Vital Role of Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by...

On owning land.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Above the Clearwater: Living On Stolen Land by Bette Lynch Husted. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2004, 168 pp., $18.95 paper. Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm by Jane Brox. New York: North Point Press, 2004, 193...

The original media icon.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland by Linda J. Lumsden. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004, 280 pp, $29.95 hardcover. She who speaks truth to power is most likely to be heard if she is gorgeous and flattering. Decades...

The 21st-century family.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... The Love Wife by Gish Jen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 379 pp., $25.00 hardcover. Novelists have borrowed some neat tricks from filmmakers. The jump cut, the flashback. With The Love Wife, Gish Jen (Who's Irish?, Typical American)...

She'll Wait.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... She'll Wait For the grayest day in September. Until she remembers the word for rhododendron, it disappears from her mind, truant, sometimes months at a time. For newer words. For a bill from the cleaning...

The Orchard.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... The Orchard In the orchard fruit still on the tree, dark, bruise-red, undropped. Fruit not waiting to drop. The apples look suspended as if they might hold there forever, not one meant for...

Skating Lessons of the Fifties.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Skating Lessons of the Fifties Passing the round pond near the weeds I say to my son, There it is. Where he taught me to skate. You remember. Your Grandpa. He smoothed the argyle socks over toes. Laced the...

First Recital.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... First Recital The wristletted girls skidding onto the stage before us seemed slim divas coaxing arabesques and plies from pencil legs, pain and humor traveling the dark audience like a wave as we watched from the...

War Horse.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... War Horse I remember her crying twice, my war horse mother. The first time, my brothers Dan and Gene were playing football one morning in the living room and crashed into the brown sectional sofa, the piece that...

Postcard.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Postcard After the birth, we sent you out to the world-- nine shrieking pounds on the hospital bed, a broom of black hair sprung from your head. On your wrist: a bracelet with a number that matched the...

Variation on a Theme by King David.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Variation on a Theme by King David Praise to you! Praise to you my snappy love! Praise you in clean socks on a Queens-bound train; praise you for your famous avocado sandwiches; Praise you from Brooklyn...

American Poem.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... American Poem --what came into my hands as change, I didn't discover until later. We were home when I showed Paula the marvelous ordinary 5 dollar bill with those few handwritten lines on its pillared...

Michiko's Plan.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Michiko's Plan I look for faultlines in Michiko's plan to drive far North when she decides it's time, turn off the engine, curl up into cold. Michiko is not sick. She is my age, 72. We are sipping green tea in her...

Manhattan Skyscraper WWII.(Poetry)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Manhattan Skyscraper WWII 1939 The closet-like elevator in our skyscraper creaks as it descends. I'm alone with Emil the elevator operator, a short balding man who has come from Germany, speaks with an accent,...

Urban Renewal.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Urban Renewal That little Spanish-Chinese place on 81st & Amsterdam where you asked me to marry you is gone-- its row of glazed ducks in the window. Where you asked me to marry you, I don't remember what we...

On Passing the Museum of Natural History.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... On Passing the Museum of Natural History This evening, from the back seat of a shoddy cab, as we bump along the pitted street where construction for months reduced this city block to rubble and its neighbors to nervous...

The Yea Sayer.(Poetry)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... The Yea Sayer I repair sere codices and tattered bodices: I seem to have an affinity for mediating between the sacred and the profane. I accept my lot, trudging from marketplace to liturgy, from wheelbarrow to...

Paula's Circle.(Poetry)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Paula's Circle Evenings, we gather at Marcella's Aventine mansion. Our hostess softly greets each of us: pigeon-toed Principia, Asella with her lopsided wigs, mild-mannered Furia-- (oh irony inherent in her name)--lithe...

Waiting for Lady Reason.(The Sex of Knowing )(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... The Sex of Knowing by Michele Le Doeuff, translated by Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code. New York: Routledge, 2003, 242 pp., $26.95 paper. Michele Le Doeuff's third brilliant book brings her characteristic erudition and razor-edged wit to...

The Times is not a-changin': your impression of the New York Times and other prestigious book review publications (present company excluded) is correct: the women are missing.
November 1, 2004... Decades ago, research showed that children assumed only men could be doctors, because that was what they saw in books. How wonderful it would be if this important discovery informed the decisions made by the editor of arguably the most powerful...

The mother-daughter puzzle.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... In My Mother's House by Margaret McMullan. New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press, 2003, 262 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Mother-daughter relationships were made for literature. They offer generous helpings of passion, conflict, and drama, all...

Dwelling in ambivalence.(three works by Judith Butler)(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... The Judith Butler Reader edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 336 pp., $29.95 paper. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence by Judith Butler. New York: Verso, 2004, 160 pp., $25.00...

Heading for dystopia.(Visa for Avalon )(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Visa for Avalon by Bryher. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2004, 170 pp., $15.00 paper. Born Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1894, daughter of one of England's wealthiest men, Bryher was well known in her own day as the author of historical novels....

A new feminist story.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave by Benita Roth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 286 pp., $22.99 paper. It's a familiar story: The American women's liberation...

Making sense of faith.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, Epistemology by Ruth Frankenberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 308 pp., $21.95 paper. I have to admit I approached Ruth Frankenberg's new book, Living Spirit, Living Practice...

The genius Colette.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Colette by Julia Kristeva, translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 521 pp., $35.00 hardcover. I love that woman's writing it is an immediate pleasure, without 'why,"' opens Julia Kristeva's book on...