The Women's Review of Books articles from October 2001

The Women's Review of Books archives from October 2001

Pity and terror.(Martyrs' Crossing)(Review)
October 1, 2001... Martyrs' Crossing by Amy Wllentz. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, 311 pp., $24.00 hardcover. When an award-winning journalist turns novelist, expectations run turns We're looking for the truth behind the headlines. And if the journalist...

Public intellectual.(Where the Stress Falls)(Review)
October 1, 2001... Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 351 pp., $25.00 hardcover. You showed that it was not necessary to be unhappy," Susan Sontag writes in "A Letter to Borges," "even while one is clear-eyed...

In tune with Billie.(Review)
October 1, 2001... If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday by Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Free Press, 2001, 240 pp., $25.00 hardcover. What a difference Lady Day makes. At the recent Louis Armstrong Festival in New Orleans,...

Mathematical model.(Review)
October 1, 2001... In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery with David Flannery. New York: Workman Publishing, 2001, 341 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Teenager Cracks E-Mail Code." This astonishing story appeared on the front page of The Times in London:...

History lessons.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties Sheila Rowbotham. New York: Verso, 2001, 262 pp., $25.00 hardcover. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!" So said Wordsworth of the rapture that was...

Commitment ceremonies.(Review)
October 1, 2001... The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 268 pp., $23.00 hardcover. In December 1991 I reviewed Nadine Gordimer's Jump and Other Stories in these pages. Everything I said then is still true. This white...

Crime and punishment.(Review)
October 1, 2001... The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult by Karlene Faith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001, 201 pp., $24.95 hardcover. On August 10, 1969, Leslie Van Houten participated in the murders of Leno and...

Compressed air.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Big as Life: Three Tale's for Spring by Maureen Howard. New York: Viking, 2001, 225 pp. $23.95 hardcover. Despite years of literary training, there's a philistine inside me that responds to "experimental" writing with the earnest...

The body in question.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001, 331 pp., $22.00 paper. At an Akron, Ohio women's...

Literate obsessions.(Review)
October 1, 2001... The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos by Anne Carson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 147 pp., $22.00 hardcover. Anne Carson's seventh book, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos is a poem about an...

Strange bedfellows.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America by Angela D. Dillard. New York: NYU Press, 2001, 231 pp., $26.95 hardcover. The black, Latino, female and homosexual conservatives that Angela Dillard discusses in...

Small town girls.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Creatures of Habit: Stories by Jill McCorkle. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2001, 256 pp., $22.95 hardcover. Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail by Bobbie Ann Mason. New York: Random House, 2001, 208 pp., $22.95 hardcover. I will never...

Cautionary tales.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Did You Hear About the Girl Who...?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality by Mariamne H. Whatley and Elissa R. Henken. New York: NYU Press, 2001, 211 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Urban legends are hot. Web sites, newspaper columns...

At the Passing of Calamity Jane, 1903.(Short Story)
October 1, 2001... Mebbe she married the Prince of Pistols, mebbe not. And the ambush story, folks here tell that lots of ways. The girlbaby--I wouldn't know. Y'see, with hail the size of coffee cups, winters so cold your eyeballs near froze, gold making folks...

Life, love and letters.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Eve's Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France by Whitney Walton. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, 289 pp., $49.50 hardcover. Marie d'Agoult: The Rebel Countess by Richard...

When Charles met Alice.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Still She Haunts Me by Katie Roiphe. New York: Dial Press, 2001, 228 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Some of the photographs that Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) took of children are so good that they might have made his reputation even if...

Traveling hopefully.(Review)
October 1, 2001... Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa by Ann Jones. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 268 pp., $25.00 hardcover. It's hard to be a politically correct traveler, and sometimes the parameters of the trip make it virtually impossible....

"Parties Must Be Appropriately Dressed".(Poem)
October 1, 2001... ends the letter with my court date for divorce, suggesting a fashion line for The Uncoupling Woman. Simple black with veil for the Truly-Bereaved among us, the Still-Sure- We-Could-Make-It-Work-ers. Or how...