The Women's Review of Books articles from September 2001

The Women's Review of Books archives from September 2001

The age of anxiety.(Mother Millett)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Mother Millett by Kate Millett. New York: Verso, 2001, 308 pp., $25.00 hardcover. Kate Millett's new book looks at first like a poem of family reconciliation. Helen Millett's advancing age and illness bring her middle daughter, "the...

Letters.(Review)
September 1, 2001... To the editor: Those of us who thought we had written good lesbian novels are surely grateful to Suzanne Sowinska for bringing to our attention the "rescue" of the genre by Canadian writer Marion Douglas ("Mixed Messages," June 2001). All...

Hostages to history.(The Holocaust Kid)(Review)
September 1, 2001... The Holocaust Kid by Sonia Pilcer. New York: Persea Books, 2001, 180 pp., $23.95 hardcover. Readers of Sonia Pilcer's 1978 novel, Teen Angel, know her as a master of early sixties adolescent girl rebellion, recapturing that time of...

Business as usual.(The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values)(Review)
September 1, 2001... The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values by Nancy Folbre. New York: The New Press, 2001, 256 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Like a movie blockbuster of years L past, partriarchy made a major come-back in the summer of 2001. And just like at...

An affair to remember.(Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan. New York: New York University Press, 2001,340 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $18.95 paper. Anyone who was breathing during 1998 and 1999,...

From roots to routes.(Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America by Sandra Patton. New York: New York University Press, 2000, 223 pp. $55.00 hardcover, $18.50 paper. When my older daughter was in the first grade, she brought home the inevitable...

Dealing with difference.(The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights)(Review)
September 1, 2001... The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights by Arlene Stein. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, 257 pp., $27.50 hardcover. One evening in the early 1980s an overflow crowd of sex radicals and...

Multiple personality.(The Sappho Companion)(Review)
September 1, 2001... The Sappho Companion edited and introduced by Margaret Reynolds. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 422 pp., $27.95 hardcover. Saucy prostitute or sedate schoolmistress, lesbian lover or heterosexual suicide, doting mother or New Woman, Greek muse...

The pursuit 0f happiness.(In Therapy We Trust: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment)(Review)
September 1, 2001... In Therapy We Trust: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment by Eva S. Moskowitz. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 384 PP., $34.95 hardcover. Eva Moskowitz is alarmed. Americans, she says, are in the grip of an...

Women or children first?(Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents by Mary Lyndon Shanley. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, 199 pp., $27.00 hardcover. If you want to...

Hatchet woman.(Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life by Fran Grace. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001, 400 pp., $35.00 hardcover. Ask a friend if they recognize the name "Carry Nation," and the reply will most likely identify her as a...

Eve Speaks.(Poem)
September 1, 2001... Once I was in Eden and I walked, blithely, out of it. How was I to know? There seemed another Eden, just next door. It looked familiar, and I was tired of the new. All day he strolled around with his name tags ...

Suburbia and its discontents.(Getting a Life)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Getting a Life by Helen Simpson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 197 pp., $22.00 hardcover. These days, women's trade fiction seems to divide between Bridget and Oprah (or, to put it in television terms, Sex and the City and Touched by an...

Ahead of her time.(The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, The Original Deaf-Blind Girl)(Review)
September 1, 2001... The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, The Original Deaf-Blind Girl by Elisabeth Gitter. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, 325 pp., $25.00 hardcover. Elisabeth Gitter knowledgeably resurrects the absorbing story of...

Ghost stories.(Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America by Maureen Waters. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001, 149 PP., $24.95 hardcover. I was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, but grew up thinking and speaking of Dublin, Ireland, as...

Patterns of a subculture.(Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas by Esther Newton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2001 328 pp., $18.95 paper. In a letter to her colleagues, Esther Newton tells us, she once wrote that anthropologists have studied...

Mismatched modernists.(Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances by Anne Herrmann. New York: Palgrave, 2000, 197 pp., $49.95 hardcover. This book takes up a worthy topic. Anne Herrmann gathers together a collection of transgressive individuals whose...