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VALERIE SOLANAS

THE DEFIANT LIFE OF THE WOMAN WHO WROTE SCUM (AND SHOT ANDY WARHOL)

As Fahs portrays her, Solanas emerges less as “a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish” than as a woman...

A sympathetic biography of a troubled and troubling woman.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) shot Andy Warhol, almost fatally wounding him. That act and her writing of a feminist manifesto titled SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) made her a cult heroine in her own time. Fahs (Gender Studies/Arizona State Univ.; Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives, 2011, etc.), believing Solanas to be a brilliant and “startling prescient,” faced considerable challenges in working on this biography: Solanas’ mother burned her daughter’s papers after Valerie died, and many who knew her refused to talk with Fahs. “Valerie famously rejected, alienated, and repeatedly threatened to kill nearly every friend she had,” writes the author. A polarizing figure, Solanas was championed by such feminists as Ti-Grace Atkinson and Florynce Kennedy, the lawyer who defended her for attempted murder, but was reviled by others. The National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, was divided about associating itself with her. A radical faction interpreted Solanas’ act as revolutionary, “a symbol of women’s rage.” Liberal feminists, focused on abortion rights reform, saw the enraged, violent Solanas as “NOW’s worst nightmare.” For her part, Solanas vehemently rejected expressions of solidarity. “SCUM is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs,” she wrote to Atkinson, who had praised the manifesto. “Therefore, please refrain from commenting on SCUM + from ‘defending’ me. I already have an excess of ‘friends’ out there who are suffocating me.” Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic after the shooting, Solanas descended ever more deeply into madness, spending her last 20 years in and out of mental hospitals. She claimed that a transmitter had been planted in her uterus and that an entity she called "the Mob" was after her. She died impoverished and alone.

As Fahs portrays her, Solanas emerges less as “a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish” than as a woman destroyed by her own overpowering demons.

Pub Date: April 22, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-55861-848-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Feminist Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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