A writer's thoughtful look at the personal and social implications of her foray into the ``manly art'' of boxing. In 1993, after lawsuits had forced the opening of amateur boxing to women, Denfeld joined the Grand Avenue boxing gym in Portland, Ore., becoming a competitive and successful fighter. In this book, Denfeld describes her experience in sweaty and bruising detail, and uses boxing as a window on the politics of female aggression. She recounts the suspicion and discomfort of the men at the gym when she began her training and how, as she became more skillful, they came to see her not as a woman but as a fighter. Similarly, as her own confidence developed, Denfeld found that she could be every bit as aggressive in the ring as the men. Denfeld argues that the denial of female aggression and the trivialization of female violence are roadblocks to women's equality—depriving them of opportunities in sports and the military, for example. It is also socially dangerous; women's sexual abuse of children, for instance, is rarely discussed. This book has greater authority than The New Victorians (1995), Denfeld's critique of contemporary feminists: She knows more about boxing than she did about feminism. But it would have been even more interesting if she had woven her own background into this story. She makes no mention of her biracial identity, although society, as she notes, regards the aggression of women of color differently from that of white women. Denfeld also grew up poor, which she briefly mentions; since class, too, shapes women's relationship to aggression, anger, and competition, this warrants more discussion. Despite some holes, a well-rendered personal account of female athletic experience—a rare offering. Denfeld also makes an engaging contribution to popular discussion of female aggression, a subject that clearly merits closer attention. (For more on violent females, see David E. Jones's Women Warriors, p. 1783.)
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-51960-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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