A too-sweeping polemic arguing that young women feel alienated from a feminist movement overtaken by its male-hating, sexually repressive fringe. In her first book, 28-year-old Denfeld covers some of the same ground as Naomi Wolf, and though she has done far more research, she shows a similar tendency to overstatement: She characterizes the movement as dominated by ``male-bashing,'' antiheterosexuality, goddess worship, and prudishness. Still, some sections of the book are solidly argued. She presents the feminist anti-porn crusade as morally repressive and irrelevant to the majority of women, and she offers a persuasive portrait of feminist theories of ``difference'' (e.g., women are by nature compassionate, cooperative, etc., while men are uncommunicative and competitive) as neo-Victorian stereotypes that put women back on a pedestal. Unfortunately, she presents ``difference'' theory as feminist gospel and never mentions that it is among the most hotly debated topics in academic feminism. Similarly, Denfeld's argument that feminists are out of touch with the everyday needs of most women is only partially convincing. She astutely points out that lack of adequate, affordable child care gets a woeful lack of attention from mainstream feminist organizations. However, she virtually ignores the legions of grassroots feminist groups that are working on other concrete problems like domestic violence, rape, and breast cancer. Denfeld's young interviewees—students, career women, and mothers in their 20s—supposedly represent widespread disaffection with the feminist movement, but they are selected randomly, she admits. What they primarily share is their agreement with Denfeld's own views. More inexplicably, she invariably notes the physical beauty of her subjects (``she is fine-boned, with tapering twists and translucent skin''), which hardly seems relevant to her discussion. A selective portrait of the feminist movement today. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51752-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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