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STILL MAD

AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

A well-rendered who’s-who guide to the contemporary women’s movement.

Four decades after their influential book, The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar offer a comprehensive, evolutionary update.

In their latest illuminating collaboration, the authors seek to show “how generations of literary women tapped the enigmas of their own lives to shape visions of cultural transformation.” In the 1950s, young women experienced “extraordinary confusions,” as their “lives reflected but also rebelled against the conformity of the decade.” “Feminism incubated” in the lives and writings of Sylvia Plath, Diane di Prima (the “feminist beatnik”), Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde. It continued to erupt in the 1960s, especially with Adrienne Rich’s politically engaged poetry and Nina Simone’s “ribald jokes and daring garb,” which reflected “a shift in both racial and sexual attitudes.” The sexual revolution and the maelstrom created by the Vietnam War brought forceful voices to the forefront in the works of Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown. Susan Sontag welcomed the rise of new forms of female eroticism and leftist politics while Joan Didion “would deplore them.” Gilbert and Gubar call 1968 “feminism’s annus mirabilis” as protests sparked the women’s liberation movement, here and abroad. Denise Levertov’s activist poetry and clashes between feminism and the Black Power movement captured the public’s attention. The 1970s brought the publication of Kate Millett’s “landmark” book of feminist literary criticism, the controversial Sexual Politics, and bestselling feminist-infused novels by Toni Morrison, Erica Jong, and Rita Mae Brown. Ms. magazine and Judy Chicago’s “celebratory artwork,” The Dinner Party, were born. In the 1980s and ’90s, feminism would take hold in “parts of the entertainment world and in the academy.” Andrea Dworkin took on sexual violence, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler battled the “hetero-/homosexual divide.” More recently, Claudia Rankine, N.K. Jemisin, and others have worked to create alliances with the Black Lives Matter movement. Gilbert and Gubar deftly explore decades of political and cultural history to fashion this timely and valuable book.  

A well-rendered who’s-who guide to the contemporary women’s movement.

Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-393-65171-3

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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