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REVENGE OF THE SHE-PUNKS

Name: REVENGE OF THE SHE-PUNKS
Author: Vivien Goldman
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1654-2

A FEMINIST MUSIC HISTORY FROM POLY STYRENE TO PUSSY RIOT

by Vivien Goldman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019

Known as the “Punk Professor” as an adjunct at NYU, Goldman extends her authority here.

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The history of female punk rock, not as a blast from the past but as an ongoing cultural rebellion.

Though the musical assault chronicled here is as contemporary and subversive as Pussy Riot, Goldman (The Book of Exodus: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century, 2006, etc.) was there at the inception. She wrote about the concept in her 1976 piece “Women in Rock,” a topic that would eventually “become a predictable annual staple of rock magazines.” Back then, however, it was such a fresh angle that she had never read anything like it. “It seems,” she wrote, “that a woman’s underground is suddenly emerging overground….They’re a threat to men because they challenge male supremacy in a citadel that has never been attacked before.” More than four decades later, this illuminating critical analysis turns the table on punk history, which generally focuses on the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash (and the Ramones in America) while relegating the female side to footnote status. Here, the men are more like footnotes, as the author celebrates, among others, the Slits, the Raincoats, and X-Ray Spex. While Goldman jumps around, hopping from band to band, she places the female musical foment within the critical context of feminist theory and the cultural context of society’s upheaval. She also highlights many artists who have remained obscure, showing how female punk has been an international phenomenon, extending to Afropunk and female punk rockers throughout Asia. Her chapters focus on specific topics, including identity, protest, money, and love, and she reframes conventional assumptions from a feminist perspective: “Instead of simply asking what makes a girl and boy fall in love, the question has also become, What makes a girl a girl, or the reverse? If you don’t recognize yourself, love is harder to find; you don’t know who might fit. Until you try.” Each chapter also includes a recommended listening list.

Known as the “Punk Professor” as an adjunct at NYU, Goldman extends her authority here.

Pub Date: May 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4773-1654-2

Page Count: 232

Publisher: Univ. of Texas

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | WOMEN & FEMINISM | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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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 lynchingâ€”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.