Women's Review of Books - 2011 Issues

January/February 2011

• The Mules of the World
  Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture
  By Sheri Parks
  Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance
  By Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant
  Reviewed by Stacey Patton
• The Children of Feminism
  The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America
  By Kathleen Gerson
  Reviewed By Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers
• People and Place
  Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears
  By Diane Glancy
  Mattaponi Queen: Stories
  By Belle Boggs
  From the Hilltop
  By Toni Jensen
  Reviewed By Margaret Noori
• Public Displays of Affection
  Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce
  By Tamara Metz
  From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law
  By Martha Nussbaum
  Reviewed By Emily Douglas
• Murphy Brown Feminism
  Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work is Done
  By Susan J. Douglas
  Reviewed By Courtney E. Martin
• The Monster That Won't Stop Coming
  Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States
  Edited by Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Ruby C. Tapia
  Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
  By Victoria Law
  The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison and Fighting for Those Left Behind
  By Safiya Bukhari, edited and with an introduction by Laura Whitehorn
  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
  By Michelle Alexander
  Reviewed By Martha Gies
• Speaking for China
  Pearl Buck in China
  By Hilary Spurling
  Pearl of China
  By Anchee Min
  Reviewed By Rebecca Steinitz
• Poetry
  By Miriam Levine
• Essay: Reading My Mother
  By Edith Pearlman
• Lost Havens
  Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir
  By Marjorie Agosín, translated by Roberta GordensteinConfined: A Novel
  By Mariana DietlDeparting at Dawn: A Novel of Argentina's Dirty War
  By Gloria Lisé, translated by Alice Weldon
  Reviewed By Alicia Partnoy
• Good Reads
  The Novel of Political Turbulence
  By Trish Crapo
• Searching For Father and Country
  Marielitos, Balseros, and Other Exiles
  By Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés
  Havana and Other Missing Fathers
  By Mia Leonin
  Family Sentence: The Search for My Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad
  By Jeanine Cornillot
  Reviewed By Margaret Randall
• New Voices From Eastern Europe
  This Lamentable City
  By Polina Barskova, translated by Ilya Kaminsky, with Kathryn Farris, Rachel Galvin, and Matthew Zapruder
  Stars of the Night Commute
  By Ana Božic˘evic´
  Father Dirt
  By Mihaela Moscaliuc
  Infinite Beginnings
  By Lucyna Prostko
  Reviewed By Lori Wilson
• Obituary
  The Personal is Inescapable (Jill Johnston 1929-2010)
  By Debra Cash

March/April 2011

• Time Passes
  A Visit from the Goon Squad
  By Jennifer Egan
  Reviewed by Jessica Jernigan
• Sexism, Racism, and Hillary
  Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women
  By Rebecca Traister
  Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak
  Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign
  Edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall
  and Johnnetta Betsch Cole;
  Hillary Clinton’s Race for the White House:
  Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail
  By Regina G. Lawrence and Melody Rose
  Reviewed by Emily Douglas
• New Women
  Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century
  By Sheila Rowbotham
  Reviewed by June Purvis
• Unruly Women
  Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917
  By Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild
  Reviewed by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
• The Politics of Point of View
  The Red Thread By Ann Hood; Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In
  Praise of Adoption
  By Scott Simon
  Dreaming a World: Korean Birthmothers Tell Their Stories
  Edited by Sangsoon Hoon
  A Gate at the Stairs
  By Lorrie Moore
  Reviewed by Martha Nichols
• Trading Babies
  International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children
  Edited by Diana Marre and Laura Briggs
  Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas
  By Karen Dubinsky
  Reviewed by E.J. Graff
• The Central Guiding Force
  Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion
  By Bettye Collier-Thomas
  Reviewed by M. Shawn Copeland
• Field Notes Pole Vaulting
  By Robin Becker
• Poetry
  By Susan Rich
• Cartoon
  By Mari Naomi
• Photography - Capacious Beauty
  Photos by Jennette Williams
  Commentary by Cassandra Goldwater
• Nobody Knows My Name
  Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject
  By Kirsten Pai Buick
  Reviewed by Jennifer DeVere Brody
• Work That Body
  Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater,
  Community Engagement, and Working It Out
  By Nadine George-Graves
  STREB: How To Become An Extreme Action Hero
  By Elizabeth Streb
  Reviewed by Debra Cash
• Reverse the Curse
  New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation
  By Chris Bobel
  Reviewed by Rachel Fudge
• A Twinned Narrative
  Specters
  By Radwa Ashour, translated by Barbara Romaine
  Reviewed by M. Lynx Qualey

May/June 2011

• The Judicial Temperament
  In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate
  By Nancy Gertner
  Reviewed by Renée Loth
• Making the Agony Visible
  Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me
  By Bobby Baker (with Dora Whittuck)
  Reviewed by Gail A. Hornstein
• Women Win On and Off the Court
  Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports
  By SusanWare
  Reviewed by Laura Pappano
• A Law Named After A Woman
  Pink Pirates: Contemporary Women Writers and Copyright
  By Caren Irr
  Review by Carole DeSanti
• Discovering a Meaningful Life
  The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth
  By Lillian Nayder
  Reviewed by Lisa Rodensky
• Good Reads
  "A Book Is An Axe": Indian Feminist Publisher, Mandira Sen
  By Trish Crapo
• Love and Delusion
  The Pleasure Seekers
  By Tishani Doshi
  Reviewed by Mandira Sen
• Poetry
  By Christina Hutchins
• Photography
  Amy Thompson Avishai: Revealing A Hidden World
  By Leslie K. Brown
  Photos by Amy Thompson Avishai
• Big Voices
  The Sensual World Re-Emerges
  By Eleanor Lerman;
  No Surrender
  By Ai
  Reviewed by Kate Daniels
• Unreality Television
  Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV
  By Jennifer L. Pozner
  Reviewed by Michelle Dean
• Danticat's Dialogues
  Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
  By Edwidge Danticat
  Reviewed by Danielle Georges
• No "True Womanhood" For Her
  Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography
  By Kate Culkin
  Reviewed by Marilyn Richardson
• Unruly Women
  Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography
  By Susan Cheever;
  Jane Addams: Spirit in Action
  By Louise W. Knight
  Reviewed by Emily Toth
• The Irreducible History
  I Hotel
  By Karen Tei Yamashita
  Reviewed by Mako Yoshikawa

July/August 2011

• Freedom’s Architects
  
  At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History
  of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
  At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New Historyof the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
  By Nancy Gertner; 
  Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
  Edited By Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod, Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner
  Reviewed by Bettina Aptheker
  
• Radical Hotness
  
• Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre


• By Kate Davy
  Reviewed by Robin Bernstein
• Music or Noise
  Pink Noises: Women on Electric Music and Sound 
  By Tara Rodgers
  Reviewed by Deborah Frost
• Adult Education
  A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
  By Stephanie Coontz; Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life
  By Stephanie Staal
  Reviewed by Lori E. Rotskoff
• The Women Of Juárez
  Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera 
  Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, with Georgina Guzmán
  Reviewed by Margaret Randall
• Good Reads
  The Half-Life of Violence
  By Trish Crapo
• Poetry
  By Katherine Sonia
• Cartoon
  Gender Revolution
  By Elisha Lim
• Get Out Your Speculums
• Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave

By Wendy Kline
Reviewed by  Amy Kesselman

• The Missing Middle, Found
  Reshaping the Work-Family Debat
  By Joan C. William
  Reviewed by  Jean Hardisty
• No Blank Slates
  Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
  By  Rebecca M. Jordan-Young;
  Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
  By Cordelia Fine
  Reviewed by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers
• The Sludge of Ageism
  Facing Age: Women Growing Older in Anti-Aging Culture
  By Laura Hurd Clark
  Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in Americ
  By Margaret Gullett
  Reviewed by Margaret Cruikshank
  
• “We Couldn't Do What You Do Here”
  The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life
  By  Jasmin Darznik
  Reviewed by Persis Karim
• Essay
  Founding The Feminist Press
  By Florence Howe
• At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New Historyof the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

September/October 2011

• Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha, and Eleanor: Identifying with ER
  She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker
  By Brigid O’Farrell
  Eleanor Roosevelt: Transformative First Lady
  By Maurine H. Beasley
  Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage
  By Hazel Rowley
  Reviewed by Priscilla Murolo

• An Unshakeable Faith In Humanity
  Memoir of a Gulag Actress
  By Tamara Petkevich
  Reviewed by Cathy A. Frierson

• Growing Up Communist, Coming Out a Folkie Feminist
  My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement
  By Alix Dobkin
  Reviewed by Susanna J. Sturgis

• The Gender Of Survival
  Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust
  Reviewed by Rochelle G. Ruthchild

• Weapons Of The Weak
  On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the US Military in South Korea
  By Sealing Cheng
  Reviewed by Grace Chang

• Field Notes
  Embracing The Range Of Human Feeling
  By Robin Becker

• Photography
  by Laura Heyman; Commentary by Rachel Somerstein

• Poetry
  By Rebecca Foust

  Born To Describe
  Inferno (A Poet’s Novel)
  By Eileen Myles
  Reviewed by Lisa L. Moore

• Nothing But Being Told You Don’t Belong
  Gorée: Point of Departure
  By Angela Barry;
  How To Escape from a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories
  By Tiphanie Yanique
  Reviewed by Rebecca Meacham

• Retrofitted Memory
  ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement
  By Maylei Blackwell
  Reviewed by Miroslava Chávez-García

• The Female Betrayer
  Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal
  By Jerry Lembcke
  Reviewed by Suzanne Kelley McCormack

• Feminist Roots
  Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War
  By Dayo Gore
  Sojourning For Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism
  By Erik McDuffie
  Reviewed by Mary Helen Washington

• A Culture Of Resistance
  Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945
  By Jennifer Guglielmo
  Reviewed by Karen Pastorello

November/December 2011

• But Are They Any Good?
  True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School
  Edited by Susan Gubar
  Reviewed by Audrey Bilger

• The Economy of Shame
  Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh
  By Lamia Karim
  Reviewed by Ghazal Zulfiqar

• Race, Gender, and Nail Polish
  The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work
  By Miliann Kang
  Reviewed by Jennifer Jihye Chun

• The Hysteria Capital of the World
  Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris
  By Asti Hustvedt
  Reviewed by Rosalind Delmar

• Jim and Jane Crow
  Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution
  By Serena Mayeri
  Reviewed by Stacey Patton

• Poetry
  By Jessica Greenbaum

• Good Reads
  What The Dead Would Have Wanted
  By Trish Crapo

• A World of Trouble
  Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight
  By Linda V. Carlisle
  Reviewed by Sandra F. VanBurkleo

• Cartoon
  Grace And Miki
  By Rica Takashima

• “I Like Me Black Face and Me Kinky Hair”
  Una Marson: Selected Poems
  Edited by Alison Donnell
  Reviewed by Erika J. Waters

• Discrimination in the Womb
  Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
  By Mara Hvistendahl
  Reviewed by Amy Agigian

• Two Sexperts
  Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy
  By Carrie Pitzulo;
  Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir
  By Susie Bright
  Reviewed by Emily Toth

• The Nannies’ Dilemma
  Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering
  By Cameron Lynn Macdonald
  Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating
  Communities
  By Tamara Mose Brown
  Reviewed by Rosanna Hertz

• The Keepers of Utopia
  Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas
  By Jessica K. Taft
  Reviewed by Courtney E. Martin

• Untangling the Marriage Knot
  Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China
  By Judith Stacey
  A History of Marriage: From Same-Sex Unions to Private Vows and Common Law, the Surprising Diversity of a Tradition
  By Elizabeth Abbott
  Reviewed by Kristin Celello

The Women's Review of Books receives program support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.


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