Women's Review of Books - 2014 Issues

January/February 2014

• Emboldened Actors on the World Stage
  The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2000
  By Jane Gerhard
  Reviewed by Elissa Auther

• Jane Franklin Beats Through
  

  Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
  By Jill Lepore
  Reviewed by Martha Saxton

• The Partners
  Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins
  By Julia M. Allen
  Reviewed by Bettina Aptheker

• With Just a Little More Time...
  The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
  By Margalit Fox
  Reviewed by Susanna J. Sturgis

• Success and its Failures
  Rape is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming Are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintince Rape Crisis
  By Jody Raphael
  Up Against a Wall: Rape Reform and the Failure of Success
  By Rose Corrigan
  Reviewed by Marianne Wesson

• Women Power and Politics
  Women in the Club: Gender and Policy Making in the Senate
  By Michele L. Swers
  Women and Executive Office: Pathways and Performance
  Edited by Melody Rose
  Contagious Representation: Women's Political Representation in Democracies Around the World
  By Frank C. Thames and Margaret S. Williams
  Reviewed by Glenna Matthews

• Photography
  Unembedding War Photography: An Interview with Kael Alford

• A Complicated Life
  Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life
  By Dana Greene
  A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov
  By Donna Krolik Hollenberg
  Reviewed by Kate Daniels

• Field Notes
  Conversations Recollected and Invented
  By Robin Becker

• Poetry
  By Chana Bloch

• Linked Stories of Love's Difficulties
  Horse People
  By Cary Holladay
  The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story
  By Joan Wickersham
  Reviewed by Mako Yoshikawa

• The Real Camille
  The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis
  By Julie Kavanagh
  Reviewed by Carole DeSanti

• The Reclusive Revolutionary
  One Day in December: Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution
  By Nancy Stout
  Reviewed by Margaret Randall

• Friends But Not Equals
  My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann
  Edited by Irene Goldman-Price
  Reviewed by Carol J. Singley

• Streams and Undercurrents
  Groundswell: Grassroots Feminist Activism in Postwar America
  By Stephanie Gilmore
  Reviewed by Amy Kesselman

March/April 2014

• Incurable
  Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and The New Politics of Imprisonment
  By Jill A. McCorkel
  Reviewed by Susan Sered

• Growing Up Right
  

  Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right
  By Claire Conner
  Reviewed by Kathleen Blee

• Half Full or Half Empty
  Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Aging
  By Lynne Segal
  Reviewed by Alix Kates Shulman

• Speaking Out and Carrying a Big Stick
  Pink Sari Revolution: A Tale of Women and Power in India
  By Amana Fontanella-Khan
  Reviewed by Smitha Radhakrishnan

• People's Culture
  Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II
  By Farah Jasmine Griffin
  The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry
  By Keith Clark
  Reviewed by Cheryl Wall

• Queer Theory and Critical History, Together at Last
  Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War
  By Laura Doan
  Reviewed by Martha Vicinus

• Curioser and Curiouser
  Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism
  By Hilary M. Schor
  Reviewed by Jan Clausen

• Risk-Taking Poets
  In Broken Latin
  By Annette Spaulding-Convey
  Odessa
  By Patricia Kirkpatrick
  Exit Civilian
  By Idra Novey
  Grand & Arsenal
  By Kerri Webster
  Reviewed by Carol Bere

• Good Reads
  A Gir Like You
  By Trish Crapo

• Poetry
  By Charlotte Holmes

• Cartoon
  By Becky Hawkins

• Mother/Nature
  Claire of the Sea Light
  By Edwidge Danticat
  Reviewed by Tiphanie Yanique

• The Militant, His Wife, and His Brother
  The Lowland
  By Jhumpa Lahiri
  Reviewed by Valerie Miner

• What is Left Out and What is Recorded
  Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom
  By Mimi Sheller
  Reviewed by A. Lynn Bolles

• Permanence and Flux
  Fools
  By Joan Silber
  Reviewed by Rachel Somerstein

• The Whispers of Trees and Water, Moths and Mud
  Beyond Nature's Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History
  By Nancy C. Unger
  Kissed By a Fox and Other Stories of Friendship in Nature
  By Priscilla Stuckey
  The Forest House: A Year's Journey Into the Landscape of Love, Loss and Starting Over
  By Joelle Fraser
  Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands
  By Sara Loewen
  Reviewed by Gretchen Legler

May/June 2014

• Changing the Definition of Family
  Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since the Second World War
  By Daniel Winunwe Rivers
  Reviewed by Dana Rudolph

• The Complexity of Life in Iran
  

  Kissing the Sword: A Prison Memoir
  By Shahrnush Parsipur
  The Book of Fate
  By Parinoush
  The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons
  By Goli Taraghi
  Reviewed by Amy Montlagh

• "A Prostitution of Her Sex"
  Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America's First Women Lawyers
  By Jill Norgren
  Gender and Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter
  By Sally J. Kenney
  Reviewed by Sandra F. VanBurkleo

• Sports Bras and Ponytails
  Qualifying Times: Points of Change in US Women's Sport
  By Jamie Schultz
  Reviewed by Susan Ware

• People's Culture
  Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II
  By Farah Jasmine Griffin
  The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry
  By Keith Clark
  Reviewed by Cheryl Wall

• The Future of Disability
  Feminist Queer Crip
  By Alison Kafer
  Reviewed by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

• On the Way, But Not There Yet
  Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua
  By Cymene Howe
  Reviewed by Florence Babb

• Late Marriage, Independent Women, and Democracy
  Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England
  By Don Herzog
  Reviewed by Mary S. Hartman

• Going Home
  Ghana Must Go
  By Taiye Selasi
  We Need New Names
  By NoViolet Bulawayo
  Reviewed by Heather Hewett

• Field Notes
  The Hard Work of Hope
  By Robin Becker

• Poetries of Affirmation
  Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice
  By Daisy Fried
  Tiger Heron
  By Robin Becker
  Reviewed by Alicia Ostriker

• Poetry
  By Barbara L. Greenberg

• Opening the Red Gate
  Shadow Woman: The Extraordinary Career of Pauline Benton
  By Grant Hayter-Menzies
  Reviewed by Debra Cash

• Families and "Alienists"
  Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in England
  By Sarah Wise
  Reviewed by Gayle Davis

• From Stalin's Elite to the Gulag
  Agnessa: From Paradise to Purgatory: A Voice From Stalin’s Russia
  By Agnessa Ivanovna Mironova-Koroli
  Reviewed by Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

• Autobiografiction
  The Art of Joy
  By Goliarda Sapienza
  Reviewed by Rosalind Delmar

July/August 2014

• An African American Prima Donna
  American Cocktail: A "Colored Girl" in the World
  By Anita Reynolds, with Howard Miller, Edited by George Hutchinson
  Reviewed by Marilyn Richardson

• The Gendered Politics of Seriousness
  

  Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises As if Women Mattered
  By Cynthia Enloe
  Reviewed by Charlotte Bunch

• A Medical Sea-Change
  Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine
  By Naomi Rogers
  Reviewed by Patricia Kullberg

• Genital Mutilation, Western Style
  Making Sense of Intersex: Changing Ethical Perspectives in Biomedicine
  By Ellen K. Feder
  Reviewed by Catherine Clune-Taylor

• Leaders, Not Ladies
  He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates
  By Deborah Jordan Brooks
  More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State Legislatures
  By Susan J. Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu
  Reviewed by Joanna Weiss

• Racializing Beauty
  Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South
  By Blain Roberts
  Reviewed by Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant

• Volunteering for Blackness
  Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance
  By Carla Kaplan
  Reviewed by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson

• Cartoon
  By Jennifer Crute

• The Golden Age
  Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics
  By Mike Madrid
  Reviewed by Joan Hilty

• Good Reads
  Inevitable Conclusions
  By Trish Crapo

• From in-Law to Outlaw
  Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012
  By Adrienne Rich
  Reviewed by Florence Howe

• Poetry
  By Maria Terrone

• I Am His Other
  Know the Night: a Memoir of Survival in the Small Hours
  By Maria Mutch
  Reviewed by Kelly Davio

• Subterfuges, Survivals, and Liberation
  The Infamous Rasalie (Rosalie l'Infame)
  By Evelyne Trouillot, Translated by M.A. Salvadon
  Reviewed by Danielle Legros Georges

• Fixated on Men, but Saved by Women
  Clever Girl
  By Tessa Hadley
  Reviewed by Valerie Miner

• The Poet and Her Mother
  Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore
  By Linda Leavell
  Reviewed by Robin G. Schulze

September/October 2014

• How the Battle of Memory Was Won
  The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898
  By Lisa Tetrault
  Reviewed by Bonnie J. Dow

• Waitressing in the Sky
  

  The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon
  By Victoria Vantoch
  Reviewed by Priscilla Murolo

• Becoming Raced and Classed
  Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region
  By Wanda A. Hendricks
  Reviewed by Corinne T. Field

• Not Known Persons
  Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
  By Gaiutra Bahadur
  Reviewed by Indira Karamcheti

• The Noble Terrorist
  The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution
  By Lynne Ann Hartnett
  Reviewed by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

• The Daughters' Stories
  My Mother's Funeral
  By Adriana Paramo
  My Mother's Wars
  By Lillian Faderman
  Nothing Holds Back the Night
  By Delphine de Vigan
  You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)
  By Eleni Sikelianos
  Reviewed by Carol Sternhell

• Photography
  Mary Ellen Mark's Long-Term Relationships
  Photography by Mary Ellen Mark and Commentary by Ellen Feldman

• Communities of Artistic Women
  In Her Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States
  By Jennifer Kelly
  Five Lives in Music: Women Performers, Composers, and Impresarios from the Baroque to the Present
  By Cecelia Hopkins Porter
  Reviewed by Kate Doyle

• Field Notes
  Hurtling Ahead
  By Robin Becker

• Post-Soviet Poetry
  Paul Klee's Boat
  By Anzhelina Polonskaya
  Relocations: 3 Contemporary Russian Women Poets
  Edited by Catherine Ciepiela
  Reviewed by Kelly Cherry

• Poetry
  By Suzanne Gardinier

• "What do we see? What do we not see?"
  So How's the Family? and Other Essays
  By Arlie Russell Hochschild
  Reviewed by E.J. Graff

• Doing the Dirty Work
  Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age
  Edited by Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, Anna Romina Guevara, Maura Toro-Morn, and Grace Chang
  Reviewed by Gwendolyn Beetham

• Black and Native Women: Not Quite Sisters
  Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890
  By Linda Williams Reese
  Reviewed by Patricia Penn Hilden

• The Dynamic Dyad
  Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome
  By Sarah S. Richardson
  Reviewed by Monica J. Casper

• The Banshee's Wail
  The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers
  By Sally Barr Ebest
  Reviewed by Mary O'Donoghue

November/December 2014

• The Fire Will Not Consume Us
  Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger
  By Kelly Cogswell
  Reviewed by Carmen Maria Machado

• Global Family Making
  

  Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America
  By Catherine Ceniza Choy
  Reviewed by Miliann Kang

• The Glass Cliff
  The New Soft War on Women
  By Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett
  What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know<br " />By Joan C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey
  Reviewed by Helaine Olen

• Specifically Universal
  Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
  By Roz Chast
  Reviewed by Rebecca Steinitz

• Citizenship and Sexual Coercion
  Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation
  By Estelle B. Freedman
  Reviewed by Danielle L. McGuire

• Virgin Mary, Become a Feminist!
  Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
  By Masha Gessen
  Reviewed by Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

• Women's Complicity
  Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
  By Wendy Lower
  Reviewed by Elizabeth Heineman

• Cartoon
  Ekphrasis
  By Amy Martin
  

• Good Reads
  Moments of Crisis
  By Trish Crapo

• Who Am I?
  Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag
  By A.K. Summers
  Reviewed by Samantha Meler

• Middlemarch and Me
  My Life in Middlemarch
  By Rebecca Mead
  Reviewed by Martha Gies

• Poetry
  By Catherine Freeling

• Art and Activism
  How It Feels to Be Free:
  Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement
  By Ruth Feldstein
  Reviewed by Salamishah Tillet

• Ambitious Assemblages
  Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe
  By Matthew Pratt Guterl 
  Reviewed by Florence Ladd

• The Value of History
  Citizenship and the Origins of Women’s History in the United States
  By Teresa Anne Murphy
  Reviewed by Eileen Ka-May Cheng

• Beyond Rescue
  Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States
  By Denise Brennan
  Reviewed by Melissa Hope Ditmore

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