|
Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar
Telling the Utterly Confounding Truth
A review by Cheryl Strayed
I'll say it now: Irene Vilar had 15 abortions in 15 years. That's the blunt opening one-liner that fails to tell the whole story of this beautiful and brave book. Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict is a memoir less about 15 abortions than it is the story of a young woman who never got enough love. At age 8, Vilar watched her mother commit suicide by leaping out of a car. At 12, she read The Diary of Anne Frank and felt scarred -- not from the horror of the Holocaust, but because she so deeply understood the plight of a girl who lived in an attic and had to ask...
Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev by Lorraine Mortimer
The Last Yugoslav
A review by Richard Byrne
It is one of the most perplexing mysteries of world cinema. In the early 1970s Dusan Makavejev was the brightest star in the avant-garde firmament. A breathless dispatch in the New York Times filed from a midnight screening of one of Makavejev's films at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival offers a glimpse of his glow:
Somewhere along in every film festival there comes that one film that electrifies everyone, that sets everyone from the man in the street to critics to the president of a major American company talking about it with the same passionate enthusiasm.... A standing-room-...
Feminism, Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture by Emilie Zaslow
Girl Power Less
A review by Jennifer Cognard-Black
Run a Google image search on "girl power," and what comes up is a series of visual contradictions: a pink woman's symbol with a fist in the circle; a photo of a businesswoman's legs, in stockings and stilettos in front of a chorus line of men's trousers; girls sporting athletic gear; "girl power" emblazoned across bikini underwear; and an ad for a porn film. In these images the power afforded girls is mixed. A working woman is reduced to her girly fashion sense. A little girl's source of influence is what's written on her panties. And almost every image is linked to consumerism. "Girl power...
|
The Ninth (Writings from an Unbound Europe) by Ferenc Barnas
The Ninth by Ferenc Barnas
A review by Josh Maday
Telling a story from a child's point of view is one of the most difficult modes of fiction to write successfully. The narrator of Ferenc Barnas's The Ninth is a nine-year-old boy -- the ninth child of ten (eleven, counting the brother who died) in a large Hungarian family -- whose inexperience and bare vocabulary are compounded by a speech disability. In writing The Ninth, Barnas seems to have wanted to give himself a taste of what difficulty his narrator must face when trying to give expression to his experience. Overall, Barnas succeeds, using simple language and a conversational style...
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Satanic Panic
A review by Spencer Dew
In the 1980s, America was gripped by a phenomenon so frightening and shameful that it has all too quickly been brushed under history's rug. The fusion of journalism and entertainment -- personified by leading figure Geraldo Rivera -- led to "the Satanic Panic," wherein viewers fell for the unfounded (and fantastic) claims conveyed by Rivera during several primetime specials devoted to devil-worshipping cults, demonic conspiracies, ritual child abuse, and even the occasional act of cannibalism. "Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera proclaimed to a...
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Chronic City: A Review of Jonathan Lethem's Eighth Novel
A review by Darby M. Dixon III
There was recently an interesting discussion at The Quarterly Conversation about what constitutes good literary criticism. J.C. Hallmann suggests that his fellow critics ought to approach literature not in the way critics do, but in the way writers do, in that writers are "perfectly comfortable saying that they simply liked a book -- or disliked it.... Writers set out to celebrate the work rather than exhaust it...." In response, the editors quote Harold Bloom, who "gives us a phrase that is quite possibly the ideal definition of a critic: 'the strong reader, whose readings will matter to...
|
Don't Miss
