A fresh and welcome feminist perspective on the place and value of heterosexual sex in society. Segal (Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, not reviewed) takes a stand against writers like Andrea Dworkin who, claiming to speak for feminism, portray heterosexuality as inevitably incompatible with women's interests. Beginning with a long history of the sexual revolution of the `60s, Segal notes that, since then, straight feminists have been less vocal than their lesbian counterparts about the pleasures of sex. As Segal sees it, that silence was a defensive response to a larger social backlash against changing gender roles and the growing economic and political power of women, which caused male anxiety about threats to masculinity. Any rethinking of heterosexuality, according to Segal, must confront and reconcile images that equate active sex with male and passive with female. In fact, she writes, ``what men want, as often as not, is to be sexually passive.'' To assume that all heterosexual sex as constructed in a male-dominated society essentially affirms manhood and therefore cannot be truly pleasurable for straight women is to deny the agency and pleasure available to women. Segal believes that achieving gender equality requires ``the success of feminist goals on all fronts, with the assertion of women's sexual autonomy but one factor among many,'' as well as the ``mutual recognition of similarities and differences between women and men, rather than upon notions of their opposition.'' Born in Australia and with a great deal of knowledge of Britain, Segal's investigation offers insight into the constructions of sexuality beyond the borders of the US, giving greater weight and evidence to her claims about heterosexual pleasures. Segal's analysis begins to fill a tremendous void in the literature and will be a welcome change to depressing and damaging stereotypes that depict all men as savage sexual beings and women as unwitting victims.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-20000-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
