A compelling, frightening look at women, not as victims of violence, but as perpetrators of it. Alarmed by the number of violent women who later claim their behavior was accidental or caused by abuse, Pearson, a crime journalist who has written for Harper's and other magazines, decided to study current notions of female aggression and uncovered some stunning statistics. Family-violence scholars have discovered that severe abuse is committed as frequently by women as by men, and terrible abuse occurs even among lesbian couples. Pearson is particularly disgusted with the FBI tenet that ``there are no female serial killers'' and explores several studies which suggest that when multiple cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) occur in one family, it is in fact frequently infanticide perpetrated by the mother. (For a detailed study of this subject, see Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, The Death of Innocents, p. 1178.) Pearson cites the tragic cases of nurse and caregivers like Jane Toppan and Dorothea Puente, who routinely poisoned their charges. Pearson, an avowed feminist, takes issue with feminist thinkers who rush to defend murderers like Betty Broderick, Jean Harris, and Aileen Wuornos by using the blanket defense of battered-women's syndrome. The syndrome, Pearson holds, is a canard, and she points out that female killers typically say the killing was an attempt at suicide gone awry or, in the case of Wuornos, that she'd been mortally afraid with seven different strangers and was compelled to kill and rob them all. Pearson has the most contempt for Canadian killer Karla Holmolka Bernardo, who with her husband, Paul, tortured and murdered three young women, including her own sister. Karla testified that she had been beaten and forced by Paul to participate; Pearson provides some grisly forensic evidence that indicates Karla killed the girls. Gripping, controversial material that sheds light on violence and society, and how women can get away with murder. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-85925-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, not reviewed) offers more of what he calls ``advanced relationship skills,'' a delightful term that says all that need be said about the author's hyper-instrumental, connect-the-dots approach to thinking about human relationships. Pull-quotes—perhaps indicating that not even Gray expects people to actually read the rest of the text—appear on nearly every page: ``Men must learn to use their ancient hunting skills of silently watching and waiting when listening to their mates'' or ``Fire gazing is the most ancient and potent of male stress relievers; when men today stare into the TV, they are, in effect, mindlessly looking into the fire.'' (This raises the question of whether there were beer commercials in Peking Man's first barbecue.) Gray does cover some of the same turf that Deborah Tannen does about differences between the way men and women speak and listen. And it's not all horse chips and piffle. But there comes a point when it's reasonable to ask whether all those horrid Greek myths full of rage and dismemberment and blindness weren't a better way to think about relations between the sexes than self- help books. (First printing of 500,000; first serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild split main selection; $350,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017162-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Memories of 25 years on the couch make for a curiously compelling recounting of the rewards and shortcomings of psychoanalysis. Chernin (Crossing the Border, 1994, etc.), herself a psychoanalyst, dives into recollections of time spent with three analysts over a quarter of a century. Using traditional analytic tools—primarily association—she recalls to life the passionate young woman in Vienna who sought intellectual and sexual adventure; the fragmented, newly divorced young mother in California who found in her first analyst a target of devotion; the emerging adult who found a life's work and a credo of bisexuality with her second analyst, and the mature woman who broke with classical ``interpretive'' psychoanalysis through her third analyst. All of these rewarding if drawn-out probes are tracked by a shadow self that has ``descended, as if in a diving bell, to uncharted regions.'' It is not Chernin's theories, but her ability to lead the reader into that ``teeming, fecund inner world,'' which rarely surfaced in the analysts' offices, that make this book appealing. With the help of yet another analyst who monitors her clinical work, she comes to believe that analysis is not the science of mining the psyche, but the art of storytelling. The ``patient'' molds a unique story for the ``doctor'' to appreciate without fitting either the tale or the telling into an established framework. Whether about infants as bisexual beings or adults as their own best storytelling analysts, Chernin's sudden ``insights'' echo ideas that have been chewed over since Freud (and long before, if you count mythology). Still, she pleads for respect, citing those insights as hers for the moment, invested with the ``aha'' of personal discovery—like a child who finally understands that c-a-t is more than squiggly lines. Despite her angry critique of traditional psychoanalysis, Freud remains a hero and psychoanalysis has ``a lasting place among the major achievements of our culture.'' There are echos of Erica Jong in this book's naive self- absorption, but Chernin's hard-core fans will find it rich with discovery.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017118-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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