A drum-beater for masculinity and an icon of feminist psychoanalysis here deconstruct a Russian fairy tale, reducing an enchanting story to psycho-mush. Bly, the poet, anthologist, and translator, is also (of course) the author of best-selling Iron John, the book that helped send men back to the woods in search of metaphorical manliness. Woodman is a Jungian analyst whose Leaving My Father’s House serves as a reference for would-be architects of feminine consciousness. Apparently, these two have developed a dog-and-pony show centered on the story of the Maiden King (or Maiden Tsar, as they call it). This unusually complex fairy tale features Ivan, son of a merchant, and his lengthy journeys, challenging tasks, and encounters with many aspects of the female, including a stepmother, three witchlike “Baba Yagas,” a more amenable —Crone,— plus, of course, the beautiful and powerful Maiden Tsar—and her 30 “foster sisters.” The authors set out to probe the metaphorical and mythological meaning of the story, first in individual commentaries, then in dialogue. Bly goes first, taking the story section by section and relating each section to other mythologies—Native American, Hindu—as well as to current cultural, psychological, and spiritual themes, frequently via poetry. In her section, Woodman dives deeper, calling up archetypes, the divisions of the psyche, and the necessity of making them whole again. Particularly interesting is a reflection on the grief caused by the death of Princess Diana (was she a Maiden Tsar?), interpreted as a “yearning for the feminine.” Both authors celebrate what they seem to agree is a trend favoring the rebalancing of male and female “energies”; they deplore a numbing of the connection between conscious and subconscious, since that connection permits spiritual fulfillment. Only groupies will think this is anything but intellectual and psychic quicksand. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5777-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
Sharp narratives that illuminate and challenge the status quo of women's roles in the world. Slim in scope, but yet another...
Acclaimed author and Harper’s contributing editor Solnit (The Faraway Nearby, 2013, etc.) expounds on the way women are perceived in American culture and around the world.
Despite years of feminism and such activist groups as Women Strike for Peace, much of the female population in the world is often powerless, forced to remain voiceless and subjugated to acts of extreme violence in the home, on school campuses and anywhere men deem they should dominate. "Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women,” she writes, “and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they've gotten so used to they hardly notice—and we hardly address." The few women who do stand up and shout to the world are the exception, not the rule, and Solnit provides a platform and a voice for them and the thousands who are too overwhelmed by fear and guilt to speak up. Solnit's thought-provoking essays illuminate the discrepancies in modern society, a society in which female students are told to stay indoors after dark due to the fact that one man is a rapist, as opposed to an alternate world in which male students are told not to attack females in the first place. Same-sex marriage, Virginia Woolf, the patrilineal offspring of the Bible and los desaparecidos of Argentina are artfully woven into the author’s underlying message that women have come a long way on the road to equality but have further to go.
Sharp narratives that illuminate and challenge the status quo of women's roles in the world. Slim in scope, but yet another good book by Solnit.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60846-386-2
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.
The infamous National Security Agency contractor–turned–leaker and Russian exile presents his side of the story.
Snowden opens with an argument he carries throughout the narrative: that revealing secrets of the U.S. intelligence community was an act of civic service. “I used to work for the government,” he writes, “but now I work for the public.” He adds that making that distinction “got me into a bit of trouble at the office.” That’s an understatement. A second theme, equally ubiquitous, is that the U.S. government is a willing agent of “surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it.” The creative web fell, replaced by behemoths like Facebook and Google, which keep track of users’ comings and goings, eventually knowing more than we do about ourselves and using that data as a commodity to buy and sell. Corporations lust for the commercial possibilities of targeted advertising and influence-peddling. As for governments, that data is something that on-the-ground spies could never hope to amass. Snowden insists that he did not release NSA and CIA secrets willy-nilly when he leaked his trove of pilfered information (“the number of documents that I disclosed directly to the public is zero”); instead, it went to journalists who he trusted would act as filters, revealing the newsworthy to the public. Most of those secrets remain unpublicized even as Snowden also insists that he held much material back. He is good at describing the culture of the intelligence community and especially its IT staff, who hold the keys to the kingdom, with access to data that is otherwise available only to a tiny echelon of top brass. The secrets are generally safe, he writes, only because “tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned." He was an exception, and therein hangs most of his tale.
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-250-23723-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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