A Cooperative Book Review

Reviews of Women's Books by Women Around the World

First / Second Quarter, 1999

Optimized for Netscape 2.0+
Updated June 3, 1999

First / Second Quarter, 1999

B.A. Chepaitis' The Fear Principle

Reviewed by Lynn Kane (Q1-2, 1999) (F)

B. Reece Johnson's The Woman Who Knew Too Much

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q1-2, 1999) (F)

Dodici Azpadu's Saturday Night in the Prime of Life

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q1-2, 1999) (F)

Jaeda DeWalt's Haunting Hands A Photographic Essay and Collection of Poems

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q 1-2, 1999) (NF)

Janis Appier's Policing Women, The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD

Reviewed by Lynn Kane (Q 1-2, 1999) (NF)

Leong Liew Geok's More than Half the Sky, Creative Writings by Thirty Singaporean Women

Reviewed by Lynn Kane (Q 1-2, 1999) (F)

Lyn Mikel Brown's Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q 1-2, 1999) (F)

Martha Shelley's Haggadah: A Celebration of Freedom

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q 1-2, 1999) (NF)

Melanie Villines' Tales of the Sacred Heart

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q 1-2, 1999) (F)

Nancy Sanra's No Escape

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q 1-2, 1999) (F)

Sadia Carone's Circle Words

Reviewed by Lynn Kane (Q 1-2, 1999) (F)

Virginia G. Drachman's Sisters In Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q 1-2, 1999) (NF)

The Fear Principle
by B.A. Chepaitis
Ace Books, NY, 1998
ISBN: 0-441-00497-0

Reviewed by Lynn Kane kanel@webmist.com

An interesting new sci-fi book where prisons are in orbit around the earth. They are staffed by "cops/therapists/empaths" who can get inside the prisoner's minds and by using their bodies, minds, and environments create different experiences through manipulation of their environments which will resolve the unresolved fears in their lives which brought about the aberrant behavior which resulted in their adjudication and confinement.

There have been sex therapists who claim to work "on" their client's sexual problems by having sexual intercourse with them. The practice in these "prisons" takes that idea even further. The lack of morality involved in the story bothered me a bit, but, after all, it was just a story.

Her own emotions get involved even more while attempting to work with an ultimate assassin who is part of a conspiracy which reaches into the hero's own organization and involves co-workers and governmental scientists who have reanimated dead bodies they believe can be used as soldiers.

This is B.A.'s first novel and as first novels go, it is pretty good. I like science fiction when it is done well. But I don't like all science fiction. So for it to hold my attention, that is a pretty good recommendation.

Saturday Night in the Prime of Life
by Dodici Azpadu
Aunt Lute, 1983
ISBN 0-918040-03-7

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

There ought to be a section in every bookstore for adult books. Of course I don't mean the puerile, sterile, trash that some cretins like to fancy is a priviledge of having achieved the age of twenty-one, but the truly adult books, the ones that demand maturity from their readers and speak to issues that can hardly be imagined in one's twenties, or even thirties.

This book belongs in my imaginary adult section, along with Judith Freeman's Set For Life, and a very few others. Women facing middle age with either anticipation or dread will find much to think about in Ms. Azpadu's intimate look into what it means to be a daughter, to have a beloved companion who's never been accepted into the family, to be called upon to face the demands of an aging mother who belatedly decides that family ties entail certain obligations.

But whose family? And what does family mean when the bonds have not been heretofore reciprocal? Neddie and Lindy, the main characters, both struggle with family feelings as seemingly conciliatory letters and phone calls from Neddie's mother arouse strong feelings of guilt and duty in the daughter she'd previously written off as a depraved sinner. But will the daughter be able to balance the demands of a mother who dominates the lives of her two brothers? Or will they be left alone "to let one of us bury the other in peace," as Neddy had only half-jokingly proposed on her fiftieth birthday party.

The dilemma is all too real and will resonate in the minds of many women who find themselves in a similar, or at least analogous, situation as their parents age and unresolved conflicts come home to roost in unexpected ways. The stage is set early, we know all the players almost immediately, and then the roots of the problem are disclosed in both flashbacks and interior monologue.

The interior thought of Lindy, especially, made this book for me. She's a woman of words where Neddie is a woman of action, a situation that hits awfully close to home for me, and I could see myself in her easily. In fact the whole story rang bells from the very start. This could have happened, might happen, or something like it, to me.

I only regret not having seen the book when it first came out, but then I might not then have had my present ability to see that it related to me. After all, I was only thirty-seven.

Find this book somehow and buy it if you can. It's a real gem. If you're not quite old enough to read it yet, set it aside to age like a fine wine and sample it when you come to it, in the fullness of time.

No Escape
by Nancy Sanra
Rising Tide Press, 1998

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Tally McGinnis, Private Eye, returns in this formulaic follow-on to her earlier and far more successful _No Witnesses_. Also resurrected is Tally's savage nemesis, the improbably gifted and murderous psychopath, Marsha Cox. I'm getting rather tired of this latter, which is a generous understatement. In the first novel, she was interesting as a villain but she's been reduced to a mere gimmick in this one, evidently to make the protagonist's struggles more Sysiphean. Just when you think she's getting somewhere, Mad Bad Marsha pops up like a Jill in the Box and backhands her with a GO DIRECTLY TO THE HOSPITAL card. Puhleeze! Modern times require a slightly more realistic interaction between the black hats and the white hats than this. There is enough real evil in the world and enough evil people to make artificial creations like Marsha redundent and boring.

Her malevolence is as tiresome as it is unrelenting. Her intelligence rivals that of Moriarty, the "Napoleon of Crime" who dogged Sherlock Holmes to the point of incipient mental breakdown. Her skills surpass those of the entire Mission Impossible team. Would it have been too much to ask that she figure out a better hideout than a (dare I say it?) secret passage in the business she once owned? The cash economy is alive and well in San Francisco and she could easily have blended in to the dark corners of the city without a trace.

The book was also flawed by a curious failure to capture the reality of present-day San Francisco without the excuse of being set in the forties or fifties. Heck, even the seventies. As a trivial example, her characters rely overmuch on the Marlowish inhalation of nicotine as character "enhancers" and are often seen smoking in situations where they are illegal in the real San Francisco, like restaurants. This jarring detail does little to enhance the verisimilitude of the setting in which the story takes place.

This may seem a small thing but over the course of the novel it gets a bit irritating. California workers are protected in their workplaces from the known carcinogens in second-hand smoke and, anachronistic as it may be, I find attention to the rights of others and the law refreshing in characters I'm supposed to believe in, especially the police, even former police. In this day and age an ex-cop who refuses to step outside to smoke is thoughtless and rude as well as stupid and contemptuous of mere legality.

If we want to see how insensitive and crude she is, why not show her picking her nose or noisily passing gas? Now there's a _really_ memorable and distinguishing trait. If we want to distinguish her character from the bland morass around her, a less cliched approach than tough-guy booze and cigarettes would be a refreshing change, especially when paired with the cigar inevitably sported by the (Surprise!) hostile dumb cop. Now don't get me wrong, cigars are often smoked by hostile men and this might have been a telling character trait if it were less expected.

A characteristic sight in contemporary California is a pathetic clot of smokers huddled around the entry of every public building indulging their addiction. The casual use of tobacco products, while not a thing of the past, is usually usually somewhat furtive nowadays and carries an air of beleaguered truculence about it. Smokers expect to be told to smoke outside and often are, sometimes quite forcefully. Magically, this never happens here in Wonderland.

And then again, in a stunning dea ex machina in reverse, Tally has a car phone, evidently so she can be conveniently out of touch for long periods of time. Everyone else in California seems to have a cute little cell phone in their pocket or purse. My own is about the size of those ubiquitous damned packs of cigarettes that the characters seem to be fiddling with at every moment to use up a few dozen words and show their defiance of common sense and/or decency. It does alpha-numeric messaging, voice-mail, and goddess knows what all. I have another, an older analog model (but just a little larger) that I replaced when digital became favored by my carrier. I keep it in the glove box of my car just in case my other phone becomes defunct. It's nice to have a backup.

I'm pretty well connected wherever I go and most of the women I know have cell phones for the same reasons, fear for our personal safety and convenience. What the hell good does a cell phone do me (or any woman) if it's in my car when I'm walking down a street late at night? I keep it turned on and my finger on the speed dial button that connects me to 911 Emergency like most sensible city dwellers of the female persuasion.

The last time I saw a car phone, actually _attached_ to a car, was in an old Kojak TV movie. While they may exist, just as it may be possible to find some troglodytes still using those huge old cell phones the size of a lunch box, I remember a group of teenagers laughing their heads off at the sight of one almost a year ago.

And there's my pager, about the size of a box of the matches ditto. I keep it set to vibrate and usually have it tucked in my cleavage (such as it is) so I don't get confused by the cacophony of beeps when riding elevators. Everybody in California has a pager, including many small children. My pager is connected to my voice mail service so if anyone has a message for me it lets me know right away. I use it in my work as well as my personal life. One would think someone less dense than our heroine would get with the program and avail herself of the technology out there to make her life (and job) easier. Considering how often poor Tally and her friends get kidnapped and knocked unconscious, one of those Lo-Jack car transponders might be a good investment as well.

And now we come to the anomalous detail of a pathologist dissecting corpses with a scalpel. I hate to disabuse Ms. Sanra of any fond notions but the cutting tool most commonly used in an autopsy is the same rough and ready butcher knife one uses to slice other meat. The delicacy of a scalpel is a waste of time when you don't expect the "patient" to revive. The only reason for the scalpel seems to have been having a suspect's name engraved on it and then carelessly used and discarded in the commission of an unrelated crime instead of being reverently displayed in a glass case as such a treasure would have been in real life.

But the most irritating thing of all is Tally's ill treatment of her girlfriend which borders on either abuse or negligent self-centeredness to the point of monomania. Come on! She can't get it together to call and let her know she's going to be late, or is safe after an all-too-predictable but strangely "unexpected" absence or accident, preferring not to worry her long-suffering (to the point of co-dependence) gf "unnecessarily" when she turns up knocked over the head, cut up, and/or bleeding every few chapters. She gets knocked out more often than the hokey TV cowboys in Fifties Westerns. It's a wonder she isn't brain-damaged. Or perhaps she is. That would explain everything now that I think of it.

On the whole, I can't recommend this one unless you're desperate for a lesbian mystery and don't mind suspending disbelief to the point of absurdity.

Sisters In Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History
by Virginia G. Drachman
Harvard University Press, 1998
ISBN 0-674-80991-2

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

The majesty of the law may have lessened of late, as the body of contemptuous humor and outright gibes surrounding the legal profession today will testify, but at the turn of the century it was still a desired and forbidden fruit for women, the secular equivalent of the knowledge of good and evil.

The fruit was especially tempting, offering a way for women to participate in public life at a time when they were still denied the vote in most of the United States, but the barriers were very high. The law schools were among the last bastions of all male priviledge to withstand the growing awareness among men of conscience that women were not being treated fairly by being restricted to children, church, and kitchen. In fact it was not until 1928 that one of the most prestigious schools, Columbia, allowed unrestricted access to a legal education, long after women were finally permitted to vote in Federal elections and were being freely admitted to medical schools.

How do I know all this, knowing nothing in particular about the law otherwise? I read the book. Ms. Drachman's well-researched and very scholarly book chronicles the ongoing struggle of women to enter and succeed in a particular profession, that of the law, from the end of the last century to the middle of this. It's filled with enough anecdotes and hard facts to make Phyllis Schlaffly gnash her teeth and repent her rash rejection of feminist principles and more than enough to arouse the interested sympathies (and perhaps fury) of any women in almost any male-dominated field today.

Unlike the Garden of Eden, where angels with firey swords guarded the entrance against questing women and men alike, the courtroom was guarded against feminine intrusion by mere men with all the weapons at their disposal, from arguments like the "it's for your own good" admonishment that women might be sullied by associating with criminals and "women will corrupt the law" because male lawyers won't be able to resist their feminine wiles. Yeah, right. Those same male lawyers found it easy enough to resist and deride the requests from women to be admitted to study law and had no problem throwing women who demonstrated in favor of sufferage into prison. But I guess that didn't count as the hostility and malicious discrimination was conducted in private conferences or in the abstract. It only seemed to be in public that chivalry was called for and seeming courtesy toward one lady left unscathed a general attude of contempt toward women in general.

And chivalry obviously didn't extend to actually hiring a woman once she'd fought her way into the legal profession, since most major law offices refused point blank to hire women. The few women who managed to pass the bar mostly went into private office practice well into this century, eking out a modest living at the edges of the profession rather than in the major centers of power. One of the many strengths of the book is how she manages to incorporate statistical information into the individual stories that breathe life into the past and bring it home in a personal way.

With a sure hand she illumines the bare facts of income and specialty with the actual experiences of women living in that past world, making us feel the frustrations of applying to office after office only to be told that the job really called for a man. Story after story shows us the day-to-day reality of the brave women pioneered and persevered in their efforts to open the field of law to women, to such purpose and good effect that we can now seriously talk about the history of women as lawyers and understand the relationships between the individual struggles of the women highlighted in this book to the overall struggle of women to achieve full equality in our society and in the world. It isn't over yet of course, but we've made such great strides since the seventies that it's just barely possible to deny that serious problems still exist without looking like a complete idiot, at least to people whose knowledge of social reality is limited to what they read in the supermarket tabloids (or hear in their broadcast equivalents) or are young enough to think of the Spice Girls as golden oldies.

Luckily, the uncritical audience here described is unlikely to be reading this review so I can trash their credulity with impunity. I'm assuming that most of us know that sexism still exists and have at least heard that men in these United States are still making 33% more than women on average. We have quite a way to go yet but it surely doen't hurt to look back and reflect on how far we've come. My mother was born two years after Sufferage and was active in the WCTU during high school, which was a leader in the fight for the vote not so very long before. My grandmother could not vote during her youth although she was dedicated to voting while I knew her. It's not so long ago. For me, it's tremendously encouraging to think that I'm connected by a physical as well as a psychic chain to those brave women who struggled before me.

I'm not a lawyer, but thanks to those women I could have been, my daughter can be, and the are more roads open now than ever before. Not bad for only a hundred years or so.

Haggadah: A Celebration of Freedom
by Martha Shelley, with Hebrew translations by Ilana Brody
Aunt Lute Books, 1997
ISBN 1-879960-53-2

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Why is this book unlike all other books?

We've seen women's Haggadahs (haggadot for purists) before, if not by the score then at least in many versions, from hand-written or photo-copied sheets passed out among friends to nicely-printed books available at specialist bookstores. But this is the first I've seen not specifically addressing a Jewish audience, aiming to be a Passover Seder for everyone rather than being limited to a particular religious or ethnic group.

I have to admire her insight in this for the Passover truly is a celebration for everyone, not just Jews. For those who don't know the story and symbolism, participants in the Seder are expected to dress for a journey and to regard themselves as having personally escaped from slavery, personalizing the experience of bondage and liberation so that it cannot be forgotten and reminding us that we must always be prepared to escape if the need arises. And it will. It always does.

Although the traditional Seder celebrates a particular story of flight from servitude that may or may not have happened 3200 years ago and ignores women's experience almost completely, tyranny and slavery still exist in the world. Many now living have experienced imprisonment at forced labor or coercive conditions of employment. Many of the rest have ancestors who were sold into chattel slavery or forced by punitive and discriminatory laws into episodic or juridicial slavery under color of authority and law. Women in many parts of the world still live in conditions of servitude to men, bound to the men who control their lives as surely as slaves are shackled. Ancient Egypt is not the only Narrow Place from which people have escaped or may need to flee in future.

Tyranny is as real when enforced by economic or political power as by threats of death and this Haggadah recognizes the many forms of bondage still present in the modern world, especially taking note of the systematic and pervasive oppression of women and the notable courage of women struggling to be free in an unfree world. The Exodus is still going on, is still necessary if we are to preserve our freedom against the many who would become overseers and taskmasters. Just as in ancient times, underneath economic and other social weapons is the ultimate threat of men with weapons. Whether the weapons are wielded by police enforcing a legal writ or soldiers enforcing a whim, the people in power are the ones most likely to gain.

The story of the flight from Egypt is one we must all learn by heart: The most effective way to fight for freedom is sometimes to opt out, to refuse to cooperate, to leave that place where your enemy has power and take yourself to another. It is not always necessary to fight coersive force with more force, to repay killing with more killing. Sometimes another way can be found, even if that way leads out into the unknown wilderness.

So on this night, unlike all others, as every night in every human life is different, prepare yourself as if for a journey and think about what freedom means to you and what you are prepared to sacrifice. You were there in the land of plenty, surrounded by rich food and comforts and left it all behind. But you survived. You were there at the edge of the sea and no way forward but certain death. But you put your foot forward and the way was made clear. Remember?

Haunting Hands A Photographic Essay and Collection of Poems
by Jaeda DeWalt
JAEDE Publications, 1998

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

This is an intimate chapbook of poems and photographic self-portraits by an incest survivor. As such, it reveals the devastation experienced by one woman, in one place in time. It's a story we've all probably heard before, although rarely so raw and unstudied.

Calling all lost souls,
Can you hear my heart beckoning to yours?
Can you hear whispers of my pain,
Echoing through your souls?

from Haunting Hands, Calling All Lost Souls

This describes a feeling which I know many survivors of child sexual abuse have experienced, the sudden kinship you feel with another woman, or perhaps a man, sometimes without a word being spoken. You just know. There is a sisterhood of shared misery and remembered pain that links us at a deep level and speaks to us louder than words. I likened it once to the secret marks that hobos placed on doors to show what sort of person lives there.

Do you see the sadness behind my smile?
Can you see the ugliness I mask behind this painted face?
Do you see the dirty fingerprints with which this body is marked?

from Haunting Hands, Dirty Fingerprints

As you can see, this is very raw indeed. She details suicide attempts, protective incarceration, fantasies of revenge, failed love affairs, parental failure to protect her, and all the rest of the mess that incest can make of your life.

I had difficulty with some of the photographs, in particular the sexualized nude self-portraits, although they mirror the feeling of inappropriate sexualization that many women experience and I can sympathize with the author's desire to reclaim her adult sexuality in a positive way. Still, it's hard. Very hard.

Like Terry Wolverton's Black Slip, which deals in part with incest, or Leah Pesa Kushner's Dragonchild, Haunting Hands is difficult to read in many places. The stubborn truth is that many women never fully heal from the effects of incest, and must get on with their lives as best they can. Sometimes this isn't pretty. Recovery from that sort of trauma can be, in many cases, like the "recovery" of a body and mind assaulted by drugs a life-long struggle. You don't know what your own experience might be unless you've been through the same trauma. But you can try to understand. This book can take you a long way down that particular road and may help some women articulate their own experience by the familiarity of the feelings and thoughts she describes here.

For another, more structured, start on that road, I would recommend The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, and their several related books. They deal with the subject with sensitivity, courage, and compassion. One of the two is a survivor herself and writes with considerable authority about how it really feels based on her own experience.

But such anecdotal evidence is routinely dismissed by most researchers in psychology, following the contemptible example of Alfred Kinsey, the gullible, if not indeed complicit, confidant and protector (in the name of dispassionate scientific inquiry and objectivity of course) of at least one pederast and child molester. Based on his informant's self-serving reports of how much his victims liked it, Kinsey hypothesized that even tiny babies are sexual in nature. This is more than weird. This is like asking rapists whether women are "asking for it," or citing Nazi propaganda to "prove" the "inferiority" of Jews and other "mongrel races."

Kinsey's sexual baby theory has been used to justify sexual abuse of children since the 40's. After all, the twisted logic goes, if babies and children are sexual creatures, a "responsible" adult should see to it that their sexual needs are met, just as they would feed a child if it were hungry. Not only was Kinsey's theory based on the testimony of one sick pervert, it was highly irresponsible of him to place such a powerful rationalization in the hands of those who would misuse it. And there are many who do. With all the power of the scientific method behind it.

Kinsey is the founding father of a whole generation of "scientists" who trivialize personal accounts and prefer the value-free, morality-free, responsibility-free distance of the "scientific method." But are his conclusions truly value-free? Are theirs? Or are they in many cases designed to advance a position?

Dark rumors have circulated about Kinsey for years, suggesting that he had a somewhat more hands-on approach to the study of pederasty, pedophilia, and kinky sex than might seem proper in a scientist, not to mention his possibly deliberate skewing of results by choosing wildly inappropriate populations to sample from. His data on the incidence of male homosexuality, for example, is larded with a disproportionate number of incarcerated felons. About which population we can form a few obvious conclusions. However laudable his efforts to show that homosexuality is normal may be, using cooked data to inflate the total numbers is an act of deception, not science.

And using what may be the diary of a Nazi, reporting without comment tainted concentration camp "experiments" designed to "prove" the Nazi thesis that Jews were inferior creatures closer to their "animal natures" than Aryans, more sexual and more "primitive," is the act of either an ignoramus or a villain. Kinsey seems far too eager to prove points in many cases, suggesting a personal axe to grind, rather than just sampling randomly and letting the chips fall where they may.

It's enough to make one nauseous.

But it's still going on.

In July of 1998, the American Psychological Association (APA) published a "scientific" paper in the Psychological Bulletin, their house organ. I use this latter word advisedly. The authors, Bruce Rind, Phillip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman write in A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples and purport to discover through "meta-analysis" of other researcher's data that survivors of child sexual abuse (sometimes called incest) quite often feel good about it. Despite its unisex title, the paper focuses primarily on men, years after their abuse for the most part. The experience of girls is mentioned as being much more negative for some reason and then dismissed as a real subject of inquiry by this stalwart panel of male researchers. One can almost hear them collectively say to themselves, "Gosh! Women are so hard to figure out! Let's just extrapolate from real people!"

Of course, the major pedophile apologists are ecstatic and you can easily find the article referenced and abstracted by them on the Web. The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) has posted glowing reviews of the article on their Web site. Not surprisingly, the article is referenced as "The Good News," an appellation usually reserved for the Holy Bible. The Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE) is similarly enchanted. The fact that many children are shown by the study to be harmed is cheerily ignored or downplayed by all, including the authors. After all, if some survivors can view their childhood sexual experience in a positive light, the onus is obviously on those who fail to achieve this "mature" adjustment to integrate the "opportunity" they were "given" into their adult lives. It's a rather sophisticated way of blaming the victim. Unspoken is the implication that, since women are more likely to be negatively affected by sexual abuse, they must be somehow less "mature" than men.

The authors skew their borrowed samples by excluding both those with the most evidence of harm and those which show the highest incidence of abuse in the general population although they grudgingly admit to a figure of 18% or so, almost one in five women, and 11% of men.

In spite of their own admission that girls who have been "willing" partners in abusive sexual relationships are very likely to report adverse feelings about it, they exclude several studies that show shockingly large rates, more than half of all women, because they include child sexual abuse entered into "willingly." What does "willing" really mean if willing female participants describe themselves as feeling dirty and used afterwards? I strongly suspect that it means "acquiescent," just as it does in so much of our sexist society. If a woman (or girl) doesn't say "no" loudly enough, whether intimidated or unconscious, the understood default response to male sexual demands is always "yes." So if one makes the "mistake" of not struggling violently to escape the "fate worse than death," even at the risk of one's life, even at the risk of angering or disappointing a parent, or an older sibling, one has "agreed" to sex. Yeah, right.

But whether it's one in five women or one in two is irrelevant at some level. If that many women are affected, just what does a "normal" adjustment mean for any woman? If you weren't sexually abused, the chances are that many of your girlfriends were if those studies are even partly true and their experiences would have affected the way they behaved. And who among us has not been affected by the behavior of our close friends? No wonder they wanted to get rid of as many of these embarrassing condemnations of the status quo as possible. And the simple method used is to claim that the studies' criteria for true "abuse" were "too broad." Despite the harm the women came to. Does this seem just a little surreal to you? It does to me.

The authors sturdily insist also that the fact that survivors often go on to lead productive and well-adjusted lives is evidence that they were never really harmed in the first place. Dare we say that this might appear to be self-serving, if one was of a cynical turn of mind? How exactly does the fact that 33% of males seem later to feel that their experience of abuse was negative and a similar number are finally ambivalent translate into "no harm done?" This seems a bit like saying that since, on average, only one in six participants in the game of "Russian Roulette" actually dies, it's not nearly as dangerous as it seems. Or that breaking a leg does no harm, since most people heal up quite nicely, thank you.

They also differentiate between "consensual" sex, say with a nine-year-old, and non-consensual rape. Funny, the same child who is not able to lawfully "consent" to enter into a contract involving money is magically transmogrified into a willing and competent (in the legal sense) partner for purposes of sex. The fact that the current President of the APA was a "willing" participant in a sexual relationship with a pederast at that very age is simply a coincidence. I'm sure. And the removal of unconflicted pedophilia from DSM-IV is a similar coincidence. I suppose. In other words, if a pederast doesn't feel bad while buggering an infant or pre-schooler, if he feels good about it, then it's not really a sickness. Well, what the hell is it then?

Quite frankly, I think these guys are either stunningly out of touch with reality or just a little disturbed. Or worse. Strikingly, at least two of the authors are loudly skeptical of reports of repressed memories in sexual abuse survivors, another trait (or rhetorical position) they coincidentally share with many convicted pederasts and alt.mens.rights readers.

They've lent their supportive voices to at least one gathering of pedophiles and sympathizers in the Netherlands, one attended by four, (count'em, four) members of the local vice squad intent on tracking what they (wrongly?) perceive as the bad guys. The sponsors of the meeting speak glowingly of our psych-boy debunkers, and of Larry Constantine, sometime computer scientist, psychologist, Penthouse magazine board member, and advocate of group marriage, "open" families, child pornography, sexual freedom for children, and other quaint concepts of the seventies. Larry is much beloved by both philanderers and pedophiles, with whom they class our heroes. Hmmm. You'd think they'd have the decency to be embarrassed.

They're not.

The Woman Who Knew Too Much
B. Reece Johnson
Cleis Press, 1998

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

The tradition of the preternaturally competent "operative" has a long history in crime, from Sherlock Holmes to the Double-Oh-Seven novels of the past generation and now including the redoubtable Ms. Cordelia Morgan, who ghosts into this mortal drama as artfully as she ghosts out of it, unknowable not through concealment, although she is a master of that arcane art, but through the transitory nature of her profession.

They're all the same, these operatives; the life leaves no margin for sentimentality or companionship. The other protagonist in the book, a writer retreated to the obscurity of pseudonymous mystery novels because of a fatal confrontation between government agents and a group of separatist women energized by a previous non-fiction work, hits the mark when she realizes that there are no pets in Cordelia's life, no friends, no lovers, nothing in fact but a series of faceless hotel rooms scattered across the globe.

Cordelia is not only stunningly beautiful, smart, and dangerous, as all operatives must be, she is blessed with a prescient power that allows her to stay one tiny step ahead of almost anything her enemies can throw at her. And she's bound to have enemies. She stirs up a nest of hornets in this first caper, a sort of "Introducing Mr. Sherlock Holmes" involving massive corporate indifference to morality, quasi-legal drugs, impending environmental disaster, reckless masculine preoccupation with sexual performance, personal greed, and enough poisonings, mysterious deaths, and general mayhem to keep the most jaded reader awake until the last page.

The history and science behind the multiple threats is very plausible, with analogies in the form of Viagra, the Waco deaths, and the assorted chemical and radioactive plagues we've collectively wished upon ourselves, so the possibly fatal consequences of pumping up limp desire has a creepy sort of truth to it. How much do we really know about the chemicals we blithely pump into our veins? Or the by-products that we dump into our rivers and aquifers? Anti-psychotic drugs which can cause horrible and uncontrollable life-long muscle spasms, minor sedatives which cause horrendous birth defects, and a children's pain reliever which has been revealed to kill them every once in a while. But hey, that's progress, right? The drug manufacturer just wanted to make a few bucks and who knew that the stuff was going to kill or maim you?

Viewed in retrospect, the line between the illicit drug makers and the ones on this side of the law seem to blur a bit at the edges, at least in this novel, where them that owns the gold makes the rules. What might land the executives in jail in one country is perfectly legal, even exemplary, in another, and they can bounce their selves, their consciences (and their liability) from one nation to another when it suits their fancy. This is the world Cordelia has inhabited up to know, amoral and predatory among sharks and wolves. But then she runs into a woman with a vision, a vision she had shared in her past life, and the amorality starts to unravel, to be replaced by... what?

This one is a page-turner, sure to be a hit with any connoisseuse of the mystery/adventure novel.

Recommended.

Tales of the Sacred Heart
by Melanie Villines
1999, BogFire, Liberty, IL

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Magic realism meets A Course in Miracles in this richly layered novel of neighborhood life in Chicago. Melanie Villines' interwoven threads of experience center on the roiling life of a parish in which the poor, Poles, Irish, Hispanics and the whole rich melting pot of American immigrant aspirations intertwine and separate in an unhomogenized frappé of textures and colors. The Sacred Heart of the title is the Catholic church and parish which forms the loose matrix in which the various communities bubble and ferment.

Through it all, the possibilities of miracles, of curanderos, faith healers, evangelists, and radio talk show hosts form a series of wonderful tableaux which contrast with and extend the ordinary disparate and desperate lives of the many protagonists in a way which at first defies comprehension and wholeness. A character in the book writes (wheels within wheels) a continuous counterpoint detailing the disintegration of the religious community in the face of modern quasi-secular alternatives to the One True Church, the Church Universal and Triumphant, that is Roman Catholicism.

But it all comes together in a dénouement as strangely satisfying as it is impossibly mythical. A frightened, jealous man asks a curandero to curse an ugly man who is transformed into a figure of bright angelic beauty in fulfillment of the curse. A gang member wanting to get out of his gang has a vision of the Virgin, who happens to work at a local bank. The writer documenting the collapse of religious life talks with God and discovers a new meaning to his own. And an ordinary housewife and mother founds a new religion and talks with the Saints. It's a wild ride from start to finish but so persuasive in its suspension of disbelief that one says, "Yes, this is the way it must be, the way I desperately wish it to be."

The Sacred Heart is a heart on fire, and the author takes us into the heart of everything. Our deepest hopes and longings are revealed to be possible with the gift of grace, and grace is such an ordinary thing that one can find it on every street corner, in the local convenience mart, or in one's own heart. If the Church is in tatters, shredded into a thousand sects and cults, our own hearts rebuild it every day in strange and stranger ways, restoring it far closer to our own true heart's desire.

Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger
by Lyn Mikel Brown
Harvard University Press, 1998

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Here is the very heart of girlhood with passions still raw, new, and undimmed by nostalgia, still raging at injustice without the soi disant "mature" but still poignant realization that little has really changed, or can be changed within mere human lifespans. Coming to realize that the world is made in a certain way and that most of us are fitted to our procrustean beds with or without our cooperation, that persistent unfairness and inequality are, in the words of one 12-year-old, "just the way it is," is a bitter pill to swallow and it takes a while to choke it down. These girls are still struggling with it, sometimes idealistic and sweetly naïve, sometimes cynical beyond their years, but still filled with anger, energy, and drive.

But powerful forces are at work trying to force these girls into a conventional view of femininity and deny their own experiences.

So one seven-year-old girl who has been verbally assaulted by a group of boys threatening both physical and sexual assault, is persuaded by the words of a "well-meaning" grandfather that aggression in boys means that "they love you." So I suppose this clueless old man believes that if they really truly loved you they'd black your eyes, or perhaps cut you with knives instead of calling you degrading names and threatening to rape and beat you. Or show their ultimate expression of such twisted "love" by killing you. With "concerned" relatives like that, what girl could possibly need enemies?

So when a girl whose father violently and repeatedly beats her is confronted with the father's sometime girlfriend saying that he raped and beat her so severely that she was put into the hospital, she denies the rape and says that she deserved the beating. She admires how hard he hit her and threw her across the room, breaking the door, and says she deserved what she got. This girl is well on her way to being a mere puppet imitation of her father's rage and hatred of women. She still believes that the beatings she receives are unjust and wants to take karate to protect herself but soon she'll realize, I suppose, that it's really all her fault. She wasn't quick enough to read her father's mind, or burned the dinner, or was late from school. With a father like that, what girl could possibly need to go out in the world to get mugged?

So when confronted with the story of a teacher in a nearby school who has sexually molested several young girls the girls are angry both at the teacher and at the school system. Predictably, they also question the morality and sense of the girls involved. I suppose they've already accepted the rapist fantasy that girls who are molested or raped have "asked for it" in some way.

The author calls this "ventriloquation," speaking with the voice of the boys and men who largely control their world and set the tone of every public discourse. The girls echo the taunts and insults of the boys directed at other girls and even take their side against girls who are "teasers," trying to place bets on which boy will be able to force her to have sex with them. It's enough to make one weep.

And yet, there are many signs of change and hope for the future.

The book is filled also with stories of the real and active resistance these girls make to the demands of the dominant male culture, trying to find a standpoint from which they can be both proud and powerful women.

The small group of girls who, when the administration arbitrarily replaced a very pregnant but real choice for Homecoming Queen based on votes with a non-pregnant girl for the sake of "appearances," courageously staged a sit-in protest at a school pep rally which was joined, after a long moment of heart-breaking anxiety, by almost the entire student body and quite a few teachers both learned and taught a lesson in creative resistance to unjust authority which should have garnered them an A+ in Civics for the rest of the year.

The two girls who, tired of the Hooters T-shirts worn by some of the boys which carried the slogan, "HOOTERS - More than a mouthful," designed their own T-shirts with a rooster on it and the slogan, "COCKS - Nothing to crow about," struck a powerful blow for equality as well as making a compelling and stunningly perceptive social commentary.

They made me proud.

Policing Women, The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD
by Janis Appier
Temple University Press, 1998
ISBN 1-56639-560-7

Reviewed by Lynn Kane kanel@webmist.com

This is not "light" reading. Nor is it something to curl up with on a cold night in front of the fireplace. However, it is a worthwhile book to read, if you are interested in a scholarly and well documented study of how the inclusion of women in the Los Angeles Police Department and throughout law enforcement has changed the nature of law enforcement and, comparitively speaking, "humanized" the treatment of criminals.

I have worked briefly in law enforcement and I know the treatment of criminals has changed drastically over the years. I am sure that it is changed for the better. A woman in a lockup was for years also routinely used for sexual gratification by her male captors. But the only justification for locking a human being up in a cage seems to me to be to protect society from being hurt by others. And frequently, in my opinion, violent criminals are left loose and people who are not really a threat to others are in jail. But that is just my opinion.

The author also goes into great detail how women fought to change the job of police work from strictly a "man's job" to one where women now play an integral role.

She patiently shows how women have changed the focus of police work from a "male" role one of punishment to a more nurturing and positive "female" role dealing with crime prevention. She details how police departments were pressured to take women social workers into their ranks as policewomen in the early 1900's and how local Los Angeles "socialites" pushed this agenda politically through their husband's power and influence initially.

They started working with juveniles, in an extension of the "mother" role model, then gradually moved into working with adult women as keepers of traditional moral values for those who were exhibiting immoral behaviors.

There are parts of the book which are riveting, but after later in the book, it becomes repetitive while passing over essentially the same information from different perspectives to make different points.

As a scholarly thesis, the book is quite good. As an interesting read, it is very good, if you are interested in the topic. As an attention-getter, it bogs down in the later chapters and it was an effort for me to finish.

More than Half the Sky, Creative Writings by Thirty Singaporean Women
Edited by Leong Liew Geok
Published by Times Books International, Singapore - 1998
ISBN 981-204-629-1

Reviewed by Lynn Kane kanel@webmist.com

Singapore is the New York of the Orient. It has a cultural diversity that pulls from all parts of the Orient, Europe, India and even the Middle East. And within that framework, there are millions of stories. These thirty women authors have presented us with 40 stores, plays and poems between the covers of this book.

The title says a lot about the role of women.

More than Half the Sky is of course an allusion to Mao Tze Tung's prescription for the men and women in the People's Republic of China where the sexes were to be seen and treated in a communist state as equal. Women (in China at least) hold up half the sky; the other half, men presumably hold up in an admirably equitable division of labour and responsibility. .... In Singapore in fact, women are likely to hold up more than half the sky than only one half of it.

What a wonderful, interesting and engaging collection! There were stories so unique that I could not put it down. There was a story called "Pearls on Swine" by Wee Kiat about a pet pig from the pig's standpoint, from a spoiled child's viewpoint, the servant's standpoint, the chief gardener's, the secretary's and, in short, from the viewpoint of all the people who were in contact with the pet pig.

Perhaps it doesn't seem that interesting but this story, like all of the other stories in this collection are like a window into the Singapore culture and to our own humanity and sometimes the lack of it.

Some of the stories left a lingering emotional ghost. Recently stories have come out of the Middle East about local villagers killing couples who they believed were living against the moral teachings of their religion. Bandong by Suchen Christine Lim had the greatest impression on this reviewer. In it, the author took the view of a young man who traveled to a village of people who had emigrated from his home village and witnesses the execution by the village people of a woman accused of immorality. After her torturous death, he learns that the dead woman's mother-in-law drove her to do the minor things she was accused of and that this was common knowledge in the village, but that they "had" to kill her to preserve their social stability.

There are poems and short plays. The titles tell you a lot: "The Mother and the Muscle and the Making of Love", "In the Proximity of Humans", "The Matchmaker."

There is a very entertaining story called "Wingtips & Shoulder Pads" by Eng Wee Ling which is about the conflicts between a macho male subordinate and a woman executive which could have taken place in Chicago, San Francisco, or New York.

Now, the unfortunate part of this story. The book is not available in this country but it is available over the Internet from the link to the overseas publisher.

Circle Words
by Sadia Carone
Alternate Society Press, New York, 1996

Reviewed by Lynn Kane kanel@webmist.com

This little book of uneven paper covered by a heavier grade of paper arrived one day. I read poetry referencing suicide, the author's poetic memories of her relationship with men, lovers, her child, her mother and father.

I feel like I should be more appreciative because this has meaning for her. I feel guilty in a way, but her frames of reference didn't reach me. The poems were obviously of great meaning to the author. I thought it was a national pasttime to have been clinically depressed and even to contemplate suicide. I don't enjoy reading poems about someone's pain. And I am not sadistic enough to enjoy reading about depression.

Then, I searched for short stories, but found none. There were some passing commentaries... partial and incomplete memories of her family, relationships and what might stand as a statement of personal philosophy.

The chapbook ended with "New Poems" but poetry seems such a personal thing. I am a terrible audience for poetry. Even my own embaresses me and I would not suffer anyone else to read it. It was "therapy" when I wrote mine and I suspect that these poems were the author's personal therapy, as well.

There was an instructive short essay about how to make your man "shoot blanks" by persuading him to immerse his genitalia in 116 degree hot water for forty-give minutes a day for three weeks at a time. I talked with my old man about this...he was not eager to test out the practice despite the fact that the author maintained, "This method is refreshingly straightforward..."

He suggested I stick my breasts in boiling water first to see if it did anything for me and went to bed. I thought he was very "straightforward," too.

This online publication is a cooperative effort by many women and will be changing as time goes on. The overall purpose of the site is to encourage women to read women's books and to buy women's books at women's bookstores if they possibly can. The site is loosely (some might say chaotically) connected with the Feminist Bookstore Index, an online resource indexing women's bookstores all around the world, and we encourage you, if any of these books sounds like they would interest you, to find the women's bookstore nearest you (if you haven't got a favorite one already) and support women's words by buying women's books at women's stores.

Fine Print

The opinions expressed herein represent the thoughts of each individual reviewer as they react to the book in review and are not indicative of the thoughts of any other woman or of the collective thinking of Women's Books Online, which actually has no collective existence other than as a site on the world-wide web. Any errors or omissions are either entirely my own (Lee Anne), or Lynn's, or the separate errors and omissions of the individual reviewers but we disclaim any responsibility other than correcting such errors as they are brought to our attention. Someone will respond promptly to any author or publisher who contacts the site (probably me or Lynn) with corrections or notification of any mistaken statements of fact such as a misspelling of the author's name or of the title of the book (hey, these things happen) or perhaps you could submit another review (as described below) if you can find someone other than the author (who might be rather more partial to her own book than the average reader) to write the review. Omission or inclusion of a book in this review is neither a condemnation nor an unqualified endorsement of any particular book but merely represents the fact that time and space are finite and we can't review everything but only what strikes our uncollective fancy of the moment. If you know of a book you'd like to see reviewed, please feel free to inquire about it to one of us or to anyone else on the page, or write your own review and, if it meets our flexible and ever-changing standards and time schedules, it will appear in a future edition.

Neither this file nor any of the individual reviews contained herein may be copied or reduced to any permanent medium, whether electronic, magnetic, paper, or any other storage medium, other than temporary and incidental transfers of data for the purposes of viewing in a web browser or other viewing client, nor may they be used for any commercial purpose, without the express written permission of the individual authors.

Thank you for your continuing support of women's books and bookstores,

Lee Anne Phillips and Lynn Kane The Un-Management

Women's Books Online Graphics and Web Pages
Copyright © 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Continuing Site Design, Editorial Supervision, and HTML Encoding by:
Lynn Kane kanel@webmist.com

http://www.webmist.com/

Contact:

Women's Books Online
4200 Park Boulevard - Suite 250
Oakland, CA 94602
USA

Graphic Design by:

Individual Reviews Copyright © 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 by Their Individual Authors
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Archived on June 1, 1999 by Lynn Kane kanel@webmist.com
in Valparaiso, FL, USA
This site is mirrored at http://www.webmist.com/review/ and at http://www.leeanne.com/review/