Carole Goldberg

Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed

by Aidan Levy

(Chicago Review Press, $28.95, 448 pages)

Who is this author?

Aidan Levy grew up in West Hartford and is a graduate of Hall High School and the son of former Courant writer Patti Weiss and former WVIT-TV reporter and current consumer columnist/staff writer at Journal Inquirer, Harlan Levy. Aidan Levy has written for the New York Times, the Village Voice, JazzTimes, and the Daily Forward. He plays baritone saxophone in the Stan Rubin Orchestra and recently earned a Ph.D from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His biography of Lou Reed is his debut book.

What is this book about?

James Brown was the Godfather of Soul, but Lou Reed was the Godfather of Punk. He was a poet of rock whose legacy includes “Heroin,” “Sweet Jane,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” and “Street Hassle,” among other songs.

Reed, a curmudgeonly sort in his music and his life, died in 2013, but his legend lives on. He made “noise rock” in the 1960s with the Velvet Underground and went on to work with Metallica. A nice middle-class Jewish boy, the son of an accountant and a former beauty queen, he grew up on Long Island and went on to write songs before joining those two seminal groups and becoming a pivotal figure in the punk music avant-garde. Levy’s book explores his early doo-wop recordings, the influence of his Jewish faith on his work and his connection to the LGBT movement, drawing on deep research that includes recent interviews with Reed’s friends, lovers and artistic collaborators, who included Andy Warhol, Nico, John Cale, critic Lester Bangs and others.  And it also demonstrates the tender side of this often harsh purveyor of punk music.

Why you’ll like it:

Levy spared no effort in exploring Reed’s world, relationships and lasting influence on music, and his thorough research grounds the conclusions he reaches about this often difficult but important figure in contemporary music. He produces not only a measured look at the punk phenomenon, but also an intimate portrait of one of its most famous avatars —  addictions, sexual explorations and all.

What others are saying:

Library Journal says:  “In his biography of the protopunk icon Lou Reed (1942–2013), Levy does a splendid job debunking the myths surrounding the musician. He describes Reed’s middle-class Jewish upbringing on Long Island as stifling and discusses how bouts of nonconformity, depression, and bi-curious sexual attractions drove his parents to subject him to electroconvulsive therapy. Levy covers Reed’s years at Syracuse University, where he meets his first girlfriend, Shelly Albin, a muse for some of his notable early songs, and his troubled mentor, the writer Delmore Schwartz. Levy’s history of the Velvet Underground, Reed’s influential late 1960s band, covers familiar territory, as the author discusses his fractious relationships with Andy Warhol, Nico, and collaborator John Cale. Levy is at his most engaging describing Reed’s first decade as a solo artist, shedding light on his attempts to self-sabotage his career, his then-shocking relationship with transwoman Rachel Humphreys, his playfully combative friendship with rock critic Lester Bangs, and his addictions to alcohol and amphetamine. The book’s one weakness is that it offers far less detail about Reed’s career after 1980 than about his work prior to that decade. VERDICT Though a little dry, this study is about as close to a must-read book on Reed as one can get.

Says Kirkus Reviews: “A biography of legendary rocker Lou Reed (1942-2013). There is no shortage of biographies testifying to Reed’s importance as the godfather of punk and progenitor of art rock. Even before his death, his place in the rock-’n'-roll pantheon was uncontested as a founding member of the Velvet Underground, and his life had become the subject of mythic archetype for his transgressive lyrics, blend of pop stylings with avant-garde aesthetics, and hard-living lifestyle. Journalist Levy’s narrative of Reed’s life and work—touted as the first since his death—confirms these honors. But the most useful aspect of Levy’s study is his ability to separate Reed the rocker from Reed the person. Reed’s reputation and legacy as one of the pioneers and innovators of rock are unquestioned, but the author also showcases his irascible, confrontational, and often cruel personality, which complicated his cult of personality. Driven by the emergence of bohemian and Beat cultures in the 1950s, Reed devoted himself to a contrarian, anti-bourgeois lifestyle that alienated friends and lovers, sabotaged professional relationships, and fueled a self-destructive lifestyle. Guided by his literary mentor Delmore Schwartz, Reed began his musical career as a songwriter at Pickwick Records, where he began writing one of his early masterpieces, “Heroin.” He also made connections with like-minded musician John Cale and artist Andy Warhol, who formed the artistic core of the Velvet Underground. As frontman, Reed ushered in a new style of cacophonous, uninhibited, and gritty urban realism in songwriting. The details of Reed’s ascendance, fall, and comeback as a solo artist are so vital and culturally significant they read like a Hollywood script, and Levy ably captures it. Few artists, let alone musicians, have had a more fruitful yet tempestuous creative life, the results of which forever changed perceptions of popular music and art. A valuable study of Reed, further cementing his totemic influence as the high priest of art rock.”

When is it available?

“Dirty Boulevard” is on the shelves at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Barbour branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

The Mare

By Mary Gaitskill

(Knopf Doubleday, $26.95, 464 pages)

Who is this author?

Mary Gaitskill, who once sold flowers on the street in San Francisco and for a time supported herself as a sex worker, is now an acclaimed American novelist, essayist and short story writer who often explores kinky relationships in work that goes far beyond the cheaply titillating. She is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted T , which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, and Don’t Cry, and the novels Veronica , which was nominated for a National Book Award, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her story, Secretary, which appeared in Bad Behavior, is about a sadomasochistic boss and worker relationship, became a 2002 movie with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

What is this book about?

A middle-aged couple in New York State entwine their lives with an 11-year-old girl from the Dominican Republic via Brooklyn, through a children’s charity. Velveteen Vargas, known as Velvet (in a nod to the classic book and film National Velvet), has a domineering, cold-hearted mother, but over several years, she develops a warm relationship with Ginger, her benefactor who is a recovering alcoholic and a failed artist, despite Ginger’s husband’s doubts about yanking a city kid out of her milieu and exposing her to a life she may not be able to sustain. Even more important,Velvet comes to love and bond with an abused mare known as Fugly Girl, and that relationship changes everything for the main characters. The story has some real life parallels: Gaitskill and her then-husband hosted a pair of Dominican-American siblings with an abusive mother through the Fresh Air Fund and grew close with them, although the relationship fell apart. The book explores how love can be affected by differences in race and socioeconomic class.

Why you’ll like it:

Gaitskill writes with unflinching honesty and lyrical grace, and in this book she convincingly speaks in the voice of a child. Her work is both disturbing and compelling, and she is not afraid to explore areas of human behavior and emotion that might frighten off a lesser writer.

In an interview with BOMB magazine, she said she began writing at age 18 because she was ‘”indignant about things—it was the typical teenage sense of ‘things are wrong in the world and I must say something.” ‘

A New York Times story about Gaitskill describes her work this way: “[It’s] so acutely observant of human behavior that it’s frequently described in the language of violation: a vivisection, a dental drill, a flogging. There is very rough sex in her books, and characters who binge eat and rip out their hair. But the real danger is elsewhere: It’s in glances and gestures and sudden silences, in craving contact and being rebuffed. ‘‘I wanted to communicate and connect,’’ Gaitskill said when I asked why she became a writer. ‘‘

What others are saying:

“The Mare is a raw, beautiful story about love and mutual delusion, in which the fierce erotics of mother love and romantic love and even horse fever are swirled together,” says Maureen Corrigan’s Best Books of 2015 on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Library Journal’s starred review says: “Velvet Vargas, the abused, underprivileged daughter of unstable Silvia, and Ginger, a fortysomething, upper-middle-class recovering alcoholic, are the heart of this multi-voiced saga of damaged people scrambling to survive against enormous odds. When Ginger and husband Paul take in 11-year-old Velvet for a summer stint with the Fresh Air Fund in upstate New York, this initial visit segues into frequent visits over the years. Paul is skeptical about this social experiment; Ginger is obsessed with the girl’s welfare every time she returns to Brooklyn. When they arrange for Velvet to take riding lessons at a nearby horse farm, Velvet’s rare equine intuition ups the tension. Her jealous, hateful mother resists all efforts to nurture the very gifts that may save Velvet’s soul, while Ginger oversteps one boundary after another to keep Velvet safe while healing the dark abyss of her own psyche. VERDICT Gaitskill spares no one in this brutally honest story of poverty, bigotry, the secret life of adolescents looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places, and parental and marital dysfunction. The major and minor voices narrating this brilliant tapestry are wondrously original, poignant, and, despite all, not without hope.”

Kirkus’s starred review says: “A young Dominican girl from the mean streets of Brooklyn forges a relationship with a white woman living in a bucolic upstate town and learns to love horses and respect herself. Eleven-year-old Velvet has a soft name, but there’s nothing even remotely plush about her life in a rough part of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Abused (mostly, but not only, verbally) by her mother, a tough immigrant, Velvet has little to call her own (she keeps her treasured objects—a shell, a dried sea horse, a broken keychain doll—in an old cotton-ball box in the back of a closet) and few friends, almost no one she can trust. Velvet’s mother clearly prefers her 6-year-old son, Dante, singing him to sleep at night with her back to Velvet in the family’s shared bed. Instead of comfort and cuddles, Velvet gets the message that she’s “no good”—not that it’s really her fault; it’s just that her blood is bad. While Velvet craves her mother’s love and attention, Ginger, a 47-year-old sometime artist recovering from alcoholism and drug abuse, an abusive relationship, and the death of her troubled sister, finds herself yearning for a child. Now living a comfortable life in upstate New York with Paul, her college-professor husband, Ginger has decided to “test the waters” of adoption by hosting a Fresh Air Fund kid for a couple of weeks, a commitment that stretches far longer and deeper. That’s how Velvet and Ginger meet, and it’s also how Velvet meets a mistrustful and mistreated horse at the stable next door to Ginger’s house, the horse the others call “Fugly Girl” and she renames “Fiery Girl,” whom she will tame and train, and who will do the same for her. Alternating primarily between Velvet’s and Ginger’s perspectives, with occasional observations from other characters, National Book Award finalist Gaitskill takes a premise that could have been preachy, sentimental, or simplistic—juxtaposing urban and rural, rich and poor, young and old, brown and white—and makes it candid and emotionally complex, spare, real, and deeply affecting. Gaitskill explores the complexities of love … to bring us a novel that gallops along like a bracing bareback ride on a powerful thoroughbred.”

“The Mare is indebted, in its narrative strategy, to As I Lay Dying, another novel that employs a host of recurring narrators to get at the tangled intricacies of family life. There is a certain loom-like effect at work in both books, a warp-and-woof texture, visible only to the reader, produced by the interwoven sets of impressions . . .  On horseback, Velvet is in her own, untouchable place, and Gaitskill’s sentences lift their necks and pick up speed to match her movements stride for stride,” says The New Yorker.

Says Publishers Weekly: “In this novel by National Book Award–finalist Gaitskill 11-year-old Dominican-American Velveteen “Velvet” Vargas from Crown Heights in Brooklyn is invited to spend a few weeks with a white couple in upstate New York as part of the Fresh Air Fund sponsorship program. The demure and self-possessed girl is skeptical of the situation at first, but as she continues to visit over the next three years, she develops a relationship with Ginger—an ex-addict and amateur artist—and Ginger’s professor husband, Paul, as well as with the horses at a nearby stable. True to form, as Velvet learns to trust her instinct and develops a talent for riding a feisty horse she renames Fiery Girl, her confidence soars. But problems arise when Velvet hits puberty and discovers boys: Velvet’s single mother, fierce and prone to violence, refuses to allow Velvet to ride and repeatedly calls her worthless, while Ginger goes off the rails dealing with her own insecurities. Gaitskill is renowned for her edgy writing, but the book—narrated by different characters—treads into stereotype. More nuanced portrayals might have made Velvet’s bumpy growth into an independent young woman more palatable. “

 

When is it available?

This powerful novel is now at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

The Early Stories of Truman Capote

By Truman Capote

(Random House, $25, 208 pages)

Who is this author?

Happy New Year, everyone!

As the year ends, let’s look back as well as forward, at some recently rediscovered work by one of America’s finest writers and most original characters, Truman Capote, who died at age 60 in 1984, leaving behind some of America’s most admired books, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Grass Harp, and the reportorial classic, In Cold Blood. Capote was born in New Orleans, lived for a time in Alabama, where his close friend was Harper Lee, and went on to hobnob with, and occasionally write about (with some unpleasant repercussions) the very rich, very famous and very powerful. He won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize twice and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Hilton Als, who wrote the forward to this collection, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker who also writes for The New York Review of Books.

What is this book about?

Here are 14 short pieces, all written when the author was between 11 and 20 years old, before Capote achieved fame and fortune. They had been stored in the archives of the New York Public Library, all but forgotten, but were re-discovered and collected in this book. In them, a boy chases a convict into the woods, a prep school girl encounters jealousies, a young hobo is robbed by an older man and two society women plan something far more complicated – and cruel – than another game of bridge.  The lead characters are outsiders, typical for Capote, and the stories are set mostly in the South, but also in New York, where Capote eventually made his home. Together they offer an intimate look at a talent that would fully bloom later in the author’s life.

Why you’ll like it:

Even though they are not as good as his mature work, these stories show how his voice and vision as a writer took root and foreshadow his later flowering. As did his later work, they show Capote’s empathy for outsiders – as he himself was as a gay man coming of age in the Deep South long before acceptance was even considered to be a possibility. The stories deal with dark subjects, such as racism, violence, murder and jealousy, but Capote also displays the compassion and appreciation for the oddballs among us that we see in his later work. This book offers a rare opportunity to see how a writer sets out on the path to brilliance.

What others are saying:

“[Capote’s early] stories are special. Not just because they give a glimpse of an author finding his voice; or for the traces of his masterpieces. But also because they stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled. . . . If you consider they were written when he was a child—aged between eleven and nineteen—then they become breathtaking in their precocity, craftsmanship, simplicity and the tenderness he became renowned for.”—The Independent (U.K.)

Library Journal says: “Discovered as manuscript pages in the New York Public Library Archives, often with Capote’s edits clearly in place, these ten-plus stories were written when Capote was a teenager and young man and will shed light on his subsequent work while remaining sharply observed pleasures in their own right. The settings seesaw from the rural South to sophisticated 1940s New York, and the characters range from a teenage girl awaiting a date to a little boy who finds his dream dog in Central Park to sadder-but-wiser types making their way in the urban jungle.”

Says Kirkus Reviews: “Gathering of the great American prose stylist’s earliest pieces, published for the first time. Some of those pieces are very far from Park Avenue. In the first, a teenage Capote serves up an odd vignette concerning a young hobo and his older, wizened friend of the road. “Ma an’ them don’t know I been bummin’ around the country for the last two years; they think I’m a traveling salesman,” the youngster says, just before the older man helps himself to a ten-spot his companion has been guarding against the day that he can wash up, buy a suit, and head home. The moment of their parting is worthy of de Maupassant. So it is, too, when Capote, Alabaman by upbringing if not inclination, turns in another Southern-fried piece, this one involving a gaggle of kids, a snakebite, and a chicken or three. “The ulcers were burning like mad from the poison,” Capote writes in a fine closing, “and she felt sick all over when she thought of what she had done.” Capote might have become another Flannery O’Connor had he stuck to his home turf, but instead he relocated to New York, and several of the later stories here reflect that change of venue. Now his characters are more urbane and decidedly more privileged: “The girl had had excellent letters from the Petite Ecole in France and the Mantone Academy in Switzerland.” Excellent letters or no, the story in question marks what will become a typical Capote ploy, a scenario of roiling jealousies and intrigue under a superficially calm cover. Another reveals Capote’s trademark strangeness, too: “It’s one thing to lose a leg,” harrumphs one character, “but it’s too much to lose an election because of someone else’s stupidity.” Amputations, petty larceny, and noblesse oblige: it’s all of a piece, and all that’s missing are the chameleons. Students of both Capote and the short story will find this instructive and entertaining—and, if somewhat unformed still, very readable all the same.”

Publishers Weekly’s far less generous review says: “This volume collects 14 tales that Capote wrote during his teens and 20s; most of them are set in his native South, and most are previously unpublished. At their underwhelming best, they reveal his adept ear for Southern vernacular and make a good attempt at atmosphere, though suffering from adjectival overkill. Early on, Capote’s imagination conjured Southern gothic dramas. An escaped convict with “cold, calculating, insane eyes” pleads for help in “The Moth in the Flame.” “Miss Belle Rankin,” considered “a witch,” is a starving old woman who dies under a japonica tree she refused to sell. The stories are earnest but predictable efforts. And though Capote was adept at posing imaginative scenarios, he seems incapable of producing satisfying endings. Thin characterization and inept narrative development in “Swamp Terror” (two boys get lost in a swamp while an escaped convict is on the loose) and in “Kindred Spirits” (two society matrons plan murder) mark them as puerile efforts. “If I Forget You,” a sentimental story about a girl in love with a man who is leaving town is a vignette without depth, and another, “This Is in Jamie,” a would-be tearjerker in which a little boy receives the dog he desires from a dead child’s father, falls flat. “Traffic West” is a facile version of the novella The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a story popular during Capote’s youth. These stories will be of interest mainly as a budding writer’s efforts to master the techniques of his craft.”

When is it available?

This book is on the shelves at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Park branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

 

My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

(Random House, $28, 304 pages)

Who is this author?

Gloria Steinem, now a hard-to-believe 81, is one of America’s foremost and most famous feminists. Steinem is a writer, editor and activist who, in 1972, co-founded Ms. magazine and also helped found New York magazine. She is the author of bestselling books and has won many major journalism awards, as well as a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. Her new memoir is adding to her list of honors: a bestseller, it was named one of O: The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Favorite Books Of The Year and one of the Best Books Of The Year By Harper’s Bazaar , the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Publishers Weekly.

What is this book about?

In My Life on the Road, Steinem looks back at her early years when she gained her first taste of fame as a reporter who did a stint as a Playboy Bunny and wrote about it, and where that brave-for-its-time act of journalism led. Beginning with her growing-up years in the Midwest with a wandering but fascinating father and submissive and often depressive mother, and following her career as an advocate for the rights of women who barely understood that they had them, she pairs her story of personal growth with that of the Women’s Movement.

Why you’ll like it:

Steinem is an American original, one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Outspoken, plainspoken, erudite and empathetic, she fills this book with anecdotes that illuminate why she believes what she believes and what she has accomplished. Whatever your views on the feminist movement’s history and future, she is well worth listening to.

What others are saying:             

An Amazon Best Book of November 2015 review says: “To women “of a certain age” – a euphemism the author of this book would surely abhor – the idea that Gloria Steinem is a revolutionary thinker, a wonderful writer and a practical activist is not, perhaps, news. (But there is something joyful in the rediscovery of same.) To those who didn’t know or don’t remember the Steinem story – founding Ms. Magazine, fighting for reproductive rights, waiting to marry until she was in her 60s! — it might be a revelation. Long before Sheryl Sandberg leaned in at work, Steinem was preaching the gospel of empowered women by, among other things, travelling the country and the world listening to people, gathering stories and insights, offering support of the intellectual and emotional kind. From the very first page – in which she dedicates her book to the British doctor who ended Steinem’s pregnancy, illegally, in 1957 – to the tales of a supposedly shy woman who admitted she wanted to nail her sloppy husband’s tossed-anywhere underwear to the floor, Steinem recounts a life well-travelled in every sense. Now 81, the woman who at 40 replied to a compliment about her appearance with “this is what 40 looks like,” Steinem can still raise consciousnesses, including her own.”

Says The New York Times: “My Life on the Road…is a warmly companionable look back at nearly five decades as itinerant feminist organizer and standard-bearer. If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to sit down with Ms. Steinem for a casual dinner, this disarmingly intimate book gives a pretty good idea, mixing hard-won pragmatic lessons with more inspirational insights.”

The New York Times Book Review  says: “[Steinem's] new book, My Life on the Road, provides a lesson in how to stay relevant when your name is synonymous with a decades-old movement that has fallen in and out of popular favor: Keep moving. And keep asking questions…As an author, Steinem is best known for her essay collections published in the 1980s and 1990s. Though they all contain first-person anecdotes, none are as autobiographically comprehensive as My Life on the Road. Steinem’s life has been so remarkable that her memoir would have been fascinating even without a central theme, but her decision to use travel as a thematic thread was a smart one.”

“Steinem rocks. My Life on the Road abounds with fresh insights and is as populist as can be. . . . Honoring its title, My Life on the Road ranges around subject-wise. One minute Steinem is writing about stewardesses on the shuttle, the next women who taught Gandhi. Now she’s railing against Betty Friedan, whose focus on white middle-class feminism Steinem argues damaged the movement. Still later she’s celebrating her friendships with Native American women, whom she sees as guides into the future. . . . Go, Steinemite!” saysThe Boston Globe.

 

Publishers Weekly’s starred review says:  “If you want people to listen to you,” iconic women’s rights activist Steinem underscores in this powerfully personal yet universally appealing memoir, “you have to listen to them.” And that’s exactly what she’s done for the past four decades, crisscrossing the country in search of inspiring women and women—and men—to inspire. Steinem, a staunch advocate for reproductive rights and equal rights for women, long before either was fashionable in the public eye, writes candidly for the first time about her itinerant childhood spent with a father who itched to be constantly in motion and mother who gave up her own happiness for the sake of others. Vowing to distance herself from both her mother’s dependent lifestyle and her father’s peripatetic ways, Steinem ended up doing exactly what she never imagined: being a public speaker who’s constantly on the move. Highlights include her role in the 1977 National Women’s Conference—“It was my first glimpse of how little I knew—and how much I wanted to learn”—and her accounts of conversations with taxi drivers across the country. Throughout her travels, whether visiting small college campuses in the South or attending a 1971 Harvard Law School dinner where her equality speech was met with animosity, Steinem strives to create positive, meaningful change. Her inviting prose as easy and enjoyable to read, even when the subject matter veers towards the painful.”

Library Journal’s starred review says: “Steinem  weaves an inspired personal narrative by sharing stories of the places she’s seen and people who have galvanized her, which includes everyone from poet laureates to cab drivers; and how their influence transformed a young journalist with a palpable fear of public speaking to the face of the modern women’s movement. The author doesn’t shy away from her flaws and doubts, and her anecdotes—specifically those about her nomadic, cheerful, and kind-hearted father—are deeply moving. What’s touching about this work is its hopefulness. Anger sparks activism, but optimism fuels it. (If you don’t believe things can be better tomorrow, why would you fight today?) Steinem’s confidence and faith—in people, ideas, and change—make this more than a collection of retold events; it tells how people can be encouraged in unexpected ways, in surprising places, with only one caveat: you have to be listening. VERDICT Poignant, accessible, essential. Activism is a people’s movement, and this is a people’s memoir. Ideal for readers who are familiar with Steinem’s work as well as those who aren’t.

Kirkus Reviews says: “A respected feminist activist’s memoir about the life lessons she learned as a peripatetic political organizer. Until she was 10 years old, Steinem grew up following two parents who could never seem to put down roots. Only after her stability-craving mother separated from her restlessly migratory father did she settle—for a brief time until [Smith] college—into “the most conventional life” she would ever lead. After that, she began travels that would first take her to Europe and then later to India, where she began to awaken to the possibility that her father’s lonely way of traveling “wasn’t the only one.” Journeying could be a shared experience that could lead to breakthroughs in consciousness of the kind Steinem underwent after observing Indian villagers coming together in “talking circles” to discuss community issues. Once she returned to the United States, she went to New York City, where she became an itinerant freelance journalist. After observing the absence of female voices at the 1963 March on Washington, Steinem began gathering together black and white women to begin the conversation that would soon become a larger national fight for women’s rights. In the 1970s and beyond, Steinem went on the road to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and for female political candidates like 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, Steinem began work with Native American women activists who taught her about the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of balance. From this, she learned to walk the middle path between a life on the road and one at home: for in the end, she writes, “[c]aring for a home is caring for one’s self.” Illuminating and inspiring, this book presents a distinguished woman’s exhilarating vision of what it means to live with openness, honesty, and a willingness to grow beyond the apparent confinement of seemingly irreconcilable polarities. An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.”

 

When is it available?

It’s at the Downtown Hartford Public Library now and on order for its Mark Twain branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!