Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women

The overarching theme of this gathering of impassioned, compelling articles and speeches from the last decade by famed feminist Dworkin is that the epidemic of rape, wife-beating, murder of females, pornography and prostitution is made possible by cultures that allow men to exercise destructive power over women. She views the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, ex-wife of accused batterer and stalker O.J. Simpson, as emblematic of our legal system's failure to protect women against male violence. There is a powerful expose here of Serbs' systematic rape and murder of Muslim and Croatian females. In her polemical report on a trip to Israel, Dworkin condemns what she sees as a theocratic, racist state based on dispossession and theft of Arab land, a place where Orthodox rabbis make most of the legal decisions that affect women's lives. In a revealing personal history, Dworkin, a former battered wife and sex abuse victim, declares autobiography to be the unseen foundation of her nonfiction, and indeed many of these pieces forcefully link the personal to the political. (Mar.)