Amazon.com Review
Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic for The New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book, Bitch is a celebration of the defiant, rock & roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages from The Oresteia to O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character (Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Schindler's List, Oliver!, Carousel, and Andrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious. Bitch is like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11. --Tim Appelo
Passionate Minds is a series of explorations of the biographies and literary achievements of twelve modern women writers. It tells the stories of women who ‘rewrote’ the world that they inherited, shaping beliefs about vital issues ranging from religion and sex to race and politics.
The book is organised into three sections. The first deals with issues of sexual freedom, in essays on Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, and Mae West. The second section, which examines Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, deals with issues of race and the American South. The third focuses on politics, with essays on the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing and, in a dual essay, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.
Originally published in The New Yorker, these essays — brought together in revised and expanded form — reveal unsuspected parallels, contrasts, and influences among the twelve women discussed, illuminating each of them in new and startling ways.Passionate Minds is a series of explorations of the biographies and literary achievements of twelve modern women writers. It tells the stories of women who ‘rewrote’ the world that they inherited, shaping beliefs about vital issues ranging from religion and sex to race and politics.
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