Susan Brownmiller

"A 'history of rape, including psychological, sociopolitical, and legal perspectives ... The material is well documented and compellingly presented.'" Choice.

Gardening on rooftops, balconies, and terraces is a popular trend. After thirty-five years of experience, Susan Brownmiller writes with honesty and humor about her oasis twenty floors above a Manhattan street. She reports the catastrophes: losing daytime access during building-wide renovations; assaults from a mockingbird during his mating season. And the joys: a peach tree fruited for fifteen years; the windswept birches lasted for twenty-five. Butterflies and bees pay annual visits. She pampers a buddleia, a honeysuckle, roses, hydrangeas, and more. Her adventures celebrate the tenacity of nature, inviting readers to marvel at her garden’s resilience, and her own.

Brownmiller addresses the set of societal strictures, esthetic ideals, and assigned "characteristics" which governs the lives of half of America, and which goes by the name of Femininity. Biological femaleness, writes Brownmiller, is the smallest part of the elusive quality we know as femininity, which "always demands more. It must constantly reassure its audience by a willing demonstration of difference, even when one does not exist in nature." Body and gesture, skin and hair, conversation and clothing; the way a woman speaks, the way she sits, the way she smells: all are ruled by a code that requires enhancement, containment, exaggeration, or even denial of woman's nature. Whether an individual woman finds in femininity the luxuriant pursuit of a positive identity or an implacable standard she can never hope to meet, femininity remains, at bottom, "a powerful esthetic based upon a recognition of powerlessness."--Publisher description.

A biography of the New York politician who was the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress.

In November 1992, shortly after the U.S. government lifted travel restrictions, Travel & Leisure magazine sent Susan Brownmiller to Vietnam on a tourist visa. "You take a lot of baggage when you go to Vietnam," her piece began. "One small suitcase, one carry-on, and two thousand pounds of disjunctive emotions napalmed into your brain from a televised war that won't go away.". The inspired match between author and subject continued after the article's publication as Brownmiller immersed herself in Vietnamese history and current events, rekindling an interest that began in the 1960s. Seeing Vietnam is the result, a traveler's journey in the grand tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene - part reportage, part impassioned memoir, part serendipitous adventure, all delivered with the acuity, wit, and political sophistication we have come to expect from her. As Brownmiller does the twist in a Hanoi disco, gorges on garlic-fried crab (while passing up the crunchy fried songbirds), bargains for hand-painted ceramics, joins a class in tai chi for older women, drinks tea with the Buddhist monks of Hue, sits crosslegged with the Bru Van Kieu near the ghostly remains of a military base, gives an impromptu English lesson to university students, is offered a pygmy slow loris on a Saigon street, and chats with representatives of some of the larger multinationals in her hotel lobby, the reader shares her intense engagement, her delight in each new encounter, and the emotional catharsis of seeing - and making friends with - a people and a country we have fought but never known.

The story of a six-year-old girl who is beaten to death in Greenwich Village and the warning signs that were misinterpreted by those in a position to sound the alarm.

Short stories in the laconic style of a news reporter.