My Weekly Book

Here are a couple of excellent articles from the New York Times books section for anyone who fancies a bit of feminist inspiration. The first reviews a book by Lisa Appignanesi about the historical collision between women and the mental health establishment:

Diagnosis: Female

…it seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her. As Appignanesi observes, “Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women - romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination - comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering. Victorian women who weren’t locked up for falling victim to lypemania (melancholy), monomania, homicidal monomania or “moral insanity” were at risk of neurasthenia, a “mirror image of rebellion” in which their “nervous depletion” was explained as the result of their “incursion into the masculine sphere of intellectual labor,” a strain that constitutions formed for tender sentiment couldn’t be expected to support. And then came hysteria, which “best expresses women’s distress at the clashing demands and no longer tenable restrictions placed on women in the fin de siècle.” Read full article here…

The second takes a look at Germaine Greer’s biography of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. As a great admirer of Virginia Woolf I found the following excerpt, which ends the article, incredibly resonant:

Reclaiming the Shrew

In “A Room of One’s Own,” with its famous riff on Shakespeare’s sister, Virginia Woolf wrote that when one tries to picture the life of an Elizabethan woman, “one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. … What one wants, I thought — and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? — is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; … did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring.” And now the book written by a brilliant student from Newnham, dreamed of by Virginia Woolf in the last century, exists: lively, rigorous, fiercely imagined. Read full article here…

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Meanwhile, over at The Telegraph, they really do love their lists. Here’s a link to the latest - the top 50 cult books of all time.

Worth reading alone for its refusal to take itself too seriously: “What is a cult book? We tried and failed to arrive at a definition: books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula “ whacko”; books our children just won’t get… Some things crop up often: drugs, travel, philosophy, an implied two fingers to conventional wisdom, titanic self-absorption, a tendency to date fast and a paperback jacket everyone recognises with a faint wince. But these don’t begin to cover it.”

As a fan of thrillers, I like a John Grisham novel as much as the next thrill-seeking escapist. Thus I was interested to see the review of the latest on in the New York Times. Here it is (registration/login may be required):

Uncivil Action

Thrillers thrive on villains and heroes, and usually these characters are not overly complicated; writers don’t want to confuse or slow the plot. In John Grisham’s page-turners the villains are corporate titans and their lawyers, and the plucky, idealistic heroes (played in the movie versions by Tom Cruise in “The Firm” and Julia Roberts in “The Pelican Brief”) are renegade lawyers or law students, shocked into action by the corruption they have stumbled across.

Grisham sticks with his formula for the villains in “The Appeal.” But he paints a more complicated picture of the heroes, while making an important point about how the justice system in more than half of the 50 states is increasingly threatened by the kind of big-money gutter politics that have made so many Americans disgusted with Washington.

Grisham’s heroes in “The Appeal” are plaintiffs’ lawyers, the much maligned litigators who represent victims of alleged corporate wrongdoing. Their excuse for taking a third to 40 percent of their clients’ winnings — even if those winnings are in the millions or billions (in the case of mass tort claims against asbestos or tobacco defendants) — is that their little-guy clients don’t have the money to pay hourly fees in advance of a verdict, and that it’s those big paydays that give them the incentive and resources to take on risky cases that deliver powerfully deterrent punishment to those who would otherwise keep committing all kinds of corporate jihad.

It’s an argument, however, that’s been undermined by the spectacle of trial lawyers cashing in on cases where deep-pocketed, well-insured defendants who might not be fully culpable or culpable at all threw in the towel out of fear that sympathetic juries were too easily rewarding any tug at their heartstrings, and by revelations of corruption in recruiting clients and divvying up fees among fellow vultures of the bar who did little more than race to the scenes of tragedies. Read full review here…