This insistence beats like a pulse throughout the book, reminding the reader that it is necessary to interrogate the uncritical way we accept the organisation of society. The result is an uncompromising deconstruction of the complex manner in which patriarchy has knotted itself into our lives and societal structures, how this affects not only women, and the importance of not viewing history as a static, objective report. In The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, Saini takes a rigorous, broad-ranging and illuminating look at the various historical iterations of patriarchy, and, in tandem, the progression of the feminist cause. “The biggest challenge has been untangling the mass of assumptions that bog down this subject, disguised as objective knowledge.” “This book has taken years of research,” writes award-winning science journalist Angela Saini.
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In some places the translation obscures details that may matter to a specialist. This makes for a readable text, but it may frustrate some specialists: it is never clear when a survivor’s words are transmitted exactly and when a story has been reworked or paraphrased. As this description perhaps suggests, Dressed for a Dance in the Snow contains carefully constructed historical narratives as opposed to raw interviews. Whole documents (letters, poems, the texts of songs) are at times interpolated into the text. At times, Zgustova’s voice interrupts the flow of a woman’s story to add additional reflections or information, but often the women appear to speak without interruption. Chapters are often framed with short introductions describing the woman’s apartment or her interactions with Zgustova. Zgustova does a good job rendering each woman’s story as a clear and coherent narrative. Punitive psychiatric confinement after participating in a demonstration protesting the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Irina Emelyanova, the daughter of Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s lover, who received a camp sentence in 1960 for her role in the “economic crime” of receiving foreign currency -royalties from the publication of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Over the course of one long summer, these characters find connections to one another, and to the land, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one piece of life on earth. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities the future holds. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life.ĭown the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. |