Gray Books

For the enthusiast of the War of 1812, this book constitutes a must have resource, as it is the first time in which an attempt has been made to compile the nominal rolls of the Upper Canadian militia. For the most part, the information provided consists of no more than name and rank, but where possible, the author provides more; in addition, he has also made an attempt to compile a list of casualties suffered by the Upper Canadian militia, a list which the author admits is far from complete, but which is a commendable undertaking nonetheless. The author also provides a clear and concise background to the formation and participation of the Upper Canadian militia in the war. All making for a unique and useful resource.

This is an outstanding volume from one of the most important thinkers of Western civilization. This is a bridge linking the two major classics from Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government. In this volume, we see Locke's dependence on Stoic philosophy (especially that of Seneca) and the effect that Aristotelian philosophy had on him.

"As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure Hardships, so also does that of the Mind. And the great Principle and Foundation of all Vertue and Worth, is . . . That a Man is able to deny himself his own Desires, cross his own Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho' that appetite lean the other way." And how does one do this? Locke's answer is through education (i.e., through habit).

Anyone wishing to understand the thought and philosophy of Locke, can not afford to ignore this volume in the corpus of Lockean writings. This edition is a very scholarly edition, there is another modern edition available as well. To bad the editors of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke are not very organized, at the rate these volumes are being produced, the complete writings will not be available during my lifetime.

The world needs a modern edition of the writings of Locke, he is too important a thinker not to have this - if nothing else, for us inspiring Lockean scholars. :o)

It bewilders me that such a fine piece of work should drop out of print so quickly, while so much that's mediocre or worse gains a wide audience and many reprints. This comic and satirical novel is written in a neo-picaresque chain-of-stories form, and is a fine companion to Gray's prizewinning _Poor_Things_. Gray himself credits the inimitable Kathy Acker for the inspiration to write it. You'll never look at a woman in leather in the same way again. The nominal epilogue--really an essential part of the structure--may be the funniest part.

Darrell Gray is one of the few poets of his era, whose work has stood up to the test of time. If he isn't mentioned as often as some others, it's only because poets writing now are trying to hide how many lines they've stolen from him. A must read along with SCATTERED BRAINS for anyone who wants to see for themselves how excellence separates itself from mediocrity.

This appeals to 4th grade readers. It's an Up the Down Staircase kind of story using letters to show the difficulties of adjusting to a new school. I took this to booktalk at schools and had good response to it.

The Observer, December 8 1991

Though written from interviews held only three years ago, this fascinating book's pro-Gorbachov/perestroika enthusiasm already has a fugitive feel. But the freshness and strength of these voices from a culture in which 'women can do everything; men can do the rest' easily withstand change.

The Boston Globe, March 8, 1993
...Francine du Plessix Gray, in her book "Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope," notes a long tradition in Russian culture, "marked by men's ambivalent awe and resentment of forceful females" - a trait reflected in literature by an "idealization of women's moral virtues" and a "negative, ascetic attitude toward women's sensuality and intellect."

Gray attributes this pattern to centuries of domination by the Russian Orthodox Church, which emphasized a fear of women's sexual powers, to the point where, for many years, women were forbidden to attend services during their menstrual periods and only those past childbearing age could bake Communion bread.

The Washington Times, July 1, 1991
The Soviet Union has the highest abortion rate in the world (between five and eight abortions for every birth), and the nation's ignorance relating to sexual matters is equaled only in the most backward countries, according to Francine Du Plessix Gray in Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope.

Motivated by memories of her own Russian mother, the novelist traveled from Riga to Irkutsk, questioning women from all walks of life. Author of six other books, including "Lovers and Tyrants" and "World Without End," she doesn't mince words and paints a painful picture of repression.

Most fascinating of all the sexual issues she explores is the paradox of the Russian women's liberation movement compared with its U.S. counterpart. Embittered by years of deprivation and overwork, Russian women are fighting to get out of the work force and back home to domesticity.

New & Noteworthy The New York Times May 19, 1991

Traveling through the Soviet Union, an American novelist of Russian descent finds that oppression has hardened the women to the point that the country "might be as much in need of a men's movement as of a women's movement." Last year our reviewer, Ruth Daniloff, said, "The portraits are drawn with humor and warmth, interspersed with history and social observation."

Notable Books of the Year The New York Times December 2, 1990
Brilliant, sympathetic portraits of overworked, frustrated women whose men have neither the authority of patriarchs nor the utility of househusbands.

USA TODAY, October 22, 1990

Lenin promised Soviet women liberation and equality. Instead, Soviet women are overburdened by policies that deny them birth control, proper health care and day-care centers yet encourage full-time careers and child- bearing, the author says.

The result: a matriarchy of self-sacrificing women, passive men, frequently abandoned infants and as many as five to eight abortions for each live birth. The average female worker, slightly better educated than her male counterpart, earns only about two-thirds his income. Almost half of Soviet women are manual laborers or unskilled.

Author Francine du Plessix Gray, says the Soviet and the U.S. women's movements are traveling in opposite directions. Many Soviet women long for traditional roles and dominant men.

An insightful look at Soviet women from all levels of society.

Books: Sisters in the Red brigades The Guardian (London) September 20, 1990

THE WORLD may stop thinking that all Soviet women are 'ba bushkas' after reading Francine du Plessix Gray. She has let them speak for themselves.

Ms Gray explored the land of her ancestors in an effort to 'document some of the obstacles which have stood in the way of Soviet women's self-fulfilment: misogyny, the double burdens of work and family, a scandalous insufficiency of child support measures, a vastly deteriorated health system, a dearth of basic commodities.'

Her account of the plight of women in the Soviet Union is detailed and, in most instances, accurate. Her sources, Soviet women and a few male doctors who 'care deeply about women's well-being,' at times may get so carried away as to refer, in front of journalists, to the leading members of the USSR ministry of health as 'criminals' and 'murderers,' but they put you in the picture.

The picture is that Soviet women over the past decade have had to survive in an austere environment that lacks the most basic things such as food, clothing, contraceptives, kindergartens, virtually everything. They have a culture of their own, one that is unique and has been the fruit of living under stress and the need to scrape by in spite of the 'widespread machismo of Soviet men' and the government's neglect of women's issues.

There is the widespread sexual ignorance as a result of which '70 per cent of Soviet women have never had an orgasm,' abominable maternity homes which have been described by Soviet women as 'our best contraceptive' for many of them are afraid to repeat the experience, Soviet gynaecologists who complain that Soviet-made condoms 'break up on first use' or claim that they 'can fix any contraindication' to an IUD coil.

A major contributor to this environment has been the almost medieval level of sexism in Soviet society, where even a most ardent male supporter of the women's health issues, someone like Dr Archil Khomassuridze, the head of the Soviet Union's only medical centre that is a full-fledged member of the World Health Organisation, may be chauvinistic enough to 'refuse employing women for their own sake,' so as not to distract them from the family, 'their first priority.'

As a result women have evolved a very distinct attitude towards men, who are seen by an increasing number of women in the USSR as a 'second child,' to look after. Women are growing more career-conscious and more independent (this coming as a sort of paradox as some of them still 'miss not being able to depend on a beloved man'). On the other hand, they resent men's reluctance to help them out with housework and their having almost 'two days extra' every week. Women are casting off their fear of remaining unmarried, and often a good relationship with a man is far from their top priority. ('Let the man be on his way' after the child has been conceived.) The book may give the reader the false impression that Soviet women are all too powerful and invulnerable, while the men are 'a tonic' or 'a Finnish sauna' to them. This isn't quite so. Women are busy surviving, and that's what makes them so aggressive, while aggression is not necessarily their inherent property. Half of Soviet women polled may 'outrightly state that they detest sexual contact,' but most are not happy that they feel that way. They are just women whose philosophies and habits have been twisted by the idiocy of their society, but not to the point where they consciously choose to abandon their families, confining themselves to the pursuit of careers.

The book presents quite a negative view of Soviet men, who may not be the most gallant of gentlemen but, mind you, they too have lived in a twisted society and have in varying degrees succumbed to its influence. In her busy if even somewhat hasty travels through the Soviet Union Ms Gray may have seen a lot of henpecked husbands, but the percentage is not that high in this society. The current husband-wife relationship in Soviet society is probably as complex and hard to categorise as the contemporary social and economic trends there.

People survive in the harshest of environments, and some of them cope better than others. Similarly, in the Soviet Union some women manage, miraculously and contrary to the widespread philosopy, to 'achieve power without losing their tenderness.' This wonderful achievement has been convincingly illustrated by Francine du Plessix Gray, who has come up with an incisive and informative yet personal and at times romantic piece of writing.

BOOK REVIEW / That old blat magic has her still in slavery; The Independent (London) August 19, 1990, Sunday

THERE IS A linguistic theory which holds that the most central everyday concepts are usually expressed in words of four letters: work, for instance, or milk. The normally polysyllabic Russian language seems triumphantly to bear out this idea in the word blat.

Blat is what it takes to get anything in the Soviet Union, from a coveted pair of shoes (slip a bottle of imported brandy to the salesgirl) to an abortion with the benefit of anaesthetic (Swiss chocolates and French perfume will fetch the doctor to your house). Without blat or connections, the 14 abortions that the average Soviet woman suffers during her fertile life will probably be performed ''in a hall splattered with blood where two doctors are aborting seven or eight women at the same time; they're usually very rough and rude, shouting at you about keeping your legs open . . . if you're lucky they give you a little sedative, mostly Valium. Then it's your turn to stagger to the resting room, where you're not allowed to spend more than two hours because the production line is always very busy.''

This is the testimony of Olga Lipovskaya, a 35-year-old Leningrad woman who edits the country's only feminist magazine, and one of scores of Russians, mostly women, whom Francine du Plessix Gray interviewed during her tour of the Soviet Union. The resulting book is a remarkable documentary of quotidian Soviet life. We hear from women of a variety of professions, most of whose lives are rapidly being transformed by glasnost. There's a sexologist; a psychiatrist and patients at a suicide clinic; a designer and some artists; a writer, a hotel worker, several doctors. In edited transcripts liberally salted with her own very decided views, Gray conveys the reality of their days and explores their painful two-fold identity crisis, half old, half new. The old part is that the idea of ''liberation'' for Soviet women, with their double load as producers and reproducers, has always been a cruel joke; the new is that now they are not communists any more, they do not know what they are instead.

The book's many voices painlessly feed us an encyclopaedic quantity of statistics. Soviet women commonly leave home at 7.30am and return at 8pm. Only 5 per cent use any efficient method of birth control (hence the 14 abortions). They spend up to two hours a day queuing for food; they do all the work in the house as well. Though the first women in the world to get the vote, they live like slaves. Soviet men, it goes almost without saying, are represented as little above the Neanderthal.

The book is a mine of deliciously quotable quotes: ''Perhaps one of the finest results of our glasnost will be the manufacture of Tampax'', for example, or ''Soviet women may well have the highest rate of culturally repressed orgasm in the world.''

Much in this book is flawed and partial. Brought up by a Russian mother and grandmother, Gray states her aim to be one of fathoming the ''mysterious, unique power of Russian women'', and she conveniently finds many interviewees who support her thesis. But her book makes horrifying and enthralling reading for us all. Gorbachev (because of the glowing tributes to him, both explicit and implicit) should read it to cheer himself up.

Times Newspapers Limited, August 19, 1990

If ever there were a lively dialogue between the dumb and the deaf it is to be found in Francine Du Plessix Gray's account of her conversations with Soviet women. Though allowed to travel freely in the USSR, under the new dispensation, Gray took with her much heavy baggage stuffed with American pieties about feminism and ''women's issues''.

Happily for her book, Gray was met with incredulity and incomprehension when she unpacked her feminist wares. And her political exuberance for the Gorbachev ''revolution'' received short shrift. ''We have more glasnost than we can handle, but we'll never have perestroika,'' she was told by Tatiana Tolstaya, the novelist. It is unclear what the women felt about their American guest, but some of Gray's questions about official corruption and belief in God seem to have confirmed the widely held belief that they were in the presence of some being from another planet.

Soviet Women gives one the sense of an explorer travelling among people who wear their heads beneath their arms. The feeling is strengthened by frequent references to ''us'' and ''them''. ''They'' are the Russians. ''We'' are always, and only, Americans. Thus when Gray's eye falls on dissenters in Izmailovo Park they bear ''a striking resemblance to our own 1960s''. And her approach to each of the women she interviews is not to find out what each thinks of herself but ''aims to decipher her views of us''.

But nothing is that simple in the Soviet Union. It's one of the pleasures of this book that Gray never seeks to conceal her surprise and even more revealing her dismay at the responses she receives. It turns out that Russian women have no strong opinions of American women, except envy of their figures. On the contrary, what Russian women really like are American men. They are admired for their ''gentlemanliness'', adored for their ''casual elegance'', their gallantry and cordiality and celebrated for their talents as ''good providers''.

It ought to make a feminist fume. But of course this is not really the way Soviet women feel about American men. For a start, very few will have met an American male. But they have seen a lot of good, old-fashioned movies. And they have read Gone With the Wind, which Gray found, to her perplexity, was regarded as one of the great classics of American literature. This perhaps explains the Soviet woman's unusual reading of the talents of American men.

In fact, many Soviet women use, not just American, but any foreign males, as ammunition in their war against their own men. In the words of Alya, a streetwalker I once knew in Moscow, ''foreign is fun''. Gray consulted no prostitutes, but if she had done so she would have found they confirmed the view of most women that just about any ''foreign'' is fun by comparison with what is regarded as the dour and boorish Russian male. Russian women are not anti-men. But they're distinctly displeased with the home-grown variety and, in particular, that stock figure of fun, contempt and pity, the husband.

What Gray's book makes clear is that the Soviet Union is the world standing on its head for the conventional Western feminist. Soviet women positively like cooking, knitting and having babies and keeping the home. They distrust the idea of women's liberation and they detest what they see as its aggressive American variant. Despite a marked hostility towards it, even among women with otherwise remarkably liberal views, Gray continues to force the comparison. The hostility of her ''Soviet sisters'' she ascribes to ''their decades of cultural isolation''. The trouble, it seems, is that ''they'' have never read Woolf or de Beauvoir, they have never had access to our basic feminist texts. ''These are the regrets of the missionary among some archaic tribe reporting back to biblical mission control.''

It is not about the lives of women that these conversations are most revealing. Rather, they show just how wretched life is for very many Soviet citizens: squalid hospitals, empty shops, graft, corruption, irascible officials, lousy housing, increasing street violence and growing frustration. Seventy years after the great experiment in human progress the place is a dismal mess. Perestroika and glasnost are, in fact, party-led reforms, directed from above and woefully inadequate.

In these pages Soviet women (editors, television executives, scientists, wives, mothers, daughters) arrive at an unexpected consensus. They're allowed to do everything, but, left to their own devices, women would do a lot less, and do it at home. Gray estimates that 98% of street sweepers are women. There are also more doctors, engineers and teachers amongst women. But their bosses remain men men who see women, with their high work rates and indefatigable industry, as ''our Japanese''.

As for Russian men, Tatiana Tolstaya refuses to take the predictable view. Men need special treatment, they wear out so much sooner. ''Women are the roots, men are just the leaves.'' In its marvellous blend of pity and disdain, this raises the debate to a level to which the missionary zeal and frequent astonishments of Soviet Women seldom aspires.

Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope._book reviews, The Nation, June 4, 1990

Seventy-three years after the Russian Revolution, Soviet women are confronting a powerful backlash against its emancipation of women. Glasnost is allowing Soviet citizens to voice patriarchal prejudices once banned as bourgeois or counterrevolutionary. The state-controlled news media, for example, frequently blame "overemancipated, masculinized women" for social ills from juvenile delinquency to divorce. And Mikhail Gorbachev's ambivalent positions on the role of women in political and economic life, along with the social policies proposed by the Communist Party and the Congress of People's Deputies earlier this year, further strengthen the view that only women are responsible for children and housework.

So far, perestroika has failed to change Soviet women's secondary position in the work force or shorten their second shift at home. Measures proposed by the Communist Party to "improve the working and living conditions of women"' for example, will allow women to work fewer hours a week; release them from heavy work and labor injurious to their health (usually the highest-paying jobs); and increase prenatal, maternal and workplace funded leave for mothers of large families and single mothers. These policies, however generous and necessary, fail to address the fundamental inequalities women suffer. Official discussions of women's double burden rarely extend to men's family responsibilities-or consider society's responsibility for family welfare. The idea of parental, as opposed to maternal, leave was unthinkable until this year. (In April the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution which for the first time allows "fathers, grandfathers or other family members" the right to take unpaid child care leave.)

Why is this happening in a country that produced the first woman ambassador and the first woman in space? The Soviet Union contains the largest number of women professionals and specialists on the globe, and close to 90 percent of its female population is in the work force. Early Soviet legislation sought to secure full economic and social equality for women. They were to be employed in the public sector as a condition of complete equality, and the responsibility for housework and child care was to shift from the individual household to the collective. But the disruptions of war, large-scale unemployment, rampant inflation and Stalin's conservative social policies meant that few resources were devoted to social programs. Although opportunities for women in the labor force expanded, the socialization of housework never took shape.

As a result, many Soviet women express yearning for a traditional female role centered around the family and the home. They are exhausted by decades of paper equality and a double burden made more difficult by consumer shortages (a recent Soviet survey shows that 275 billion hours, equal to 90 percent of the time devoted to paid work in the national economy as a whole, are spent on shopping, child care and housework each year, most of it spent by women). Yet recent national polls show that only 20 percent of Soviet women would quit their jobs even if they could afford to. And most Soviet women, like their American counterparts, still need to work full time in order to make ends meet. Other women, fewer in number but increasingly vocal, are taking advantage of increased opportunities for political and social activism. Some are even espousing Western-style feminism, as they understand it.

Francine du Plessix Gray set out in 1987 to capture a society in flux through the voices of its women. She admits to a dual purpose: to examine "the first community of women in history to be officially emancipated" and to decode "the forceful spell that Russian women have had on me for much of my life" (Gray was raised in Paris by a-Russian mother, grandmother and governess). Her nostalgia for the cozy and aristocratic milieu of her Russian maternal relatives may have led her to talk mainly to educated, urban, successful" women. There are no rural women, or engineers or scientists in Soviet Women (although there are many doctors, a more traditional female occupation), and only a few token workers. Her portraits of women in their homes, at work or in hospitals and clinics are always meticulously observed and often lyrical. A distinguished writer of fiction and nonfiction, Gray tells these women's stories like a novelist.

The strength of Gray's book is its reporting on how women are being affected by a deteriorating health care system. Gray hears stories about the brutal treatment of women during childbirth. On visits to several hospitals, she documents the primitive conditions: the unchanged, blood-smeared sheets on nursing mothers' beds, the lack of bathing facilities and the patients' shabby, prison like hospital gowns. Men are not allowed to visit their wives or children for fear that they will infect them. The great irony of the Soviet Union's backwardness in the field of gynecology is that the technique of prepared childbirth had originated there several decades ago (the Frenchman who introduced it to the West, Dr. Lamaze, had actually learned it in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s from two Soviet doctors, Platonov and Velkovskii). Today the Lamaze method is virtually unheard of in the Soviet Union, and women have little or nothing to say about the conduct of their labor. According to Gray, only one clinic in the Soviet Union, in the more westernized Baltic Republic of Latvia, practices family birthing techniques.

Abortion is the primary method of birth control-not by choice but because of the absence of reliable contraceptives (diaphragms come in only two sizes, and condoms are called galoshi, winch means just what it sounds like). There are four to eight abortions, depending on whose statistics you trust, for every live birth. The conditions in abortion clinics that Gray describes are now being graphically detailed in the Soviet press. Last year, for example, Moscow News published an account of one woman's ordeal under the headline, "I Don't Want to Be Sorry I'm a Woman:' The author, Yekaterina Nikolayeva, recalled her experience in an abortion clinic. A doctor yelled at her for staring at his bloodstained gloves and scolded another woman by saying, "You should have had second thoughts before. You're all fond of sweets, but you're not willing to pay the price: "

The article led the highest-ranking woman in the Soviet government, Aleksandra Biryukova, to order a Health Ministry investigation. She promised that the contraceptive industry would radically increase its output over the next two years. But Biryukova's call for change will not be easily answered. The Soviet reproductive health system needs radical restructuring before it can serve women humanely and effectively, and the lack of contraceptives is not the only problem. Family-planning programs are almost nonexistent and have no way to counter widespread beliefs that contraceptives are unreliable, dangerous or unobtainable. (No sex education materials designed for women are readily available now, but next year Progress Publishers may publish Our Bodies, Ourselves.)

Unlike the abortion debate in the West, which pits the putative rights of the fetus against women's right to choose, the Soviet discussion is about women's health care-the right to adequate supplies of reliable contraceptives, sanitary conditions, anesthetics and the respect of medical workers. As of now, there is no national debate in the Soviet Union about the morality of abortion. But rising ethnic tensions in the Russian Republic and in the Caucasus, for example, could open that issue because they strengthen patriarchal religions which have a dim view of women. (A similar phenomenon is occurring in Poland, where the Catholic Church is trying to use its influence with Solidarity to curtail abortion and the availability of contraceptives.)

Few Soviet sexologists (a surprisingly busy and esteemed specialty) will discuss homosexuality, and decades of cultural isolation from the West and of repressive laws have insured that sexual attitudes remain reactionary. (Although lesbianism was never officially outlawed, homosexuals have been jailed for up to eight years under a statute that, according to press reports, is likely to be repealed this year.) But there have been glimmers of opposition. In December 1979 a group of Leningrad women issued a samizdat publication, Almanac Women and Russia. It was the first self-consciously feminist text produced in the Soviet Union since the early 1920s, and its half-dozen contributors wrote about the flaws of Soviet gynecology, the scarcity of consumer goods and the general overburdening of women, problems that are aired today by numerous women in the glasnost press. What was unusual about Almanac was its accounts of lesbian relationships, a reality of Soviet life that is only now being acknowledged (albeit euphemistically and grudgingly).

Ten years earlier, in November 1969, Natalya Baranskaya'snovellaa Week Like Any Other was published in the prestigious literary journal Novy Mir. (It has just been published in English, along with several of Baranskaya's short stories, by Seal Press.) Written in the form of a week's diary entries, it details the nightmare of one woman's daily life: food shortages, endless fines, poor health care and day care, the lack of basic household services and a husband who buries himself in the TV or newspapers and never lifts a finger. When he suggests to Olga, a young scientist, that she stop working and stay home to take care of the family (a familiar proposal these days), she is appalled: "You want to shut me in here for the whole year! How could we live on your salary! ... All this boring stuff is for me alone, and the only interesting things are for you! " Olga's story touched a raw nerve; Baranskaya received hundreds of letters from grateful women thanking her for telling the truth about their lives. hat was twenty years ago; it's taken women that long to get started. Since 1989 there has been an upsurge of independent (that is, outside party control) activism by women. And although there are still no signs of a mass movement, independent women's associations have emerged around the country. But Soviet Women doesn't take these developments into account. (To be fair, things are changing so rapidly in the Soviet Union these days that many books are outdated by the time they are published.) Gray writes that women are "hindered from cohesive action, to this day, by their government's censure of any feminist' movement that would function outside of party control ... and by their curious lack of solidarity." Her comment that during her travels she "barely found two" other feminists is difficult to understand. One evening last December I sat in a newspaper office in Moscow and listened to twenty women from eight different independent associations define what feminism meant to them. Many were in their 20s, contradicting Gray's view that the younger generation has lost contact with feminist traditions. In fact, the emerging women's associations are composed of women of different ages and different political and professional orientations.

In Moscow, Olga Voronina and a group of women scholars have established the League for Society's Liberation from Stereotypes (LOTOS), which is beginning to articulate a gender analysis of Soviet society. Olga Bessolova has revived a once dormant Women's Council in the Aerohydrodynamics Institute in Zhukovsky, sixty kilometers from has organized a Women's Initiative Club, which lobbies the town government for better services and holds bimonthly consciousness-raising, and an Inter-Regional Women's Political Club, which organizes political training workshops for women and nominates women to run in local and national races. Last January I attended one of the Initiative Club's meetings. Forty women-professionals, scholars, journalists, engineers and factory workers-gathered for four hours. These women believe that the solution to the "women's question" lies not in the improvement of consumer goods and services but in the redefinition of male and female social roles'. One month earlier, a federation of women writers was formed inside the Russian Writer's Union, and women filmmakers and journalists have started lobbying groups to fight for higher pay and better working conditions. (The Soviet Union still has only one female foreign correspondent.) In March several women formed a women's center in Moscow which will offer legal consultation as well as political leadership training. In Leningrad, Elena Zelinskaya, who heads a women's cooperative association and the Northwest Information Agency, a network of independent journalists in Leningrad, was recently appointed to chair the City Council Commission on Communication. In Uzbekistan (where Gray interviews a "narcissistic Communist official" and a "Dragon Lady"), Rozika Mergenbaeva makes documentaries about the appalling conditions under which women and girls work in the cotton fields.

More disturbing than these omissions is Gray's conclusion, presented early in the book, that "the Soviet Union might be as much in need of a men's movement as of a women's movement." She tries the idea out on some of her Soviet friends and finds it very well received:' But the women Gray asks, and who inform this book, are almost exclusively strong and successful women who live with either their mothers or children or with passive, emasculated men, whom they deride in Gray's presence. As someone who has traveled regularly to the Soviet Union in the past ten years, I'd say the country has had a men's movement all along; only now are women's concerns emerging on the fringes of the male-dominated political and cultural outpourings that characterize glasnost. What kind of matriarchy pays its female workers two-thirds of the average male income, gives women the dirty manual jobs while insuring that they cannot reach the top of the professions and then blames "masculinized" women for every social problem?

Gray emerges as a kind of romantic feminist, accepting the view, so popular among the Soviet intel political elite, that Soviet women have an essence that is indisputably different from that of men. "In this laboratory of emancipation offered us by the Soviet Union' " Gray concludes, "in this epochal experiment which has engaged women in the work force longer and more fully than any society in history, the paradoxical equality' between the sexes may well symbolize a central dilemma of the human condition: the female's secret and ambivalent desire to lead and be led, the male's confusion and resentment before her mysterious force and her often awesome versatility:' Throughout all levels of Soviet society, she writes, "one is constantly awed by women's keen sense of their greater patience, diligence, optimism, endurance, shrewdness and selfesteem-a self-esteem apparently heightened by the very arduousness of their everyday duties, their incessant foraging for basic necessities of food and clothing." Gray continues, "Many women I talked to prefer to remain exhausted, to continue complaining and to keep their husbands out of the kitchen, where 'it is not their place to be.' " Perhaps, she notes, this stance makes more sense if viewed in the great Russian literary tradition that depicts women's suffering as a redemptive force. In the end, she creates the same image of women created by Russian male authors in the nineteenth century: heroines considerably more powerful than their male counterparts. Those authors placed women on pedestals, the better to admire their suffering while keeping them in their place. The structure of much of the booksmall-scale, impressionistic pictures of women in their homes, with their children and, occasionally, "henpecked" husbands-places women in a traditional surrounding....

The description of this story above is a little vague, because this story has a lot of depth and depicts a very sweet brother-sister relationship. In preparing for Halloween, big brother Harry cat and his little sister Emily plan their costumes, but Emily wants to keep hers a secret until the last minute. Unfortunately it doesn't turn out quite the way she planned and when she comes downstairs for trick or treating she is crying because she is so disappointed with it. Harry saves the night by pointing out all of the neat things about her costume and telling her how clever it is. Then at each house where they trick or treat, Emily's costume gets extra attention because it is so unusual and Harry explains what she is to everyone. Emily gets lots of extra treats for her original costume, and at the end of the night she has more than Harry....but they put the candy together to share it.

As a parent with brother and sister siblings any book about cooperation and helping a younger child feel special is very welcome. Harry is a tremendously patient older brother. My five year old loves this book--if you have siblings in the 3-9 age range don't miss it. The drawings are one of our favorite things, they are very simple and sometimes (perhaps unintentionally) funny. My son loves how Harry's hair sticks up on top of his head. All of the books we have seen so far featuring Harry and Emily have the same themes of cooperation, positive thinking and increased independence.

Why I like this book?

1) It is interesting.
2) It gives me a better image of how the world war is like.
3) It also interest me to read on and on without stopping.
4) It reflects on how well I am.
5) It also helps up with my school projects, especially my literature.

This are only some of my likings of this book. There are still lots more that I couldn't find words to describe it! It's just so good that it also helps to improve my language! Read it! I do sure you will love this book! =)

Thanks so much for it! I'm still loving the book so much! =P

Stanford is one of those schools that just seems to have pretty much everything (great academics, great facilities, great weather, proximity to San Francisco) and this guide seems to paint the same picture. It was interesting to see, though, that most of the kids tend to stay on-campus to party and don't venture out of the city too much. Luckily, the book also includes plenty of listings for local restaurants and nightlife spots - very helpful for someone new to the city. Highly recommended for those who aren't from the area.

This is a great book, better than others written about Yosemite Indians. You might ask why does Stanislaus Indian Wars have to do with Yosemite? That is where most people claiming to be Yosemite Miwoks came from. Their chiefs made agreements with people like Charles Webber, who built up Sockton California, and had their people go up to the foothill to dig gold for them. It also has how and where the Miwuk and Yokut dancing came from and their legends. Yosemite Miwok Legends were not original Yosemite Miwuk legends, but far western Yokut or Coastoan tales brought in by one of their shamans named Chiplichu. C. Hart Merriam later conceded in 1930 that he was incorrect. That Yosemite Miwok legends were really far western Yokut tales. That is in Frank Latta's book Handbook of the Yokuts.

This is a great book and must have for anyone who is doing research on early Central California Indian life.