Life and Death

A collection of her most incisive essays and unpublished speeches, Life and Death makes it clear why Dworkin has found her place in the canon of modern political thought. She begins here with a poignant autobiographical piece, in which she recounts with rare tenderness her childhood in Camden, New Jersey, her political odyssey, and the crushing pain of her brother’s death. Lending her hand to tragic current events, or what she calls “emergencies, ” like the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the Hedda Nussbaum child abuse case, and the mass murder of female students at a college in Montreal, Dworkin makes clear in her inimitable way the obvious things we stubbornly fail to notice. Finally, she guides us back to the core issues at stake in women’s lives – pornography, domestic violence, rape, and prostitution – and reminds us that even after decades of feminist so-called progress, gender is an ongoing war.