Reasonable Creatures - by Katha Pollitt (Paperback)

About the Book

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this brilliant, insightful, controversial, and courageous book contains the best of Pollitt's pieces, which have galvanized readers of The Nation, The New Yorker and The New York Times, on subjects that range from abortion and breast implants to date-rape, marriage, the media, and violence.

Book Synopsis

She writes about sex, children's books, the media, breast implants, the mind of an antiabortionist. She invokes Moby Dick and Gilligan's Island, Lorna Bobbitt and Lysistrata ("the original woman's strike-for-peace-nik"). For more than a decade, in her wonderfully provocative, wittily astute, graceful and gutsy pieces in The Nation, The New Yorker and The New York Times, she has taken the strongest positions on the thorniest moral issues and the most controversial events, from date rape to surrogate motherhood, to violence against women, to the Anita Hill hearings, to fetal rights and mothers' "wrongs." She asks "Who's Afraid of Hillary Clinton?, " considers the Smurfette Principle and explains why she hates "Family Values." She takes aim at nineteen targets in all. Her pieces delight by their language - the mastery that won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her first book of poems - and her refusal, ever, to be ponderous.

Review Quotes

"Katha Pollitt writes the liveliest, smartest general essays on women's issues today. (They're awfully good on America, too.) Relief -- that someone is finally saying it -- is one of the many pleasures that Pollitt invariably gives me. Brave. funny, commonsensical, morally right on, she's almost always right." -- Susan Sontag

"Katha Pollitt's essays are so brilliant that I had to rub my eves from time to time as I read them. When she finishes with a subject, there really isn't anything more to say -- except, 'Thanks, Katha, for clearing that up!'"

-- Barbara Ehrenreich

She asks "Who's Afraid of Hillary Clinton?," considers the Smurfette Principle and explains why she hates "Family Values." She takes aim at nineteen targets in all. Her pieces delight by their language -- the mastery that won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her first book of poem -- and her refusal, ever, to be ponderous.

"A thoughtful and brilliant woman ... These essays are a joy to read." -- alice Adams

"It is a great pleasure to have this gathering oF' Katha Pollitt's work. Her intelligence is always relentless, always bracing, while always; maintaining a wonderful lightness. She is the gin-and-Campari of the women's movement." -- Mary Gordon

"Lucid, gutsy, funny and just, Katha Pollitt is easily my favorite essayist at work today. I read everything she writes and consider this collection a treasure." -- Phyllis Rose

"Katha Pollitt's essays are fine, fierce, well-informed and mind-changing. Anyone would be proud to have her good head and good heart on their side."

-- Gloria Steinem

About the Author

Katha Pollitt is the author of the essay collections Learning to Drive, Virginity or Death!, Subject to Debate, and Reasonable Creatures, and is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation. She has won many prizes and awards for her work, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for her first collection of poems, Antarctic Traveller, and two National Magazine Awards for essays and criticism. She lives in New York City.