A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer | 
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Product Description
Selections from the “Until the Violence Stops” Festival
Featuring writings by Abiola Abrams • Edward Albee • Tariq Ali • Maya Angelou • Periel Aschenbrand • Patricia Bosworth • Nicole Burdette • Kate Clinton • Kimberle Crenshaw • Michael Cunningham • Edwidge Danticat • Ariel Dorfman • Mollie Doyle • Slavenka Drakulic • Michael Eric Dyson • Dave Eggers • Kathy Engel • Eve Ensler • Jane Fonda • Carol Gilligan • Jyllian Gunther • Suheir Hammad • Christine House • Marie Howe • Carol Michèle Kaplan • Moisés Kaufman • Michael Klein • Nicholas Kristof • James Lecesne • Elizabeth Lesser • Mark Matousek • Deena Metzger • Susan Miller • Winter Miller • Susan Minot • Robin Morgan • Kathy Najimy • Lynn Nottage • Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy • Sharon Olds • Hanan al-Shaykh • Anna Deavere Smith • Diana Son • Monica Szlekovics • Robert Thurman • Betty Gale Tyson • Alice Walker • Jody Williams • Erin Cressida Wilson • Howard Zinn
This groundbreaking collection, edited by author and playwright Eve Ensler, features pieces from “Until the Violence Stops,” the international tour that brings the issue of violence against women and girls to the forefront of our consciousness. These diverse voices rise up in a collective roar to break open, expose, and examine the insidiousness of brutality, neglect, a punch, or a put-down. Here is Edward Albee on S&M; Maya Angelou on women’s work; Michael Cunningham on self-mutilation; Dave Eggers on a Sudanese
abduction; Carol Gilligan on a daughter witnessing her mother being hit; Susan Miller on raising a son as a single mother; and Sharon Olds on a bra.
These writings are inspired, funny, angry, heartfelt, tragic, and beautiful. But above all, together they create a true and profound portrait of this issue’s effect on every one of us. With information on how to organize an “Until the Violence Stops” event in your community, A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer is a call to the world to demand an end to violence against women.
“In the current era, it takes some brain racking to think of anyone else doing anything quite like Ensler. She’s a countercultural consciousness-raiser, an empowering figure, a truth-teller.”
–Chicago Tribune
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Customer Reviews:
• Ensler Examines Violence Against Women 25 December, 2007
I read this book at the gym and found that I really wished that I had a pack of tissue with me. Ensler's anthology is at times painful to read- the vignettes are harrowing and will leave the reader with a sense of sadness.
I found that I kept on leafing to the back of the book to read the contributors' bios. I wish that the bios were after each poem/essay. This book is not a sunny, fun read, but a heavy one.
The audience for this book is both a lay and academic audience. I would actually like to hear it on cd. I can't help but wonder if the pieces would be more powerful that way (much like the _Good Body_ is better on CD).
Overall, I think the anthology can educate people about the seemingly everyday wickedness concerning violence against women and girls. I think that some folks don't understand how pervasive violence is in our lives, yet we don't talk about it.
Kudos to Ensler for continuing to be such a great feminist artist, who uses her creative endeavors to educate.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AAG0O8X2PYE6G
• A Pack Of Lies. 11 December, 2007
1) Violence against women and girls will end when violence ends. Even rape, a distinctive form of violence in which the gender of the victim is profoundly significant and the perpetrator's motives are largely unique to the circumstances, is not disassociated from the larger realm of violent behavior. While it may very well be possible to reduce rape and domestic violence independently of other forms of violence, can anyone be so obtuse and ideologically brainwashed as to believe we can make them disappear in a world where violence itself continues to flourish? The feminist stance on rape, in particular, never fails to confound me: they say it is thoroughly sexless in its motivation, which would mean that there is nothing to distinguish it from other acts of violence insofar as the innate quality of the violence itself is concerned. Would this not mean, then, that rape in its nature is not a specialized phenomenon? Yet they labor under the assumption that rape is so specialized that it represents a war waged against women and that it can be isolated and thoroughly expunged from society irrespective of general violence.
2) The portrayal of all violence against women as a special kind of violence and of violence against men as generic violence - the belief that female victims warrant greater concern and outrage than that which their male counterparts warrant - the tenet that posits women's victimization as more significant than men's because the male victims are victimized by members of their own sex (thereby imparting a certain degree of complicity and inherited guilt to the male victim) - the assertion that we need to make bringing an end to violence against women a special priority above and beyond other violence - all this indicates a grossly prejudiced value system. There is even a limit with regard to domestic violence: contrary to popular polemical belief, not all domestic violence represents a concerted effort to keep a woman in a subjected state of terror and docile tractability. Much of it, yes; and then there are men possessing violent tempers that are inclined to flare up in the home, and still others who are brutes that don't discriminate when it comes to the gender of their victims. I'm inclined to believe that the bulk of domestically violent situations do not fall neatly within any single one of these categories. To focus exclusively on domestic violence as a specialized phenomenon - though expedient for turning it into a purely politically form of behavior, thereby painting a picture in which a cross-section of men are "waging war" against women - is to impose a structure into which it does not always fit, and can only cripple our ability to effectively battle such behavior since it reduces our ability to fully comprehend it in all its manifestations.
3) Most appalling of all is the prioritization of girls over boys as victims. How can a group of women be so cruel and heartless as to exclude male children? Does their contemptuous misandry run that deep? Or could it be that they are conscious of infantilizing women by lumping them in with children as a group? That's bad enough; this is worse.
Remember, this book is co-edited by a perversely twisted woman who made her contempt for men manifest in The Vagina Monologues: The ranter of the monologue recalls how as a girl she was drugged and seduced by an older woman, an incident which impacted her life in a profound and irrevocably positive manner. I.e., heterosexual relations are so detrimental to the best interests of women that it is beneficial for a 14-year-old girl to be date-raped by an adult female if it "awakens" her to the gentle wonders and sweet joys and wholesome goodness of lesbianism, thereby veering her away from a lifetime of destructive heterosexual relations with violent, egotistical, power-hungry, and immoral males. What a crock.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3C8V3BHKG422B
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