True Love Waits brings together fifteen years of Kaminer's best writings from publications including The Village Voice, The New York Times, Mirabella, and The Atlantic - thoughtful, acerbic, and prescient essays that have helped us understand ourselves. Though her topics range from popular culture to politics and law, and her thinking has evolved over the years, her concerns have remained constant. This is no accidental collection but a cohesive set of reflections on fundamental themes - self-reliance, justice, sex, and civil liberty. First and foremost, Wendy Kaminer is concerned with feminism, a diverse and conflictual movement that includes among its adherents women who oppose pornography and women who consume it, women who want to integrate the military and women who'd like to dismantle it. A longtime proponent of equality feminism, Kaminer has been surveying the feminist landscape for over a decade, mapping its contradictory ideologies. She was also a critic of popular celebrations of victimhood long before criticism of victimism became fashionable, and Kaminer turns from questions of personal responsibility raised by the feminist movement to questions of accountability in the criminal courts. A onetime practicing attorney, her early writing on our confusion about crime, punishment, and retribution and the balancing of social injustice with the demands of criminal justice seems practically clairvoyant today. She examines the equation of the personal and the political, in the courts, the feminist movement, and the culture at large and finds a tendency to trivialize the political and inflate the personal to sometimes ridiculous proportions. And, of course, she trains her eye on thepersonal development tradition, the subject of her celebrated I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, offering trenchant analyses of self-help literature, popular therapeutic culture, and politics.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This is an aggravating collection by a tough-minded thinker, who quite accurately describes herself as having "a compulsion to hold forth." Kaminer (I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional) holds forth on such topics as sex, feminism, politics, gun control, divorce laws, freedom of speech and Hillary Clinton's lack of charisma. She has a gift for the pithy phrase ("Publishing activity, like premarital sex, begins early these days") and an unerring eye for both sides of a question. She has no tolerance for feminist scholars who indulge in language abuse, e.g., Sally Cline: "Women who opt for celibacy should have their positive choice in the direction of personal independence and political empowerment validated and approved." But Kaminer herself uses words like "inapt" and "inartful," and she claims that opinion polls may "adumbrate unarticulated ambivalence." People in glass houses? What gets in the reader's way here is that the pieces are undated and unattributed (they appear to range in time from the early 1980s to the present). Knowing where an essay or a review appeared is important. It identifies the intellectual context. Worse is the fact that the numerous reviews often fail to identify fully the book under discussion. Kaminer's ideas are challenging and interesting enough to merit a better showcase.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Taking its title from its opening essay on the premarital chastity movement for teens, this book of social commentary and criticism follows Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional (LJ 6/1/92), which skewered the self-help movement. The pieces in this collection, some of which first appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Village Voice, among others, address such issues as the feminist "backlash," gun control, criminal justice, and gender roles. Their unifying theme, in the author's words, is a plea for "independent thought and individual autonomy." Kaminer, who is a lawyer/journalist/social critic, covers a wide range of topics in her reviews and essays. A well-reasoned and thought-provoking collection, although not likely to spark the controversy engendered by her earlier book.
Pamela R. Daubenspeck, Warren-Trumbull Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Pamela R. Daubenspeck, Warren-Trumbull Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The most brilliant person on earth,
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This review is from: True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism (Paperback)
I have been an avid reader all my life. And I am grateful to whatever fates there be that I have finally discovered Wendy Kaminer. Even if it was a burst of unduly enthusiasm that made me say "the most brilliant person on earth" for the title of this brief review, I am going to stand by that statement. I don't think I have ever been in awe of a person's mind to the degree to which I am in awe of Wendy Kaminer's. A few days ago I didn't even know she existed, but by now I have two of her books in my possession, with a third one on its way and two more I have just ordered here.
Be that as it may, what I want to say here is that this collection of essays is just about the most exciting collection of essays that I have ever seen - and that includes the most famous of them all, the essays of Montaigne (and he invented the genre). What you will find in Wendy Kaminer's essays is that (as she herself says in another book) there are more than two sides to an issue. Her thoughtful explorations of whatever topic she chooses to deal with are nothing short of absolutely amazing. And, according to her own admission, she is not even trying to change your mind, she is just trying to have the freedom to state her own opinions. Ah, but does she change my mind! Even if - as in most cases - I find that I have already agreed with her prior to reading her argument, I still find myself compelled to "change" my mind anyway, and to think (or try to) like she does. I recommend this book to one and all; I wish the entire world read it, and read each essay in it more than once. I am now looking forward to reading more of her books (soon I shall possess five of them). If you want to read great essays that truly deserve the name "critical" (in every sense of that word), read those in True Love Waits (and let me point out that the title is misleading - and surprisingly so). Your mind is going to thank you for it. Steven C. Scheer, author (but humble in comparison)
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