Mother
Millett by
Kate Millett
Kate Millett's tremulous and hauntingly
beautiful memoir begins with a telephone call from Minnesota where
her mother is dying. Her return home to a severe, intelligent, and
controlling matriarch is the catalyst for a meditation on her
upbringing in middle America and her subsequent outcast status as
a political activist, artist, and lesbian. Mother Millett
is an intensely personal journey through the author's interior
life, a subject she has visited over the years in such classic
texts as Sita
and The
Loony Bin Trip. In these pages are reflections on a life
of political engagement, beginning with the sexual politics of the
feminist movement, proceeding to the struggle for gay liberation,
and culminating in her campaign for housing rights on the Lower
East Side of New York where she and her neighbors currently face
eviction. Throughout, Millett confronts her fears of losing her
mother, the anchor to a world she has long ago rejected but which
continues to define her. Echoing Philip Roth's Patrimony,
Millett writes with great poignancy about caring for the person
who brought her into the world, a role reversal that brings with
it both devastation and grace.
Sita
by
Kate Millett
This autobiography of the last days of her quite
obsessive relationship with Sita is the story of a dying love
affair, where each day's petty slights and delightful surprises
are digested for the insightful truths and harsh realities of self
analysis. Like Violette Leduc, Millett charts every moment and
every emotion during the days of bliss and the days of spite in
the struggle to save the love they share, until Sita's ultimate
betrayal by leaving for a man. Included in this new edition is a
portion of the elegy Millett wrote after Sita's suicide in 1978,
which is a stunning finale for this captivating memoir. Unlike
other reviewers, I didn't find this at all depressing. Rather, I
found this book uplifting and mesmerizing. -- Anonymous Review
The Politics of Cruelty - An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment
by
Kate Millett
Millett offers a harrowing portrait of torture
as a method of citizen control in modern nation-states. Her
catalog of officially authorized horror is not comprehensive, but
she surveys major categories of state terrorism--Hitler's
concentration camps and Soviet gulags, colonial repression in
Algeria in the 1950s and in Ireland over the past quarter-century,
South African apartheid--as well as victims' narratives from
Central and South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The
Politics of Cruelty argues convincingly that, despite
worldwide postwar revulsion at Nazi and Soviet crimes against
humanity, national security today "justifies" formally
proscribed but secretly sanctioned torture in dozens of nations,
"cancelling the most fundamental reforms of the last two
hundred years." Millett probes the experience of confinement,
isolation, and physical and psychological torture in novels,
memoirs, and photography and film. Her powerful essay challenges
the "imperial circularity" of the disease model of
torture; she insists that both torture and resistance to torture
are political acts with moral consequences and that individuals
have the power, over time, to bring state terrorism to an end. A
painful, provocative exploration of the ugly, brutal underside of
the vaunted "global economy." Mary Carroll from
Booklist
