Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Written as long ago as 1963, this book still speaks with a fresh, combative yet engaging voice. Friedan set out to understand the nagging sense of emptiness that American suburban housewives felt in the 1950s. Marshaling the data and arguments of psychology, sociology and history, she made the case that this existential nullity resulted from the attempt to live according to what she called the feminine mystique, the idea that a woman's sole purpose in life is to be a wife and a mother. In different chapters, Friedan analyzed and criticized the contributions of Freudian psychoanalysis, functional sociology (including Margaret Mead's later writings), sex-directed education, post-war uncertainties and rampant consumerism to the feminine mystique. The synthesis of research and polemic is quite compelling. Equally persuasive is her demonstration of the deadly consequences of the feminine mystique. Taking the home as the boundaries of her world, the American housewife exhausted her...

Edited by Peter Fallon, this selection of poems comes from 6 books published over a period of 29 years, roughly one book every five years. Chuilleanáin was 30 when she first published Acts and Monuments in 1972, and 59 when she published The Girl who Married the Reindeer in 2001. In the first book she imagines herself reading “in a ruin/ By a sour candle” and compares the future death of a lover to a plane crash in which You will be scattered like wreckage, The pieces every one a different shape Will spin and lodge in the hearts Of all who love you. In the last book death has come, and taken away people the poet loved. “Agnes Bernelle, 1923-1999” is a moving elegy that compares, with considerable tact, the departed with a spider “that makes her own centre every day,/ Catching brilliantly the light of autumn.” Besides the fictions and facts of death, the poems also say life is a journey, traveling often by water. Born in Cork, Ireland, Chuilleanáin traveled to Oxford for her studies, ...