Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"If I can't dance, I'm not coming to your revolution," declared Emma Goldman, encapsulating a lifetime dedicated to the entwined causes of personal and collective liberation. Focusing on the former, Gornick (The Men in My Life) has written an emotional and sexual biography of the anarchist leader who was known as "the most notorious woman in America." A stirring lecturer and valiant advocate for social justice in the U.S. a century ago, here, "our Emma" is resurrected for the present, with Gornick transposing Goldman's Victorian struggles for personal liberation onto the countercultural and feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s. Eschewing long discussions of political philosophy, or much in the way of historical context, Gornick understands activism as an emotive state: "Anarchism itself is a protean experience, as much a posture, an attitude, a frame of mind and spirit as it is a doctrine." Though she believed that free love pursued between equals could never end in jealousy or subjugation, Goldman spent a lifetime in bad relationships. With wit and insight, Gornick urges readers to feel what Goldman felt, to ponder what made her kick against conditions that her contemporaries meekly accepted, and to ask whether things are so different today. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A brief biography of the turn-of-the-century anarchist once considered the "most dangerous woman in the world."Gornick(The Men in My Life, 2008, etc.) aptly condenses the life story of the fiery radical and presents a vivid snapshot of Gilded Age liberal activism. Born in 1869 in the Russian city of Kovno, Goldman immigrated to America with her sister in 1885 and landed in the wretched sweatshops of Rochester, N.Y. Goldman soon became enamored of the local hordes of social agitators, and she was captivated by the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. Moving to Manhattan's Lower East Side, Goldman fell in with a group of liberals, including the anarchist Alexander Berkman and newspaper editor Johann Most, who launched her speaking career. These were heady times for radicals both domestically and abroad. The American Socialist Party numbered more than 100,000 members in the first decade of the 20th century, and "Red Emma's" fervid lectures were regularly attended by thousands. When Goldman was deported in 1919, she landed right in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution (and quickly became an early critic of the Bolsheviks). The idiosyncratic Goldman often ended up on the wrong side of historye.g., she was a proponent of birth control but no friend to suffragists, and she remained obsessed with Spanish Civil War refugees when the rest of the world was turning its attention to Hitler and the Jews. But her undying belief that the personal is political would make her an important figure in radical politics more than a century after her birth.Such a slim volume necessarily glosses over details that would dramatize Goldman's larger-than-life persona, but Gornick lucidly presents her subject's significance within a fascinating historical moment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
