Review by Booklist Review
Lesser is cofounder of Omega Institute, a center for holistic education, and Omega's Women & Power conference series. This work spawned the question, how would the world change if women were the storytellers? She set out on a quest to examine our earliest Western myths and legends, looking at how women are represented, the values these stories promote, and how over the centuries those values have been so absorbed into our culture that they are taken as fact. From Eve taking a step towards knowledge and then being denied a hero's journey to Pandora and the twisting of her myth, women have been Othered since recorded history. That these stories and their lessons live on is memorably shown through the comparison of Ovid's Galatea to Julia Roberts' character in Pretty Woman, among other cultural updates. Lesser examines the literary canon, providing updated reading lists as well as exercises for meditation and overcoming impostor syndrome. By identifying these stories and exposing them for what they are, one hopes that the next time Cassandra speaks, she will be believed.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Omega Institute cofounder Lesser (Marrow) demonstrates how myth, religion, and history minimize women's voices and values in this lucid and ultimately optimistic account. Criticizing traditional, male-dominated lists of great books and histories that glorify war, Lesser suggests alternative stories of women who "meet adversity with love," such as Malala Yousafzai, Antoinette Tuff, and Tammy Duckworth. She advocates "innervism" as a corollary to feminist activism, encouraging women to focus on looking at "our blind spots, our projections, our hypocrisies," and offers detailed meditation exercises to help women learn how to "Do No Harm and Take No Shit" and find the courage to "give clear voice to... healthy anger." Citing her work helping 9/11 first responders to overcome their "strong and silent" conditioning and share their feelings, Lesser ties the cultural devaluing of women with the discrediting of feminine-coded values like empathy, sharing, and care, and argues that leaning into these values would improve the world for men and women alike. Emphasizing individual over community work, Lesser does not address whether it's necessary to build spaces in which women can be heard, and her guidance on how women can tell their own stories is minimal. Still, readers will find this lucid and detailed presentation of feminist ideas motivating. Agent: Henry Dunow. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
To escape patriarchal assumptions, women must invent a new storyline. Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, an adult education and retreat center in Rhinebeck, New York, draws on her own life, research on gender, and cultural myths to explore challenges to women's power. Cassandra seems to her emblematic of women's subjugation: Cursed by Apollo after she rejected him, she would forever be disbelieved. Although her prophecies told the truth, "her words fell flat." Cassandra, like Eve, Pandora, and many other mythical and fictional women that Lesser cites, represents men's views. "So much of the sorry state of our world hangs on the excess of the so-called masculine virtues in our guiding storylines," writes the author. "So much was lost with the disparaging of anything coded feminine and the erasure of women as protagonists and heroes." Why, for example, are there no monuments to women's achievements but countless statues of male warriors? Invisible and silenced because of nature, nurture, and "the wounds of patriarchy," women, Lesser believes, share a tendency to feel self-doubt, shame, and reticence, internalizing expectations "to stay in a narrow lane: mother, caregiver, keeper of the hearth, mender of the hearts, cleaner-uppers of the mess." These qualities--nurturing, emotional intelligence, and "relational nature"--shape women leaders who are likely "to be more collaborative" and "less prone to corruption, to instinctively move to fill the empathy deficit, to seek wiser solutions to conflict." To encourage women who, like her, are "trying to excel and contribute within a system built by and for men," Lesser offers exercises designed to promote both activism and what she calls innervism: "the part of me that seeks inner change, inner healing." These include meditation, guided reflection, listing sources of inspiration, prompts to help talk to someone with differing views, and writing one's own obituary. An encouraging guide to help women redefine their lives. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
