I first started reading "Life and Death" over a year ago, but I put it down after a while because I found her ideas to be incredibly stupid. However, recently I picked it up again after reading John Water's book, "Shock Value". He inspired me to enjoy reading the rants of the insane just for fun. Andrea Dworkin's work cannot be approached as writing that will stimulate your intellect since she lies a LOT, but if you're a person who enjoys reading for camp value or who likes reading the ramblings of a woman out of her mind, then this is the writer for you. Not only that, but her style is very effective as well.

I read this book recently and was quite compelled by it. Andrea Dworkin's analysis of the war on women is both powerful and shockingly brutal. While i do not agree with all her views on different subject matter, i do echo her thoughts on acts of rape and the people who commit those acts. this book voices her opinions on the different ways that women are raped every day. I understand the horror that people go through and i truly agree with andrea when she says that women should do whatever possible to fight back. Truly empowering and thought provoking.

I read this book recently and was quite compelled by it. Andrea Dworkin's analysis of the war on women is both powerful and shockingly brutal. While i do not agree with all her views on different subject matter, i do echo her thoughts on acts of rape and the people who commit those acts. this book voices her opinions on the different ways that women are raped every day. I understand the horror that people go through and i truly agree with andrea when she says that women should do whatever possible to fight back. Truly empowering and though provoking.

Dworkin's analysis of the banality of misogyny worldwide is absolutely brilliant. She is truly a gifted writer. Her essays on the tragedy of the Nicole Brown murder case are eloquent and powerful. Her discovery of "holocaust porn" in Israel shows that even a "cynic" like Dworkin can be once again stunned with disbelief at the level of inhumanity women are subjected to globally. Like anyone who subscribes to the radical idea that women are human beings, i.e. feminism, her work will be vilified, misrepresented (anti-first amendment, anti-sex, anti-male, blah blah blah...), trivialized, etc. But to those with an open mind and an open heart and an appreciation for fine writing, Life and Death will not dissapoint.

If I were to try to find fault with this book (and I would have to try hard to do so) it would be a certain degree of repetition. This is a fault of the format rather than the writing, since these articles were all previously published and not written in the context of this book, and there is some inevitable overlap.

None-the-less the repetition perhaps forms part of the message. For one thing the events described by Dworkin aren't just happening, they are happening again and again and again. The repetition of the reports in our newspapers, the repetition of battering and rapes as experienced by victims, and the repetition of the memories, which become banal without ever losing their edge is this book's subject matter, and to repeat these accounts without ever becoming boring is sheer brilliance.

There is also the repetition known to anyone who has ever been a victim of sexual abuse and tried to talk about it; the repetition of stating facts that should have people out on the streets rioting if anything does, and finding that somehow they don't matter that much.

If you talk about it you just learn how commonplace it is as people, especially women, tell you of similar experiences. Dworkin learnt how commonplace it was so now she tells us that as well as her own experiences.

You begin to feel lucky in comparison; it only happened once, no bones were broken, you can walk down the street without a panic attack, whatever advantage you personally have.

Elsewhere Dworkin has written "Everything that didn't happen to you -- I apply this to myself as part of the way that I survive -- everything that didn't happen to you is a little slack in your leash. You weren't raped when you were three, or you weren't raped when you were 10."

It is perhaps here that much of the opposition to Andrea Dworkin's work probably lies, because none of us want to believe these things are so commonplace, even those of us who have been forced by experience to do so. It would be a great pity if some readers thought this book was over-the-top, or a merely focused on a few isolated cases. While some people still want to believe that Dworkin is some sort of "special case" in her experiences there will be many people who will resist this book as exaggeration. I wish it were. Dworkin is exact in her writing.

Dworkin deserves to go down in history for framing anti-pornography theory in terms of civil rights in such a way as made all talk of censorship irrelevant. We would expect anything she does afterwards to pale in comparison, but it doesn't. This book is a wonderfully compassionate piece of writing and should be read by pretty much everyone.