Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World by Claudia Roth Pierpont
This was an impulse buy some years ago that has been gathering dust on a bookcase. I finally got around to reading it, and it was terrific. The book is a collection of short biographies/essays on the literary contributions of a diverse group of 20th century women writers, including Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorris Lessing, Ayn Rand and others. The essays were universally fascinating (Rand was slightly less of a kook than I had thought, Margaret Mitchell, Arendt and Lessing were every but as problematic in their personal lives as Hemingway, Eliot and Pound) and I have added at least a dozen books to my list of things to read right now. The writing is sharp, it moves at a clip and no more than 30 pages are devoted to any one author. Loved it. Five Stars.
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