SOURCE: A review of Life and Death, in Ms., Vol. 7, No. 5, March-April, 1997, p. 82.

In the following review, Golden offers praise for Life and Death.

Twenty-five years ago, after a feminist helped her escape from her brutally violent husband in Europe, Andrea Dworkin made a vow: "I would use everything I know in behalf of women's liberation," she recalls in Life and Death, an impressive collection of speeches and articles she wrote between 1987 and 1995.

And Dworkin knows a lot. In Life and Death, her eleventh book, it is clear that she knows—firsthand—about rape, prostitution, battery, pornography, child sexual abuse, and poverty. She knows, deeply, how patriarchy works and how it sustains itself. And she knows how to tell the truth about women's lives, especially those women in prostitution and pornography.

Dworkin's critiques are original and compelling. In stark, powerful prose, she bears heartbreaking and relentless witness to...