SOURCE: Waldron, Jeremy. “Take These Chains.” Times Literary Supplement (3 June 1994): 4.

In the following review of Fire with Fire, Waldron approves of Wolf's candor and accessibility, but finds faults in the book's simplistic dichotomies and unconvincing anecdotal evidence.

Naomi Wolf's first book, The Beauty Myth, was a remarkable piece of work: a bitter and compelling argument about the way in which the freedom that women are winning is poisoned by the culture of idealized physical beauty. Wolf's account of the social and psychological consequences of this insinuation was packed with insight. She traced the terror of ageing, the pathology of diet and hunger, the tyranny of glamour, the intrusion of a “beauty qualification” into professional life, the competitiveness, resentment and loneliness that a preoccupation with physical appearance engenders among women, and the dark, dangerous role of beauty's imagery in our modern cults of violence and sex.

Her new book...