Published in 1994
186 pages
Katha Pollitt is well known for her wit and her keen sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime. Her Subject to Debate column, which debuted in 1995 and which the Washington Post called “the best place to go for original thinking on the left,” appears every other week in the Nation; it is frequently reprinted in newspapers across the country. In 2003, Subject to Debate won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Katha is also a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.
Born in New York City, Katha was educated at Harvard and the Columbia University School of the Arts. She has lectured at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brooklyn College, UCLA, the University of Mississippi, and Cornell. She has taught poetry at Princeton, Barnard, and the 92nd Street Y, and women’s studies at the New School University.
What is this book about?
She writes about sex, children’s books, the media, breast implants, the mind of an antiabortionist. She invokes Moby Dick and Gilligan’s Island, Lorena Bobbitt and Lysistrata (“the original woman’s strike-for-peace-nik”). For more than a decade, in her wonderfully provocative, wittily astute, graceful and gutsy pieces in The Nation, The New Yorker and The New York Times, she has taken the strongest positions on the thorniest moral issues and the most controversial events, from date rape to surrogate motherhood, to violence against women, to the Anita Hill hearings, to fetal rights and mothers’ “wrongs.”
The best of her pieces are gathered here.
