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In tracing the fate of the women's movements in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain, the author attacks widely held conventions and offers evidence that the setbacks weren't as severe as thought. In fact, she concludes, there even was surprising progress on some fronts. Her accounts from the women who fought the battles of the 1980s makes this a readable and important contribution to the literature of the women's movement.
Sissela Bok has some devastating comments to make about media violence and entertainment violence. Her thoughtful, challenging book, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (Addison-Wesley, $22), takes aim at the problems created by increasing public displays of violence in our culture. In ancient Rome, violence became a part of entertainment, used to create aggression in its citizens. Today, Bok writes, most Americans are "deeply ambivalent about how to respond." In one poll, 21 percent of respondents blamed TV more than any other factor for teenage sex and violence. "Yet even as parents worry about the messages on television about drugs, sex, and brutality, they rely on it for keeping children busy, and most set no limits whatsoever on the amount of television their children see," she writes. She says struggling with the problem of media violence requires people seeking to achieve "a measure of personal responsibility and independence that they see as endangered." She believes that the results of heavy exposure to media violence could cause a "failure to thrive" response. Only by understanding adverse effects can we expect to reverse them. A good book that deserves an audience.
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