Word: pearlman
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Most readers will immediately recognize Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson's new title. A Voice of One's Own, as a conscious allusion to Virginia Woolf's original masterpiece. They will quite naturally assume the book to be a sympathetic look at women in literature. And to a certain extent, their assumption will be justified. But while Woolf's work was a subtle, erudite study of the conditions which allow women to write. A Voice of One's Own: Conversations With America's Writing Women is an giddy, superficial look at the lifestyles and publications of women writers...
...Pearlman and Henderson first published their collection of interviews with contemporary women writers in hardcover in 1990 under the title of INTERVIEW: Talks With America's Writing Women. The former title was far more appropriate than the present one. The interviews lack the depth to be called conversations, and besides the authors' frequent asides about tape recording troubles they had, this book has little to do with voices...
...title is a heavy-handed exploitation of the considerable popular interest in women and American writing. The interest itself is entirely merited; as Pearlman and Henderson posit, "[t]he sheer numbers of women writing today and the high quality of poetry, drama and fiction by those women are the by-products of the second women's movement and the social, political and psychological changes it has wrought." While their argument that women dominate the modern literary scene in America is plausible and promising, their presentation of it is woefully amateurish...
...Voice of One's Own reads like a sorority yearbook. Admittedly, the sorority is a distinguished one. Pearlman and Henderson had the good fortune to interview such luminaries as Amy Tan. Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Godwin, Mona Simpson, Alice McDermott, M.F.K. Fischer and Louise Erdrich. They interviewed 28 women in all, striving, they explained, for a generational, regional and ethnic cross-section. Reading this book, however, we do not get the sense of the writers' differences. Pearlman and Henderson work entirely too hard to draw connections between the writers, and even harder to draw connections between themselves...
Heavily in debt, Zenith has reported losses in three of the past four years. Says Chairman Jerry Pearlman: "We are a highly leveraged company in two very tough businesses. We really felt we couldn't do either of them appropriate justice." Pearlman had tried to sell the company's TV division, but no buyers were willing to pay the reported $400 million asking price...