Reviewing My Collection-Passionate Minds by Claudia Roth Pierpont

One of the greatest blessings of being an Indie writer (which is every bit as cool as being an Indie rocker, I insist), is getting to write only on subjects that engender extremes of passion,interest or curiosity in my mind.Nothing short of fascination will induce me to pick up a pen or tap the keys.I've tried, and discipline in the service of money simply does not work for me.While my intellect is fecund, and the range of my appetites immense, I seem to return to the same core of pet subjects.I love history, I love writers, I love richly textured lives and I love reading.'Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World' by Claudia Roth Pierpont contains all of those requirements.

The dozen women profiled between the covers are a lively,forceful, and eclectic bunch.They were outsiders and stratosphere-dwelling superstars,conventional and ahead-of-their time,of enduring and fleeting appeal.They were all dedicated to their craft but pursued the muse in a thousand different ways. They would have made for interesting party-guests but probably wouldn't have gotten along,at least not past the first round.
Among the stamp-sized icons are Margaret Mitchell and Anais Nin.The former wrote the most colossal novel of her--or any--time."Gone with the Wind" is, I am sorry, not a great book, though its controversy still sets people to talking.No wonder,then, that it was more of a commercial success than Tolstoy, in his wildest Russian dreams, could have hoped to achieve.It made the diminutive Southern lady a star, for a time, in the same frenzied sense that movie queens are stars.
Anais Nin was a diarist and writer of erotica. She was, for a time, the paramour of Henry Miller, for which she is best known.Maria de Madeiros played Nin in the acclaimed biopic "Henry and June" (1990).Although she possessed artistic confidence,her real legacy is as a sexual icon.It is for both of those things that she is included in this critical study.Roth Pierpont structured the book around three themes:sexuality,religion and politics, which explains the strange and enthralling cast of characters.Mae West and Gertrude Stein,Doris Lessing and Marina Tsvetaeva have seemingly little in common.The author's complex and enlightening approach (and her acute biographical-critical break-down) to such disparate voices is refreshing and inventive.
Individually, they made interesting if not always tangible or measured contributions to literature.They often seemed to be working against themselves: it is no coincidence that many of the women were thorny specimens.Collectively,they are joined only by the incidental fact of vocation.To quote the biographer herself "These are lives in which success is hard won,retreat and even breakdown are common, love is difficult, and children are nearly impossible, lives in which all that is ever certain is that books and plays and poems are being written." I have difficulty in believing that anything has really changed.