A review by davidsteinsaltz
Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories by Katha Pollitt

4.0

I'm not a great fan of personal memoirs, in general. But the personal is the political, after all, and Pollitt is one of our finest political writers. Pollitt is a representative of the generation of feminists who made the case that the personal was political. She's making the best case for it, by describing her own life with little reference to the ostensibly political, through a politically informed sensibility. I don't agree with some of her core beliefs -- particularly her essentialist view of gender (which is partly informed by her life experience, of a generation older than my own) -- but she puts it out in beautiful, intelligent, clear-headed prose. And the essays about her Communist parents, complete with extensive descriptions of their FBI files, are revelatory.