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This collection of essays starts off with a rather harmless anecdote about author Solnit being at a party where a man starts mansplaining everything she doesn't know and he does, but it quickly turns into serious stuff indeed -- namely violence against women and the cultural roots of attitudes leading to men treating women as inferiors. If you're a man and have a problem in this department (that is, if anyone's ever called you on either your words or your actions toward a woman or women in general), perhaps you should be reading this.

It's rather bleak reading the slow progress women have made, but progress HAS been made, even though we have a ways to go. This despite the negative connotations some men feel when they read or hear the word "feminism." Solnit goes to great lengths to prove that many rapes and beatings and murders of women by men are due to men feeling entitled as a husband, as a boyfriend, or even as a stranger who smiled at, approached, or propositioned a woman who rejected the advance (and thus "earned" the right to be "punished" by the man).

Solnit does her homework and quotes many sources. You get paragraphs like this one:

"In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters. Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, 'When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it's immersed in -- the surrounding culture's illness.'"

It's interesting that she quoted this, as this book alludes to problems of gang rapes in India, too, though that country has nowhere near the problems we do when it comes to gun culture leading to gun violence.

Another topic gone into: Why is it that colleges teach college women how to avoid getting raped ("do this, don't do that") but do nothing to address the source of the problem -- college men, among whom these rapists exist? Granted, you cannot paint all men by the violence of a few, but there's no other way to go at it. These issues have to be addressed and, with them, some of the entrenched cultural and historical behaviors and beliefs that give rise to these crimes.

It's difficult to rate a book like this because the subject matter was so glum and it wasn't much fun to read it. On the other hand, you hate to start knocking off stars just because you weren't enjoying the truths that you were reading. Certainly if you have an interest in the recent history of feminism, this book deserves a look. Or it might be a book you recommend to someone who does.