Susan C. Faludis journalistisches und autorschaftliches Werk untersucht kritisch gesellschaftliche Phänomene, insbesondere mit Fokus auf Feminismus und die Auswirkungen wirtschaftlicher Veränderungen auf das menschliche Leben. Ihre Analysen zeichnen sich durch ein tiefes Verständnis für das komplexe Zusammenspiel zwischen persönlichen Erzählungen und umfassenderen sozialen sowie wirtschaftlichen Kräften aus. Faludi bemüht sich, die verborgenen Mechanismen aufzudecken, die unser Leben prägen, und die menschlichen Kosten großer wirtschaftlicher und politischer Prozesse hervorzuheben. Ihre Schreibe ist bekannt für ihre Einsichtigkeit und ihre Fähigkeit, wichtige öffentliche Debatten anzustoßen.
In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things - obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness
In this original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, journalist Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks of that terrible day. Turning her observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? The answer, she finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite "barbarians" on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.--From publisher description.
What draws our species to war and makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Social critic Ehrenreich plumbs the mystery of the human attraction to violence, taking the reader on a journey from the grasslands of prehistoric Africa to the trenches of Verdun, from the spectacular human sacrifices of precolonial Central America to the carnage and holocaust of 20th century total war. She traces the evolution of war from prehistoric forms of socially-sanctioned violence to the mass religion which nationalism has become and shows the persistence of ancient fears in the most modern rituals and passions of war.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction, this controversial, thought-provoking, and timely book is "as groundbreaking as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique." -- Newsweek.
