Claudia Roth Pierpont: Passionate Minds - Women Rewriting The World

(Scribe Publications $39.95)

Dazzling intelligence writing about dazzling intelligences, this book is a stimulating delight.

Pierpont explores the biographies and literary achievements of 10 diverse women in chapters which were originally published in the New Yorker.

Some of the stories are well known, but Pierpont illuminates them in a clever weaving of biography with literary criticism, politics and cultural history.

Here, in the section on sexual freedom, are essays on Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin and Mae West; in the section dealing with issues of race are Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty; in the section on politics we find Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing and, in the one essay, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.

There is hardly a woman here who would not be scandalised to find herself in company with most of the others, Pierpont writes, and yet they seem easily united within the construct of Pierpont's rich research and sparkling analysis.