The Shape of Red: Insider Outsider Reflections - Softcover

Hubbard, Ruth; Randall, Margaret

3.6

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780939416196: The Shape of Red: Insider Outsider Reflections

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0939416190 ISBN 13: 9780939416196

Publisher: Cleis Pr, 1988

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Book by Hubbard, Ruth, Randall, Margaret

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Review:

The correspondence between the Harvard biologist/activist (Hubbard) and the New Mexican writer/poet who has spent many years in Latin America (Randall) began after the two met at a conference in Nicaragua in 1983. The twenty-one letters reprinted here all date from 1987, however, and seem to have been self-consciously composed with an eye to publication. Their theme is hisider/Outsider. "our shorthand way of expressing a feeling, a sense of ourselves in relation to the often ill-fitting or unacceptable definitions placed on us by a distorting society." They describe two quite remarkable lives-lives to which some will find it difficult to relate. Hubbard's family barely escaped Hitler's Vienna; in the 1940s she became a scientist and, after working in both Europe and the United States, married a colleague and raised two children while teaching at Harvard and embracing radical politics. Randall, on the other hand, deliberately conceived her first child out of wedlock in 1960 before moving to Mexico and becoming a Mexican citizen; several more children and husbands later, she moved to Cuba, and from there, to Nicaragua, supporting herself and her family as a journalist, poet, and photographer. When she decided to return to the U.S., however, the INS moved to deport her, a campaign she is still fighting. Despite their unusual experiences, these women's accounts confront many of the issues addressed by thinking women everywhere: How to relate to a job that provides many perks but that we sometimes hate; how to relate to our society without being co-opted by its materialism and militarism; how to deal with the adult individuality of our children; how to regard feminists whose politics contradict our own experience; how to come to terms with our cultural and religious roots. An interesting, if not essential, addition to biography collections for academic libraries. -- From Independent Publisher

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