The Women

This book makes demands: close reading, hard thinking, and immediate re-reading. One of its great strengths is that many of those who constitute its "natural" audience will find it offensive in more ways than one. The Women transcends cant and politcal correctness to get to the heart of what matters most about personal identity in the hall of warped mirrors that constitutes our "society of the spectacle." Few works this important are written as clearly, as gracefully, as passionately. Essential reading.

Hilton Als discovers himself--strangely, a brilliant negress in negro-boy body--in this small but large masterpiece. Ignore the truly self-serving, hypersensitive comments of the Dodson advocate above whose comments "trash" Mr. Als. If you care about beauty, art, the psychology of negritude, the complexity of gender, honesty as it relates to revelation--then read this devastating book, which is a thrilling, one-of-a-kind experience.

This book is very hard to get through and understand. It isn't until you read it for the second time that it all comes together. Als talks about the women he's known and himself and ties all the lives and minds together.