Books Briefly
Books Briefly Attitudes toward Sex SEX AND DESTINY: POLITICS OF HUMAN FERTILITY by Germaine Greer Harper and Row. 541 pp. $19.95. One takes notice when an early voice of the women's movement...
...Greer's intent is not to argue for a change in policy but to be provocative: Is it true we live in a society "profoundly hostile to children...
...This small act of resistance started a chain of events that led Niemoller to become Hitler's "personal prisoner" for eight years in concentration camps—an international symbol of church resistance to the state and a militant postwar pacifist...
...Here, in her second autobiographical book, she focuses on the traumas and fluctuations of her long marriage...
...Symbol of Resistance MARTIN NIEMOLLER by James Bentley The Free Press...
...215 pp...
...Harriet Robey gives hope to those of us who are living longer than our bodies may have reckoned on...
...14.95...
...Evolving Partnership AN ORDINARY MARRIAGE by Harriet Robey Atlantic-Little, Brown...
...One takes notice when an early voice of the women's movement extols the virtues of extended families, that bastion of patriarchy in typical feminist discourse, and dusts off sexual abstinence and coitus interrupts as historically widespread and biologically sound birth control...
...Niemoller, though vaguely anti-Semitic then as most "good Germans" were, thought that Jews who had become Christian ministers should be allowed to remain so...
...Are we guilty of ethnocentrism in calling for worldwide population control to stem what seems a breeding tide of the underprivileged...
...Germaine Greer has always been a thinker many are wary of endorsing...
...Sometimes the book bogs down, but she succeeds in her principal goal, to raise issues "so poignantly that they cannot be ignored or forgotten...
...Pastor Martin Niemoller's experiences in Nazi Germany ring a warning not just for church leaders but for all of us...
...Brimming with intelligence, dry wit, and personal reports on India and rural Italy, her discussions range from childbirth, sterilization, and family planning to eugenics and overpopulation...
...As a World War I hero and a patriotic Lutheran pastor in a prosperous Berlin suburb in the 1930s, Niemoller balked at Hitler's politicization of religion only when the church was pushed to support an "Aryan" qualification for its pastors...
...Despite severe back problems and dimming eyesight, Robey wrote her first book (There's a Dance in the Old Dame Yet, 1982) at the age of eighty...
...With Dietrich Bon-hoeffer and Karl Barth, he formed the Pastors' Emergency League...
...It is an exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, inquiry into the Western world's attitudes toward children, family, what she calls "recreational sex," and the ways these concepts have shaped policies around the globe...
...This once ardent anticom-munist came to be criticized by former Western admirers for his participation in the Soviet-oriented World Peace Council and his contact with Soviet church leaders, while pro-Soviet admirers wondered about his affiliations with Western pacifists in the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters International (two organizations that biographer James Bentley fails to mention...
...16.95...
...With painful honesty and wry humor she describes her feelings for her husband and domineering mother-in-law, her own naivete, and her gradual development into an empathetic psychiatric social worker able to help others...
...Are our contraceptive practices a perversion of our bodies' needs and functions which have made us dependent on multinational pharmaceutical corporations...
...The narrative is peppered with perceptive exposures of New England bourgeois family life early in the century and glimpses of the healthy family (three sons and a daughter) the Robeys produced despite the sharp edges of their differing temperaments...
...253 pp...
...Sex and Destiny transcends her 1970 bestseller, The Female Eunuch, and moves well beyond her own culture...
...Controversial to the end, Niemoller died early in 1984 at ninety-two...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
