Naked in the Promised Land
This memoir follows the author from an immigrant childhood through poverty, show-business dreams, and precarious young adulthood to the academic life in which she found her voice. Family history, sexual identity, class, and Jewish-American experience intersect here, turning one life story into a wider portrait of twentieth-century America.
Work Information
One life becomes a lens for family memory and historical change.
The author traces her own path from an immigrant childhood and a poor adolescence through the world of show business, her studies at Berkeley, and her emergence as a pioneering scholar of lesbian history. Through a single life, the book brings together gender, class, immigration, and queer history in the American century.
Review Summaries
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Readers respond strongly to the memoir's candor and historical depth. Its sweep from childhood to scholarly maturity gives the book real force, and the link between private life and social history feels natural. Some readers, however, feel that the direct style emphasizes record over emotional fluctuation.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Wisconsin Pr
- Published
- 2004-07-30
- Pages
- 356 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 2.03 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780299200145
- ISBN-10
- 0299200140
- Price
- 2599 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Biographies & Memoirs/Specific Groups/Women
The daughter of an unmarried immigrant Jewish garment worker whose family had perished in the Holocaust, Lillian Faderman dreamed of being an actress. Instead she worked her way through college by posing for nude photographs, and by stripping. She slowly discovered that her deepest erotic and emotional connections were to women. After nearly losing herself in a dangerous underworld of addicts, pimps, and prostitutes, she became a brilliant student, eventually earning a Ph.D. And she became a loving partner, a devoted mother, an influential writer, and a groundbreaking scholar of gay and lesbian studies.
Lillian Faderman is the author of such acclaimed works as To Believe in Woman , Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers , and Surpassing the Love of Men . Among her many honors are Yale Universitys James Brudner Award for exemplary scholarship in lesbian and gay studies, three Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association awards, the Monette-Horwitz Award, the American Association of University Womens National Distinguished Scholar Award. She teaches literature and creative writing at California State University at Fresno. Lillian Faderman is the author of such acclaimed works as To Believe in Woman , Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers , and Surpassing the Love of Men . Among her many honors are Yale University&;s James Brudner Award for exemplary scholarship in lesbian and gay studies, three Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association awards, the Monette-Horwitz Award, the American Association of University Women&;s National Distinguished Scholar Award. She teaches literature and creative writing at California State University at Fresno.
Reviews
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What an incredible story. I loved this book
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Good condition though I didn't realized it was used from a Library. Notes on it and some stamps but it was my fault I didn't read properly. Perhaps a little bit expensive for being from this site
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Faderman has contributed so much to the general history of LGBTQ people, particularly lesbians, that it was delightful to read her own coming-of-age story, starting with her life as a child being raised by her immigrant Mom and aunt, and ending with the ascent of her professional career as an academic and writer. She gives us a first-person glimpse into lesbian life in the bad old days--the 50s and 60s--and also documents her struggle to become her own person while still maintaining her strong ties to her Jewish family and heritage. An excellent read.
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I thought the reviews that I read were missleading. It is very graphic is you have had no lesbeian exprience. She really told it the way it was and how she survived the dysfunctional childhhood to become a a very powerful women in California Univeristy System during the 19070's. Very amazing sucess and survial story.
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Faderman nails the characters in her memoir so vividly they become next door neighbors. This book is a fast paced, beautifully written life journey. The reader is dismayed as the author seeks in vain to find her way through a childhood filled with little and wolefully inaccurate information to navigate. Faderman chooses many self destructive roads before engaging her wonderful intellect to embrace and direct herself towards fulfillment.