Description
Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt now shows us another side of her talent.Learning to Driveis a surprising, revealing, and entertaining collection of stories drawn from the author’s own life.With deep feeling and sharp insight, Pollitt writes about the death of her father; the sad but noble final days of a leftist study group of which she was a member; and the betrayal and heartbreak inflicted by a man who seriously deceived her. (Her infinitely patient, gentle driving instructor points out her weakness–“Observation, Katha, observation!”) She also offers a candid view of her preoccupation with her ex-lover’s haunting presence on the Internet, and her search there for a secret link that might provide a revelation about him that will Explain Everything.Other topics include the differences between women and men–“More than half the male members of the Donner party died of cold and starvation, but three quarters of the females survived, saved by that extra layer of fat we spend our lives trying to get rid of”–and the practical implications of political theory: “What if socialism–all that warmhearted folderol about community and solidarity and sharing was just an elaborate con job, a way for men to avoid supporting their kids?”Learning to Drivedemonstrates that while Katha Pollitt is undeniably one of our era’s most profound observers of culture, society, and politics, she is just as impressively a wise, graceful, and honest observer of her own and others’ human nature.
About the Author
Katha Pollitt is well known for her wit and her keen sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime. Her Subject to Debate column, which debuted in 1995 and which the Washington Post called “the best place to go for original thinking on the left,” appears every other week in the Nation; it is frequently reprinted in newspapers across the country. In 2003, Subject to Debate won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Katha is also a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.Many of Katha’s contributions to the Nation are compiled in three books: Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (Knopf); Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (Modern Library); and Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time (Random House). In 2007, Random House published her collection of personal essays, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories.Katha has also written essays and book reviews for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Harper’s, Ms., Glamour, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air and All Things Considered, Charlie Rose, The McLaughlin Group, CNN, Dateline NBC, and the BBC. Her work has been republished in many anthologies and is taught in many university classes.Katha has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her poetry. Her 1982 book Antarctic Traveller won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have been published in many magazines and are reprinted in many anthologies, most recently The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). Her second collection, The Mind-Body Problem, was published by Random House in 2009.Born in New York City, Katha was educated at Harvard and the Columbia University School of the Arts. She has lectured at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brooklyn College, UCLA, the University of Mississippi, and Cornell. She has taught poetry at Princeton, Barnard, and the 92nd Street Y, and women’s studies at the New School University.
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