Don't let Walker's formidably dense prose and conceptualizations put you off of this wonderful work, though. This sublime novel of the grotto is an incredibly written catalog of the marvelous. The first chapter in particular resonates with a poetic quality that marks it as a landmark work.

As a side note, Walker's husband is the very gifted author Tom La Farge ("Crimson Bears," "Zunting")The fact that neither of these authors is better known is an almost criminal condemnation of the US literary scene.

Imagine, if you will, a nineteenth-century tale of intrigue set in the world of Myst, where nothing is what it seems and around every corner another surprising discovery awaits. The year is never given, but the century is, close to the end of the book, and it is set in Europe in the 1800s. The head of the British Secret Service has uncovered a plot by three of the continent's most powerful figures to overthrow the King of England. The plot has been twenty years in the making, and is about to come to a head. As all this is going on, a scientist in the employ of that same Secret Service has stumbled upon a discovery that will change the face of intrigue forever; he has discovered a way for humans to change their shapes. How better to spy on the conspirators than to send them those things they most obsess over? Three Secret Service agents, one of them a new recruit, are chosen as the main agents on the mission. One is sent to the German conspirator, a collector of fine glass and porcelain, as a crystal goblet of unparalleled delicacy; a second to the French conspirator, a gardener by hobby, as a heretofore-undiscovered breed of rose; a third to the Italian conspirator, a collector of sculpture, as a Milanese Thisbe. Of course, as with any decent spy novel, things start to go wrong just as everyone is settling in.

It's impossible to describe some of the novel's strongest points without giving away pieces of the plot. Polly, the new recruit and the novel's central character (if there is, truly, a central character here), finds herself on a journey that we're never told the nature of; it could be a spiritual journey, it could be an allegorical journey, it could be some physical trip to an alternate universe. We don't know. We couldn't care less. The end result is the same, and we are stunned by it. Similarly, revealing the slightest point of the plot would bring the whole intricate construction of the first hundred fifty or so pages down. In fact, revealing the shape-changing nature of the agents already takes away from the book, but I can't just say "it's the best damn book I've ever read, go get a copy." You're going to have to hunt high and low for one, I think, unless bookfinder.com happens to have a few lying around. So now you've got an idea of what it's about, kind of. But what is truly amazing about this book is its construction, its writing. It's not only set in the nineteenth century, it sounds as if it were written during the nineteenth century, but with a modern sensibilty. I'm not sure I can describe exactly what I mean, but books written before about WW2 or thereabouts have more of a sense of leisure (for want of a better term) about them. Hawthorne is supposed to be lingered over. Description is as important as plot. You are less following the action than immersed in it. And that is much of what Walker does here, though we rarely lose sight of what is going on around us. As well, and this is even less able to be imparted without expending a thousand or so words, it becomes obvious while reading that the fifteen years that Walker spent writing this novel were actually spent _writing_ this novel, not stopping and starting over and over again. There is an overwhelming sense of order and construction. There are very, very few places in the four hundred fifty-nine pages that make up this work-- to be precise, I counted two-- where it seems as if Walker slipped into cliche or took the easy way out in writing a passage. And by the time I encountered those, I was so entranced with the book's language that I felt as if those stray sentences were put there on purpose in order to draw the reader's attention to the care that had been taken with the rest of the book.

This book is not, in any way, an easy read. It demands time and concentration. More importantly, it is also a compelling book, a haunting book, one which stays with a reader whenever it is put down, until it is picked up again.

Easily an entry on the All-Time Top Ten list, and perhaps at the top of it. END

She develops this point by asserting that gender feminism indicts all men because it views maleness itself as violence against women. She notes that gender feminists believe maleness is a cultural trait, not a biological one, and that all heterosexual contact between the sexes is itself violence. She then discusses why these notions lead gender feminists to reject the ideals of personal responsibility and accountability in our society and gives specific examples of how their ideology has been used to harm women's individual rights around the world.

She begins with a discussion of violence and explains why attempts to broaden the definition of violence are, by definition, against the interests of women who experience actual violence. She cites Camille Paglia, who believes that eradicating every action committed by men which force women to experience pain and suffering could only be accomplished under totalitarianism. From this, McElroy concludes that violence is an act committed by one individual against another and that efforts to politicize pain and suffering experienced by women has only hampered the development of reasonable rules to ensure their safety.

She follows this up by asserting that'like the gender feminist notion of violence'the term sexual harassment is too vague to be properly defined. Thus, she believes the entire concept of sexual harassment to be dependent upon individuals' personalities and cultural backgrounds'rendering 'one size fits all' policies to address the issue unacceptable.

In the area of employment discrimination law, she focuses on the issue of compensatory justice. Specifically, she cites the writings of John Rawls on the initial distribution of wealth. She uses Rawls' statement that 'the natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position' to attack claims for compensation based upon prior acts of sexual discrimination. From this, she attacks the entire notion of affirmative action as 'shackling the best runners at the beginning of a race so that no one can excel.' Thus, she extends her critique of gender feminism from the social sphere into the economic sphere.

At her most controversial, McElroy offers a defense of the institution of prostitution. Although she doesn't accuse individuals concerned about the safety and well-being of prostitutes of being overly paternalistic, she does assert that many women who turn to prostitution do so out of their own free will'and that much of the concern expressed about the emotional trauma it inflicts is misguided. While this is a difficult position to argue, she does an effective job of casting skepticism on the notion that prostitution'as an institution'always harms both parties involved.

'Sexual Correctness' is an excellent introduction to what happened to feminism and why. Reads who enjoy the book should check out the more lengthy works on individualist feminism by Hoff Sommers, Kennedy Taylor, Young, Patai, and others.

Several years ago, when I was finding myself generally annoyed with what I saw as a negative editorial attitude in Liberty magazine, I came upon an article that electrified me. This article was clear, concise, logical and utterly devastating of some alarming idiocies I perceived as having taken over the feminist movement. The article was written by someone I'd never heard of, but someone for whom I instantly felt a flood of love and kindred feelings: Wendy McElroy. This was important to me because, even though I am male, I had considered myself a feminist when I was a teenager. By this I mean that I considered the historical and contemporary treatment of women to be unethical, undignified, and unbearable with disheartening frequency, and I thought the situation should be rectified. I used the word "feminist" on myself.

A movement which started out saying "I am a Woman and I don't need a Man to make my life a great thing" seemed to be saying something new: "We Women have a new boyfriend and you'd better watch out Man, because his name is Uncle Sam and he's bigger than you are!" This new position seemed to prefer any submission to the state -- no matter how vile -- to submission to individual men or to freedom, which was what I had always thought women's liberation was about.

After years of vain searching for anyone who could understand the threat to women posed by this new feminism, Wendy McElroy's Liberty article was more than a breath of fresh air; it was a strong jolt of invigorating tonic. Finally! Someone who understands! Not only that, but someone who understands better than I do and has read the works of these destroyers of women's rights. Someone who has documented the ways in which the very laws drafted by these elitist "helpers of misguided women" have hurt women.

I tell you, this got me on my feet!

I went out and found some feminists at the local college and showed them McElroy's article. I asked them what they thought. I asked them to show me where and how McElroy might be wrong. I asked them why submission to the state was better than submission to individual men. I asked them why women should not be free individuals. I pleaded with them to just talk to me about these issues.

The only answer was a deafening silence. So I stopped paying attention to feminists. They weren't going to listen to me -- a man -- anyway...

And then Wendy McElroy burst back onto my intellectual scene with the publication of XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography. Perhaps because I'd tuned feminism out, I missed the publication of Freedom, Feminism, and The State and it was XXX that made me aware that there may be hope for feminism after all.

If XXX gave me a reason to hope that feminism might once again become a force for good, Sexual Correctness has given me ten reasons, maybe a hundred. XXX was like a hairline crack in a dark prison cell; now the light comes pouring in all around as the walls come tumbling down.

Do I wax hyperbolic? Read Sexual Correctness yourself and tell me if I'm not right. Sexual Correctness is classic McElroy: clear, concise, and devastatingly logical. It is detailed and precise without being lengthy or boring. It is spirited and quite pointed without ever descending into ad-homenim attacks (or would that be ad-feminim?). It is painstakingly researched without becoming pedantic and without losing its focus. All of this makes Sexual Correctness a pleasure to read, but its greatest value is a thorough and merciless exposition of the black cancer that has been seeking power over all people through the vehicle of feminism.

Sexual Correctness describes three kinds of feminism: Liberal, Gender, and Individualist. Individualist feminism has a long history replete with clearly individualist writings that go back as far as the 1830's. Liberal feminism characterized the movement in the sixties and the struggle to secure legal and safe reproductive choice. Gender feminism began to take over the modern feminist movement in the 70's, though it also harkens back to older writings: those of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

This last kind of feminism, now aggressively dominant among the leadership of the movement, has established an almost religious dogmatism that brooks no criticism and refuses to even hear alternative viewpoints. This ideological calcification of thought is what McElroy calls "Sexual Correctness." Like the broader "Political Correctness" it is an intolerant hostility that not only runs rampant over individual rights in general, but hurts the very people it is alleged to be in benefit of: women.

McElroy takes the "Sexual Correctness" paradigm of gender feminists and shows how it is applied to various feminist issues, including rape, pornography, sexual harassment, preferential treatment, affirmative action, comparable worth, marriage and the family, prostitution, abortion and reproductive technology. The liberal feminist perspective is contrasted with that of the gender feminists and questions are asked as to how either of these can be believed to actually liberate and benefit women more than individualist feminism.

Sexual Correctness is a small book, only 190 pages long, including numerous end-notes, a bibliographical essay, and a bibliography. And yet the work is exhaustive. McElroy's observations and questions are kept to a bare minimum while the gender feminists are given miles of word-ropes with which they deftly hang themselves. This is an important point because if a conscientious reader draws a conclusion, such as that gender feminists are more interested in fomenting class warfare to vent their hatred of the free market system (and men, incidentally), then the reader wants to know that the views of gender feminists have not been misrepresented. Rather than quoting a few words out of context, McElroy quotes entire paragraphs of gender feminist rhetoric and then draws attention to some of their implications.

Something I learned from Sexual Correctness is how closely tied to Marxism the ideology of gender feminists is. Not only do some quote Marxist doctrine directly and predicate all of their analysis on a class struggle model, but many use the same tactics in dismissing the arguments of their opponents without answering them. Marxists dismissed the statistics and evidence of market economists by asserting that they were based on "bourgeois logic," which was flawed by definition. Gender feminists seem to think that they need not hear conflicting views or examine disproving evidence because it is based on "patriarchal-capitalist science" which does not apply to feminist analysis, by definition.

There are many more ideas of value in SC, but I think McElroy expresses them better than I can.

I wholeheartedly encourage all to read Sexual Correctness. Individualist feminists will be able to make great use of its arguments, evidence, and questions. Liberal feminists are going to need to read the book if they are to have a hope of understanding why they are losing their grip on feminism. Even gender feminists will need to read it if they hope to stand understand the backlash from women who want nothing to do with the gender feminist headlong rush toward a new dependency upon the state.

I especially think men need to read this book; it will help them to escape the bewilderment so many of them feel when they try to respect women and receive only scorn in return. This will tell you why, guys!

Wendy McElroy has exposed for all to view the dark sickness that has seeped into the heart of feminism.

For those who want to see the movement restored to health, for it to become a force for the liberation of women and the furtherance of human dignity, Sexual Correctness may well turn out to be a pivotal work. The advocates of freedom owe it to themselves and to their posterity to do everything they can to see to it that McElroy is heard.

Exposure is not enough. Action must follow. McElroy's questions demand answers.

On the left side of the book: parsimonious, at times humorous, always educational and thought provoking interpretations of those works of art .. never exceeding a page of interpretation for a page of the work of art

One is thus hard pressed to differentiate one work of art from another. The gestalt is just gorgeous and a real treasure.

Typically, there's a page for each herb or spice, featuring a thumbnail close-up and a still life, both in rich, glossy color. And there are three or four paragraphs describing each entry. The result is very engaging.

A representative list of the items covered is: annatto, asam gelugor, basil, bilimbi, Indian borage, candlenut, cardamon, cassia, Chinese celery, chili, Chinese key, Chinese chives, cloves, sawtooth coriander, coriander, cumin, curry leaf, fennel, fenugreek ....

The book only contains 4 recipes - a chutney, curry powder, a sambal, and a tandoori spice mix. You need to go to regional cookbooks to find recipies to use the herbs and spices shown here.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to see the herbs and spices whole. Perhaps, not essential to the kitchen but it does add fun.