Shulamith Firestone, author of the classic feminist text "Dialectic of Sex" and important early women's liberation activist in the late Sixties has turned her considerable writing skill to fiction. Every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every story is polished and honed to perfection like a stone rounded and smooth by water.

Firestone doesn't waste words in this plain and haunting look at life in and out of mental institutions. It was a quick read -- one afternoon -- that stayed with me for many days. There is very little analysis here, no deep insight into how people become ill or wind up in the hospital; just stark, honest, sometimes brutal observations on their lives during and after they have been there. I haven't been so frightened, for myself and for others walking the fine line of sanity, since reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (a very different yet similarly evocative book) years ago.

Shulamith Firestone has long been important to feminists' understanding of social institutions, injustices, and struggles. Airless Spaces adds to our understanding of an institution and experience we too often refuse to examine: hospitals for the mentally ill and mental illness itself. In a series of stark and riveting short stories, Firestone recounts the lives of those who move in and out of hospitals, rely on government, medical, and other social assistance for their survival, and fail or refuse to eke out lives recognizably "normal." As someone whose mother suffers from and has been hospitalized with bipolar disorder, I read this book as a gift. I am grateful to Shulamith Firestone for helping me to understand the lives led by my mother and those with whom she spends her days. I have a better sense now of the sorrow, humor, madness, desperation, and fantastic with which they contend daily. Too often we imagine the mentally ill as having no lives; Shulamith Firestone provides us with a picture of the difficult but nonetheless _lived_ lives of the mentally ill. This is an important and generous book.

Shulamith Firestone's now classic work was an important influence on, and manifestation of, the 1970's women's movement. Firestone, an active participant in the Chicago and New York radical feminist scenes, captures the spirit of the movement, and the historical moement, in this work. Combining a material and feminist analysis of women's status in Western society, Firestone makes a case for revolution that may seem extreme to today's reader. However, this text is essential for understanding 1970's radical feminism and it is wonderful to have it back in print.