SOURCE: “Back to the Barricades,” in New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1999, pp. 19-20.

In the following review, Paglia provides a summary of Greer's life and career through evaluation of Christine Wallace's biography of Greer and offers negative assessment of The Whole Woman.

After a year of divisive White House scandals, the feminist movement in the United States has been struggling to regain its bearings. Reminiscence rather than innovation is the trend, as memoirs and biographies of older feminists pour from the presses.

Two books arrive as timely reminders that feminism is a world movement. The first, by Christine Wallace, an Australian journalist, is a biography of Germaine Greer, author of the 1970 feminist classic, The Female Eunuch. The second, by Greer herself, is the “sequel” she vowed she would never write.

Wallace pursued her biography under fire from her displeased subject: Greer called her “a dung beetle” and...