SOURCE: A review of Letters from a War Zone, in Belles Lettres, Vol. 9, No. 3, Spring, 1994, pp. 74-5.

In the following review, Dunlap offers positive assessment of Mercy.

The urgency and rage that suffuse Andrea Dworkin's writing leave little room for savoring the distinctions between pre- and post-French Revolution pornography. In Letters from a War Zone (1993), Dworkin asserts that pornography remains essentially the same across eras and cultures precisely because women's oppression—"expressed in rape, battery, incest, and prostitution"—remains the same. "The change," writes Dworkin, "is only in what is publicly visible."

Dworkin never claims to be objective. "Objectivity, as I understand it, means that it doesn't happen to you." And "it" does happen to Dworkin, from the days when she was raped as a student and battered as a wife, to later, when her work made her the target of threats, including being made the subject of...