SOURCE: "Battle-Ax," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 16, 1997, p. 9.

In the following review, Futrelle offers an unfavorable assessment of Life and Death.

To read Andrea Dworkin is to enter into an alternate universe.

In her Amerika—yes, she still spells the word with a K—we live in the midst of an obscene, unending war: the war of the sexes. Women live, she says, "under martial law … in a situation of emergency … under a reign of terror … brutalized by 'pimps' and pornographers and just plain ordinary men."

These dramatic phrases are not, to Dworkin, simply examples of poetic license, the sort of boilerplate bellicosity that can give spice to an otherwise tepid political speech—Dworkin believes "the war against women is a real war. There's nothing abstract about it. This is a war in which his fist is in your face."

Readers familiar with Dworkin's work will...