SOURCE: "Taking the Lid Off," in Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 1988, p. 611.

In the following review, Lee offers unfavorable assessment of Letters from a War Zone, which she dismisses as "an appalling book."

This is an appalling book, and it is hard not to be appalled by it for hasty reasons. Andrea Dworkin is a fanatic, a ranter and a bully. She represents, in her own sad words, "the morbid side of the woman's movement. I deal with the shit, the real shit." To read her is to go to prison: to become, like her, a monomaniac, confined inside the walls of her cruel theme, to the complete exclusion of other and kinder ways of thinking about being alive. She is profoundly offensive to "civilized" liberals because she denies all possibility of tolerant allowances or individual variations.

She is, also, particularly alien to most British readers, since, though she...