Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > McMillan, Terry - Darryl Pinckney (review date 4 November 1993)

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Darryl Pinckney (review date 4 November 1993)

SOURCE: "The Best of Everything," in New York Review of Books, November 4, 1993, pp. 33-7.

[In the following excerpt, Pinckney praises the sincerity, force, and humor of Waiting to Exhale and discusses the novel's place within contemporary African-American literature and culture.]

Fannie Lou Hamer once said that she didn't want to be liberated from men. Her husband was, after all, six foot-two. There was a time, only two decades ago, when many black women looked at the women's movement as a middle-class white concern, a passing political fashion, or argued that black women and white women wanted very different things. No one, they pointed out, expected white women to express solidarity with white men. For black women as black people the real struggle was elsewhere, and it might prove endless. Though Toni Cade Bambara's anthology, The Black Woman (1970), discussed the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Thulani Davis (review date May 1990)
   2. Charles R. Larson (review date 23 September 1990)
   3. C. J. Walker (review date September-October 1990)
   4. Publishers Weekly (review date 23 March 1992)
   5. Terry McMillan with Wendy Smith (interview date 11 May 1992)
   6. Charles R. Larson (review date 31 May 1992)
   7. Paula C. Barnes (review date Fall 1992)
   8. Frances Stead Sellers (review date 6 November 1992)
   9. Darryl Pinckney (review date 4 November 1993)
   10. Donnella Canty (review date April 1996)
   11. Publishers Weekly (review date 1 April 1996)
   12. Malcolm Jones Jr. (essay date 29 April 1996)
   13. John Leland (essay date 29 April 1996)
   14. James Wolcott (review date 29 April 1996)
   15. Liesl Schillinger (review date 5 May 1996)
   16. John Skow (review date 6 May 1996)
   17. Richard Bernstein (review date 15 May 1996)
   18. Terry McMillan with Evette Porter (interview date 21 May 1996)
   19. Sarah Ferguson (review date 2 June 1996)
   20. Janet Mason Ellerby (essay date Summer 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright