[In the following review, Golden offers praise for Life and Death.]

Twenty-five years ago, after a feminist helped her escape from her brutally violent husband in Europe, Andrea Dworkin made a vow: "I would use everything I know in behalf of women's liberation," she recalls in Life and Death, an impressive collection of speeches and articles she wrote between 1987 and 1995.

And Dworkin knows a lot. In Life and Death, her eleventh book, it is clear that she knows—firsthand—about rape, prostitution, battery, pornography, child sexual abuse, and poverty. She knows, deeply, how patriarchy works and how it sustains itself. And she knows how to tell the truth about women's lives, especially those women in prostitution and pornography.

Dworkin's critiques are original and compelling. In stark, powerful prose, she bears heartbreaking and relentless witness to the violence and degradation that women suffer, leaving the reader awash in indelible, haunting images. "My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman hating itself—smarter, deeper, colder," she writes in "My Life as a Writer." In other pieces, she takes on the State of Israel, the creators of the Holocaust museum, the rulers of the Serbian death camps, and, as always, the pornographers. Part of what makes Dworkin's analyses so affecting is that she sees no middle ground—you are literally either on top or on bottom. She argues persuasively that pornography and prostitution must be eradicated before women can be free, equal, or even just safe.

While her uncompromising views have long inspired the wrath of male supremacists, journalists, pornographers, and some feminists, Dworkin remains undaunted. "When I look at my own life, I think about the difference between being beaten because I didn't clean the refrigerator and having my life threatened because I am fighting the pornographers," she writes. "There is a better and a worse, and it is better to encounter anything when you have made a choice that puts you where you want to be, fighting for your own freedom and fighting for the freedom of the women around you."

In these essays, Dworkin makes a passionate case that women's equality is a matter of life and death.