[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 a sexually explicit cartoon in Hustler. ("A cartoon like that says, bang, you're dead, and one way or another you are, a little.") And "it" does happen to women every hour of every day (including one rape every three minutes), to women who have told their stories to Dworkin over the last two decades.

Dworkin is interested in drawing distinctions: between words and action, between political protest and literal physical torture, between the protected "free speech" of pornographers and the forceful silencing of women, between proclaiming equality and working to create it.

The pieces in this collection were written between 1976 and 1989. Many were written as speeches. Contexts range from Take Back the Night rallies to a debate with the noted civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz who, at the time of the debate, had not yet gone on the payroll of Penthouse. Audiences range from separatist lesbians to a group of 500 Men's Movement men, from women law students and lawyers at Yale to a mostly right-wing audience. Also included in the transcript is the testimony Dworkin gave to the Meese Commission, during which she was heckled by ACLU lawyers and representatives from Penthouse.

Many of the pieces are published here for the first time. Virtually none of those previously published had wide circulation. Dworkin recounts a long history of publication difficulties. She underscores the irony in her being accused of having contempt for free speech. "Speech is what I do; it ain't free; it costs a lot."

Not all the pieces are on pornography. They include, for instance, the most lucid reading of Wuthering Heights I have come across. But pornography, in Dworkin's view, is a sort of missing link that ties together all the other phenomena of women's oppression.

There are a number of reasons why people might find Dworkin's work unpalatable. There is, for instance, the subject matter. "I represent the morbid side of the women's movement," Dworkin begins one essay. "I deal with the shit, the real shit. Robin Morgan calls it 'atrocity work.' And that's pretty much what it is."

And there is the style. Dworkin's style is characterized by the severity of one who has survived much, by the passion of one who, against great odds, has not given up hope. That is not to say her logic suffers from her bias. As she quotes Wollstonecraft, "we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel."

Dworkin's arguments are, in fact, irrefutable. Dworkin cuts through the euphemisms, the subterfuge, the nonsense. She tells us that women are fighting not only for essential ideals such as social equality and justice. We are fighting for our very lives.