[In the following review, Dickstein offers tempered criticism of Letter from a War Zone. According to Dickstein, "Much of what Andrea Dworkin has to say is important—whether you agree with it or not—but how she says it tends to undermine her argument."]

Abbie Hoffman might have been pleased to see that someone still spells America with a "k," evoking in one small gesture the clenched fist, the pulsating energy and rebelliousness of the 1960's. Andrea Dworkin is still out there fighting, and hers is a very specific battle: against the way American culture treats women.

Ms. Dworkin, a novelist and the author of six books of non-fiction, is most famous for having initiated, with the feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon, legislation in Minneapolis in 1983 and 1984 that would have outlawed pornography as sex discrimination and a violation of women's civil rights. Passed by two City Councils, it was vetoed twice by the Mayor. Similar statutes in Indianapolis and in Bellingham, Wash., were struck down by the courts as a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech.

A political firebrand, Ms. Dworkin is a street fighter and an unswervingly radical feminist. Revolutions need people like her, women willing to draw fire on the front lines and the barricades. But when the heat of battle subsides, as it has in this country, such figures are inevitably left behind, railing at the departing troops. While some might be disappointed that other people did not share their fervor or staying power, Ms. Dworkin's reaction is a bristling fury: rage and self-righteous indignation suffuse this new collection of her work.

The pieces included in Letters From a War Zone are a mix of speeches delivered at protest marches and before college audiences, essays and an occasional book review or interview. They very in length from a few paragraphs to several pages, and each piece is prefaced by notes that succinctly place it temporally and politically. Ms. Dworkin uses these notes, as well as the introduction to the book, as an opportunity to vent her resentments and perceived slights; she considers any criticism of her ideas to be ridicule, any editing of her writing to be "police work for liberals."

In addition, Ms. Dworkin complains bitterly (and often) that she has been ostracized; "censored out of the Amerikan press" is the phrase she uses. The brunt of her anger is directed at the liberal press, including the Op-Ed page of this newspaper, which she once assumed, perhaps naïvely, would be her natural home. But, in fact, the lady protests too much: she has now had nine books published, almost all by mainstream houses.

Much of what Andrea Dworkin has to say is important—whether you agree with it or not—but how she says it tends to undermine her argument. The author writes in an incantatory, rhetorical style, probably effective when delivered from the soapbox but numbing to read. It rings in the ears, pummels the mind; one begs for release from this relentless harangue. But then, this is precisely Ms. Dworkin's point, her message as well as her method: to hound and harass, to respond to indifference or even civility with a shrill pitch of outrage.

She is not a subtle writer (she would probably consider it an insult to be called that); the vulgarity and crassness of her language, much of it not fit to print here, are intentional—to shock, to be confrontational, to move to action. Her occasionally cogent insights are marred by a sweeping condemnation of any political stance but her own. She dismisses American feminism as an establishment that is "media-created and media-controlled … fairly corrupt." "Feminism is dying here," she says, "because so many women who say they are feminists are collaborators or cowards." The American Civil Liberties Union, which helped defeat some of her legislation, is characterized as "exceptionally corrupt, a handmaiden of the pornographers, the Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan."

One piece, the transcript of Ms. Dworkin's 1986 testimony before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, stands out as free of the ranting polemics that marks so much in this collection. Here, with uncharacteristic grace, Ms. Dworkin gives an exceptionally reasoned, articulate and toned-down presentation of her case. Pornography, she tells the commission, "creates bigotry and hostility and aggression towards all women."

Using anecdotal evidence, she claims that pornographic materials are often used as instruction manuals in violent crimes. The women who pose for pornographic magazines and videotapes, she says, "are tortured as a form of public entertainment and for profit." She questions using the word "consent," because she feels that for women with few options (many of the models are poor, work as prostitutes and had been victims of childhood sexual abuse), freedom of choice is problematic at best. She would not use the obscenity laws to ban pornography, questioning what "community standards mean in a society when violence against women is pandemic." She would ban not just child pornography, a point on which she has lots of company, but all "sexually violent material," including mass-circulation magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. Here is where she gets into a legal tangle. Focusing solely on what she considers objectionable, she doesn't question what else might be banned if such a precedent were set. Finally, she calls for "federal civil rights legislation recognizing pornography as a virulent and vicious form of sex discrimination."

This same argument is repeated in many guises throughout the 11 year span of writing covered in this book. Only the language varies, with Ms. Dworkin pitching her most strident and graphic statements to the already converted. Some of these epigrammatic pronouncements have contributed to her notoriety and have pushed her to the far, lonely fringes of feminist thought. Here are a few emblematic examples:

"Romance … is rape embellished with meaningful looks."

"One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man."

"Marriage … is a legal license to rape."

"The hurting of women is … basic to the sexual pleasure of men."

"All men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society."

Throughout Letters From a War Zone, Ms. Dworkin proclaims an unflinching, idealistic belief in the power of writing to effect change. "I am not afraid of confrontation or risk," she says, "also not of arrogance or error." This might well be her credo as a writer, a defiant finger thrust at the world. Yet Ms. Dworkin's pervasive senses of both persecution and superiority also lead her to say that she "never wanted to be less than a great writer," but that "great writing from women is genuinely—not romantically—despised." Her assessment of her own standing on the political scene is grim and defeated. "This essay, like others in this book," she says in the notes to one piece, "has no cultural presence: no one has to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it." In fact, Andrea Dworkin may not like the kind of attention her work receives, but she is hardly unnoticed.