Rating: 
Summary: dated but excellent
Review: Rosalind Miles has done a piece of very good work with this book. She does not pretend to be unbiased ( she is very emphatically biased)in her description of women's places in society during history, but with so many primary sources she doesn't really have to be, as these women speak for themslves. I found many of the stories horrifying. At times I had to put the book down because the hatred for women illustrated in the quotes was just too poisonous. That said, I found the book illuminating, if not comfortable. I gave it four stars because the early goddess history that Miles describes is of necessity extrapolated from very limited sources, and also because I think that when the book was reissued in 2000 it would have been appropriate to address the events and changes that have occurred since the book first came out in 1988.
Rating: 
Summary: Read it. Think about it. Share it.
Review: The book is very well written, funny, thoughtful, intelligent, interesting and provocative. A good read. But there's more. This book should (but, of course, never will) be placed in the hands of every student by every history teacher in every post-elementary school in this country, so both girls and boys can get at least a tiny glimpse of the other side of human "his"tory. Further, any adult with the courage to pick it up and read it through should - after they stop chuckling and recover from their anger - buy a copy for every female they love. Buy one for the boys too, but don't count on them reading it. Until humans understand that every race and both sexes made significant contributions to human "his"tory, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our various patriarchies until we all drown in testosterone and die. OK, I feel better now.
Rating:
Summary: Read it. Think about it. Share it.
Review: The book is very well written, funny, thoughtful, intelligent, interesting and provocative. A good read. But there's more. This book should (but, of course, never will) be placed in the hands of every student by every history teacher in every post-elementary school in this country, so both girls and boys can get at least a tiny glimpse of the other side of human "his"tory. Further, any adult with the courage to pick it up and read it through should - after they stop chuckling and recover from their anger - buy a copy for every female they love. Buy one for the boys too, but don't count on them reading it. Until humans understand that every race and both sexes made significant contributions to human "his"tory, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our various patriarchies until we all drown in testosterone and die. OK, I feel better now.
Rating: 
Summary: necessary but, for some readers, hurtful
Review: The information packed into this book is awesome, and has been needed for a long, long time to counteract the patriarchal attitudes that have remade human history into His Story. I've read several women's history books and have found things in here not accessible elsewhere. At the same time, I don't find descriptions of men as biological "deviants," the attacks on phallic symbolism, etc. the least bit helpful. They are certainly understandable, and I do hear the anger behind them--millennia of anger. But by attacking manhood itself rather than its least mature and most destructive manifestation--patriarchy--this book risks offending men who are appropriately ashamed at His Story, open to hearing what women have to say about it, and willing to admit that we do carry attitudes and ideas that invalidate women, even those of us who work so hard to unearth and get beyond them. Both sexes certainly need fresh looks at the past, and this book goes far toward providing one in some respects. But the demonization of either sex serves no one (except powers-that-be who wish to divide us), and if anything demonstrates more clearly than the text the damage done over the centuries to women forced into positions of degradation and passivity. One could even argue that the "inferior by nature" thesis originates in patriarchy and is not at all liberatory. It is, rather, a symptom. I've been happy to recommend some tremendously angry women's literature to other men and even taught it in my men's groups. But as much as I continue to try to hear those feminine voices that still make me uncomfortable with the amount of sheer pain and rage they so necessarily vocalize, I will recommend no book that implies that there's something inherently wrong with being born male.
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