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Rating: 
Summary: Great book!
Review: This is the first book I read from Simone de Beauvoir and I was very impressed. As usual, she is very realistic and thoughtfully describes the feelings of the three women in the stories, any of these women could be you. It is definitely a great book for any women of any age.
Rating: 
Summary: A surprise
Review: This was my first experience of de Beauvoir, and I remember it vividly: I was seventeen and staying at my grandparents house, supposedly studying for my final high school exams, but it was a sweltering afternoon and I was bored and listless; I found an old 70s copy of "The Woman Destroyed" on the bookshelf (it must have belonged to my radical aunt during her university days.) Anyway, I picked it up and couldn't stop reading until I finished it. While "The Woman Destroyed" described experiences very removed from my own limited seventeen year old world - mainly, the pain experienced by three different women as they grow old and watch their children, husbands and even sanity abandon them - these stories absorbed me totally. These are intense, complicated, ambiguous tales, and de Beauvoir has a breathtaking ability to capture and elucidate the knottiest of emotions. It's certainly a bleak collection of stories; de Beauvoir is unflinching and sheds no sentimental tears for her women characters. They are wrenchingly, sometimes pathetically human, and that's why you come to inhabit them so completely and care about them so much. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Forget the term "Feminism" if you plan on reading this book.
Review: Too many people can't separate the ideas of "militant feminism" from De Beauvoir, and why this is, I can't understand. De Beauvoir is hardly extreme or radical; she simply advocates equality between the sexes... and who among us doesn't? How is this radical.Anyway, to get to the book, this book is not like "All Men are Mortal" or "The Second Sex" in that, there is less advocation and pontificating going on here (this is a neutral judgment, by the way). It is more straightforward fiction; I would liken it to a minimalization of Balzac's view for the French society: It captures three woman in sharp, short snapshots at specific points in lives. What comes of this? Read and find out.
Rating:
Summary: Forget the term "Feminism" if you plan on reading this book.
Review: Too many people can't separate the ideas of "militant feminism" from De Beauvoir, and why this is, I can't understand. De Beauvoir is hardly extreme or radical; she simply advocates equality between the sexes... and who among us doesn't? How is this radical. Anyway, to get to the book, this book is not like "All Men are Mortal" or "The Second Sex" in that, there is less advocation and pontificating going on here (this is a neutral judgment, by the way). It is more straightforward fiction; I would liken it to a minimalization of Balzac's view for the French society: It captures three woman in sharp, short snapshots at specific points in lives. What comes of this? Read and find out.
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