Maternity Jeans

From Publishers Weekly

Reflecting Genet’s sympathy for the outcast and his personal revolt against the established order, this dense, episodic montage records the years the Frenchman spent with the Black Panthers in the U.S. in the early 1970s and with Palestinian soldiers in Jordan and Lebanon until his death in 1986. Genet glorifies two male-dominated societies–the Panthers and the PLO–that recall the all-male worlds of his youth in reform school, the army and prison and strains to compare two “virtual martyrs,” neither possessing any territory of their own. Part anti-Zionist tract, part memoir and philosophical discourse, this uninhibited cascade of images and associations is less a political document than a map of Genet’s mental landscape. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

At the time of his death in 1986, Genet had in manuscript form an account of his stay with the guerrilla armies of the Palestine Liberation Organization during the early 1970s and 1980s. Available for the first time in the United States, this dense and difficult book is suffused with the deathbed recollections of Genet’s personal experiences, dreams, digressions forward and backward in time, rumor and hearsay, fact and fiction, which loosely coalesce and whose overall effect is impressionistic rather than straightforwardly informative. What appeals most is Genet’s vivid exposition, which relies on metaphorical imagery rather than logical argument to make its point. This book is a biography of a people fated to struggle against unpopular world opinion and overwhelming odds, a very personal portrait of the Palestinian guerrilla movement seen from the viewpoint of a committed social rebel. A fine introduction by Edmund White helps put the book into the context of Genet’s personal and political aesthetic. Recommended primarily for larger collections or where the subject or author is already represented.- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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