V-Mail Flash: Eve Ensler's First Non-Fiction Book "Insecure At Last: Losing It In Our Security-Obses
9/29/2006
1. V-Day Executive Director Jerri Lynn Fields On Insecure At Last
Dear V-Mail Readers,
V-Day 2007 just launched and hundreds of organizers are signing up to bring V-Day to their community, to dedicate the next six months of their lives to raising funds and awareness in their community to end violence against women and girls. Organizers around the world will be focusing on our Spotlight on Women in Conflict Zones and will be asking their communities to Reclaim Peace. The timing could not be better for the release of Eve Ensler's new book Insecure At Last: Losing It In Our Security-Obsessed World.
This book is a celebration and it's a calling. It celebrates the power and strength of women, of Vagina Warriors. It tells V-Day stories-how the movement was born, the individuals who make a difference in a community and the world. It celebrates you, our V-Day organizers, supporters and friends. It's a call to all of us to dig deep inside, to find inside ourselves what scares us most, so that we can move forward and make change, to give back, to pave the way for a new world, a world free of violence, where women and girls live in joy and freedom.
Insecure At Last: Losing It In Our Security-Obsessed World is in stores October 3rd. In addition to appearances on CNN, NPR, Tavis Smiley, and more, you can see Eve on the road at the following book signings: Wednesday, October 4th-NEW YORK; Thursday, October 5th-BOSTON; Monday, October 9th-LOS ANGELES; Tuesday, October 10th-SAN FRANCISCO; Thursday, October 12th-CHICAGO; Sunday, October 15th-NEW YORK.
As you read the advance praise below I think you will agree that this is an important book, a work that will push our movement further. I encourage you to read Insecure At Last: Losing It In Our Security-Obsessed World, share it with others and consider it a calling, as we begin this journey to Reclaim Peace.
With gratitude for all you do to end violence against women and girls
Jerri Lynn Fields
Executive Director
2. The Reviews Are In...
"This brave, articulate, chilling, and inspiring howl for change might be the most important book you read all year."-O, the Oprah magazine
"Extraordinarily compelling...This is an important work by a major American writer."-Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Ensler now proves to be as galvanizing an oral historian and essayist as she is a dramatist in this forthright inquiry into our obsession with security both personal and national.... A potent brew of candid memoir and hard-hitting reportage."-Booklist, starred review
3. About the Book
When her stage play The Vagina Monologues became an international sensation ("probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade," The New York Times), Eve Ensler emerged as a powerful voice and champion for women everywhere. Now, in Insecure At Last: Losing It In Our Security-Obsessed World. (Villard; Hardcover; October 3, 2006), Ensler gives us her first major work written exclusively for the printed page. Insecure At Last is a timely and urgent look at how we live today, the drastic measures taken to keep us safe, and how we can truly experience freedom by letting go of the deceptive notion of vigilant "protection." As she writes, "Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? Nothing is secure. And this is the good news. But only if you are not seeking security as the point of your life."
From a vantage point that is unique and wholly original, Ensler draws on her own personal experiences and candid interviews (with burka-clad women in Afghanistan; female prisoners in upstate New York; a sole women in the Rift Valley of Africa fighting to stop the practice of female genital mutilation; survivors at the Superdome after Katrina; the memories of her own abusive childhood) to give us an unforgettable snapshot of our world right now. It is a world in which our hyped-up obsession with safety and security has undermined our humanity. The us-versus-them mentality, Ensler explains, has closed our minds and hardened our compassionate hearts. She writes:
I spent time in refugee camps, war-torn countries, battered-women and homeless shelters, prisons, border towns, and post-disaster sites. I have lived through a near plane crash, an almost bombing. I have left a fifteen-year relationship. I have embraced a weeping fifty-year-old man in his burnt-out backyard in Kosova. I have held the hand of a woman whose face was melted off by acid in Islamabad, Pakistan. I have clung to the body of an Afghan woman in the middle of a seizure as she remembered the torture and murder that took place in a stadium in Kabul. I have stood face-to-face with a raging member of the Taliban, his whip in hand as he prepared to flog me. I have watched the World Trade Center towers fall in my beloved city. I have sat with thousands of women in Srebrenica in a stadium as they wailed in grief over their lost men. I have spent days in dusty Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, searching for bodies of dead women, and in the hot sun of Crawford, Texas, as Cindy Sheehan stood up to President Bush.
As these experiences and lives poured through her, Ensler learned "that we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us."
Part memoir, part reportage, and fiercely honest, Insecure At Last invites us all to reconsider what it means to be free and shows us that our strength is not born out of that which protects us. Instead, an unapologetic Eve Ensler offers us the opportunity to reevaluate our everyday lives, expose our vulnerability, and, in doing so, experience true freedom.
4. On Tour With Eve Ensler
Wednesday, October 4
8:00 pm
"Cindy Sheehan and Eve Ensler: The Impact of Political Protests"
Moderator: Leonard Lopate
Talk & Signing
92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10128
Phone: 212/253-0810
Thursday, October 5
6:00 pm
Talk & Signing
Brookline Booksmith/Coolidge Corner Theatre
290 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA 02446
Phone: 617/566-6660
Monday, October 9
7:00 pm
Talk & Signing
Borders
1360 Westwood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Store Phone: 310/475-3444
Tuesday, October 10
7:00 pm
Talk & Signing
Books Inc. in Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness
San Francisco, Ca 94102
Store Phone: 415/776-1111
Thursday, October 12
7:00 pm
Talk & Signing
Women & Children First
5233 North Clark Street
Chicago, IL 60640
Phone: 773/769-9299
Sunday, October 15
New York Times
GREAT READS IN THE PARK
Bryant Park
New York, NY