Panthermania

by Gail Sheehy

125 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Gail Sheehy is an American writer and lecturer, most notable for her books on life and the life cycle. She is also a contributor to the magazine Vanity Fair.

Her fifth book, Passages, has been called "a road map of adult life". Several of her books continue the theme of passages through life's stages, including menopause and what she calls "Second Adulthood", including Pathfinders, Spirit of Survival, and Menopause: The Silent Passage. Her latest book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman, reveals a hidden cultural phenomenon: a surge of vitality in women's sex and love lives after age fifty. She has also authored a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton titled Hillary's Choice. Her novel Middletown, America is being adapted as a TV miniseries. (from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Fred · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before she became some kind of pop psychologist, Gail Sheehy was considered an up and comer in the New Journalism. This book is not too great, it's sort of scatter shot. It doesn't really give a history of New Haven or how it came to be a failed city. It doesn't give a really clear history of the Black Panthers, either in California or New Haven. It does convey the fact that the Black Panthers are a largely mythical organization, like Che Guevara, good for tee shirts but not much else. Essentially, some people who weren't even really official Panthers got on a power trip and killed a guy they thought was an informant. The federal government used the case as a pretext to lock up the Black Panther leadership, but I don't know if they needed too, it seemed pretty disorganized at that point. New Haven is unchanged from 1970 to 2025, and I don't think it will ever be a functional city in my lifetime, or anyone else's.