Power to Dream: Interviews with Women in the Creative Arts

Meeting one's heroes can be intimidating, and in this collection of interviews done over a 20-year period, Hoy falls prey to that difficulty. She lobs softball questions full of admiration and fails, unsurprisingly, to elicit much new or startling information. In her first interview, a talk with Anais Nin which was the genesis of the idea for the book, she massages her beloved subject with questions like ""Has your exceptional beauty been an asset to your creative work or a hindrance?"" And so it goes. The reader learns that writer Esther Broner's work received negative reviews from women (""Men pay women to trash other women.""), that 101-year-old sculptor Beatrice Wood believes that being an artist is more difficult for a woman than for a man and that opera singer Barbara Hendricks believes in past lives. A brief introduction to each interview describes the interviewee and her marital status, and inevitably the day of the interview itself. The roster of female artists is well-considered (although it does stretch the definition of ""creative arts"" to include Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappe and art critic Lucy Lippard) and they do occasionally pop out a gem, as when therapist and former violinist Laura Huxley describes how a cable from her prescient father kept her from sailing from New York back to Italy just days before Italy entered WWII. But most of this collection consists of fuzzy back-patting. (May)