In the journalist Joshua Prager¿s ardently reported and painfully timely epic, ¿The Family Roe,¿ Jane Roe is both heroine and villain ¿ and a paragon of human complexity. If you like your stories the way too many of us now do ¿ pat, with the narrative reverse-engineered to validate your priors ¿ this book is not for you. But it is if you want an honest glimpse into the American soul, into the foul and sometimes fruitful marriage of activism and commerce, into the ways in which people can be and believe contradictory things, into the inner and outer lives of women squelched and tossed by reproductive tyranny.
In popular lore, Jane Roe is what E. M. Forster called a ¿flat character,¿ ¿constructed round a single idea or quality¿ ¿ in her case, the brave woman who won abortion rights for...READ MORE.