SPEAKING VOLUMES Stephanie Coontz makes a point repeatedly in her new book, A Strange Stirring , a study of feminist Betty Friedan, author of the groundbreaking bestseller, The Feminine Mystique . Coontz reminds readers often that Friedan disliked Daniel Horowitz's biographical study of her, which appeared in 1998 and looked into Friedan's political background. Perhaps disliked is too tame a...

Of all the artists known as Abstract Expressionists -- those color field, action-painting revolutionaries who, with just a few bold splashes of paint in the 1950s, shifted the art capital of the world from Paris to Manhattan -- the least well-known of them has probably always been Philip Guston (that is, if you're not mentioning the sole original woman Hedda...