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Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. By Lois W. Banner. (New York: Knopf, 2003. xii, 540 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-679-45435-7.)
As the title suggests, this is a "dual biography" (p. 11). Lois W. Banner attempts a comparative biography, like the comparative work that Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead accomplished as anthropologists. Moreover, she provides an intimate examination of their lives as student and teacher, lovers, and professional peers. The book begins with their love affair in Rome in 1926 and ends with Benedict's death in 1948, even though Mead lived another thirty years. In the process, Banner hopes "to chart the impact of. . . the 'geography of gender' on their lives," meaning "the complex terrain of gender and sexuality that they negotiated . . . -political, social, professional, familial, or...