Anyone familiar with Ms. Roiphe’s work will be unsurprised by her desire to wrest a story of strength from an experience that others might describe with words like 'trauma' or 'victim'.

Despite her reputation for controversy, Roiphe has never been that formidable a polemicist; her perspective is too blinkered, her blind spots too obvious. At the level of the sentence, though, she’s a skillful writer. Even in this book, without the ballast of a sustained argument, there’s a deliberation in her pacing that keeps everything moving.

In her searching, pensive new book, The Power Notebooks, Roiphe turns her theorizing on herself.

... a series of brief-but-potent meditations on women.

The 70-some chapters, written in a muddled stream-of-consciousness style, deal primarily with Roiphe’s relationships with a series of toxic men.

The book is organized into fragmentary but readable short chapters...All are crisply written and often amusing though some chapters seem to be conventional reviews and interviews, repurposed into looser Power Notebook mode. This is understandable but undermines the message that these are 'informal musings and notes.' The men in Roiphe’s life are given some minor walk-on parts.

In the notebooks, Roiphe finds herself 'experimenting, following possibly disturbing tangents, pursuing diverging lines of thought.' Much of what her experimentation produces lies within the realm of commonplace pop-feminism.

In this arrestingly intimate and cathartic work, drawn from notebooks she kept during a recent 'time of upheaval,' she reveals her struggles with doubt, confusion, pain, and anxiety, forging an audaciously articulate, prodigiously candid, and thought-provoking blend of memoir, literary biography, confession, and dissection.

... [a] bright and dynamic collection of shorts.

At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis.