Subtitle: The Limits of Choice
Author: Kathleen B. Jones
Subject: Gender Studies/Criminology
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2744-9
Pages: 240 pp., 12 b&w illus.

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Read an excerpt from Living Between Danger and Love

Description: Kathleen B. Jones reflects on the murder of one of her students, using that tragic event as a window to examine the choices she---others---have made when confronted with violence.

Andrea O'Donnell did not fit what criminal justice experts call the "victim profile." The 27-year old women's studies major at San Diego State University was the director of the campus Women's Resource Center and a self-defense instructor. Nevertheless, in the early morning hours of November 5, 1994, she was brutally murdered. Her badly decomposed body was discovered in the apartment that she had shared with her boyfriend, Andrés English-Howard. A few days later, police arrested English-Howard on suspicion of murder. In August 1995, he was convicted of the first-degree murder of O'Donnell. The night before he was scheduled to appear in court for sentencing, English-Howard hung himself in his jail cell.

By all standard definitions, O'Donnell was not a victim. She was powerful, strong, a feminist. Yet, she became a victim. If it could happen to her, her friends feared, it could happen to them. Author Kathleen B. Jones, one of O'Donnell's professors, was particularly shaken by her death. "Andrea's life and death made me wonder more about what secret and overwhelming and lonely burden that badge of proclaimed liberation carried with it," Jones writes. "Andrea's story has forced me to examine my own complicity in keeping secrets." In Living Between Danger and Love, she examines O'Donnell's death and what it has to say to all of us.

Grafting memoir with autobiography, Jones recounts riveting episodes in her own life that parallel O'Donnell's. Adding to these memories, she narrates crises faced by others she has come to know who shared stories of domestic violence. Jones crafts a complex, hybrid tale about what she calls "unreasonable choices"-the kinds of choices that most of us feel we are expected to make between love and power, between care for another and care for ourselves. She provokes readers to consider whether, ironically, our ideas about choice prevent us from imagining and discovering social relationships of intimacy where love and power are not in conflict.

Kathleen B. Jones is a professor of women's studies at San Diego State University. She is the author of Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women and co-author of The Political Interests of Gender and Women Transforming Politics.

"Kathleen Jones shows us the complex and painful side of modern feminism's unfinished agenda. Living Between Danger and Love brings home the stories of domestic violence that we all read in the newspapers. Her book makes you realize that this type of tragedy can happen to someone like me, someone like you, or someone you love."

-Patricia Ireland, President, National Organization for Women

"A thickly braided marvel: part memoir, part memorial and lamentation, part compassionate feminist cosmology. Living Between Danger and Love is a fast read that makes you think long and hard."

-Rickie Solinger, author, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade