The Gate : A Memoir of Love and Reflection

From the author of the best-selling The Chalice and the Blade...The Gate takes us from a narrow escape from the Holocaust in Nazi Europe, first to pre-Castro Cuba with its throbbing sexuality and decadence, and then the 1950s United States pre-civil rights movement. It tells the mesmerizing story of a clever child becoming her own woman. When Riane Eisler fled her native Vienna with her parents in 1939, the young Jewish refugee left behind an affluent and cosmopolitan life. A totally different world awaited her in Havana. As she grows older, she develops a secret life, becoming involved with a sexy and fiery Marxist revolutionary. As her family regains wealth and prestige, the daughter better understands her parents, their complicated relationship, and her own place in the world. This lyrical, lovely work, reminiscent of Marguerite Duras' The Lover, is much more than a memoir. It is a work of art that will call each reader to examine the birth of consciousness and soul in themselves and that, for a brief moment, will remind each of us that technology and consumerism, as fine as they might be, are not the fundamental needs of the human soul. The Gate works on many levels - from scintillating romance to the psychological profile of an influential social thinker. By reading The Gate, the many readers of The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure will learn for the first time the very personal events in Riane Eisler's life that lead her to the courageous and portentous insights about human relationships and social history later documented in her exhaustive research on both pre- and contemporary civilizations. Never before has a noted thinker revealed the inner psychological drama of her own awakening so directly related to the development of her groundbreaking creation of social theory, embodied in her work of the last twenty years in creating the partnership model. It will be clear to historians how the events in Ms. Eisler's life awakened her to social action and discomfort with prejudice, violence and inequality. The Gate shows the common thread of injustice and man's inhumanity to man -ranging from the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, to the sexual and economic exploitation so rampant in Cuba, to the horrors of racism and justice in the United States itself. But above all, it is a book that will move every reader with its hope, faith, and love.