Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne

It's always hard to choose the best of anything for a given year. Most of the books that moved me this year--Geoffrey Canada's Fist Stick Knife Gun (Beacon Press) and Mumia Abu-Jamal's Live From Death Row (Addison-Wesley) deserve special mention--addressed issues of racial injustice.

But after much thought, I've decided to write about a book that did receive a lot of notice, but not for any of the reasons that made it so special to me. And it did have a profound political message, although no reviewer seemed to have picked up on it. The book is Between Friends. The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975 (Harcourt Brace).

It was understandable, inevitable even, that this book should get a lot of upscale media attention. Arendt was an influential, controversial philosopher and public intellectual, after all, while McCarthy, a novelist and public figure in her own right, was well known for her juicy sexual entanglements and her propensity for nasty public squabbles. There was no end of academics and pundits dying to build their own reputations by taking swats at these two fascinating figures and their equally fascinating ideas and lives.

My own longstanding interest in Arendt's ideas led me to the book. What held me rapt from the first page to the last, and left me inspired and hopeful about feminism--yes, feminism--at not much does, was the portrait it presented of the deep, passionate friendship of these two exceptional women and the way it both empowered and supported them, intellectually, emotionally, and politically through decades of intensely lived, often difficult experiences.

Certainly, neither McCarthy nor Arendt would have called herself a feminist. Gender politics was apparently the last thing on their busy minds. They were of the generation--my mother's generation--which preceded (and produced) the Second Wave of feminism. They were the kind of exceptional--we would later call them "token"--women, who forged ahead, against the grain of masculinist prejudice and even contempt, and claimed a...