Once you’ve taken the V-word across the world, where do you go from there? If you’re Eve Ensler, the “Vagina Monologues” playwright and activist, you head to the Congo to help found City of Joy, where brutalized women and girls are nurtured back to health.
“It’s like watching these women bud into flowers,” said Ensler, who’ll be honored at the 2017 Athena Film Festival at Barnard College on Feb. 9-12.
Closer to home, she’s proud of her adopted son, actor Dylan McDermott, whose father she married when Dylan was a teenager. His name then was Mark, but when Ensler had a miscarriage, he took the name she planned to give her newborn. “After I gave Dylan that name, I knew he was the one I’d devote my love to,” she told The Post. Here’s what’s in her library.
Dark Money by Jane Mayer
This book is brilliant and disturbing. It’s about the billionaires, like the Koch brothers, who are behind the rise of the radical right, and how they figured out and engineered tax evasions and other ways that helped make them the 1 percent. Other people don’t exist for them. We have to see how this developed in order to reset the course.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
Jane Fonda gave this to me after Christmas, when she came to stay with me in the country. Wohlleben spent so much time researching and listening and following the ways of trees — how they feed each other, how they live in a community, and how it feels when a branch is cut. It’s totally changed the way I see trees!
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde
I never got to meet Audre Lorde [the writer and activist who died in 1992], but I’ve been reading her for years. She’s proof that the personal is political. Her work is always about visibility, and how women, particularly black women, can have their voices heard. Her poetry’s erotic at the same time it’s fierce.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Naomi wrote “No Logo,” which looked at branding and consumers. This book is critical to read now. It’s about disaster capitalism, and how, if you create chaos and destruction, people will be off-balance and you can come in and buy up everything. It happened after Hurricane Katrina: Companies moved in to buy land.