Living Between Danger and Love
Kathleen B. JonesBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Andrea O'Donnell did not fit what criminal justice experts call the "victim profile." The twenty-seven-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 in the apartment that she had shared with her boyfriend, Andres English-Howard. Days later, English-Howard was arrested on suspicion of murder. In August 1995, he was convicted of first-degree murder. The night before he was scheduled to appear in court for sentencing, English-Howard hanged himself in his jail cell.By all standard definitions, O'Donnell was not victim. She was self-assured, strong-willed, a feminist. Yet, she became a victim. If it could happen to her, her friends feared, it could happen to anybody. Author Kathleen B. Jones, one of O'Donnell's professors, was particularly shaken by her death. 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. What emerges is a complex, hybrid tale of what Jones 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 the irony that our ideas about choice might prevent us from imagining and discovering social relationships of intimacy where love and power are not in conflict.