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The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
The Age of Wonder
A review by Benjamin Moser
Richard Holmes's monumental The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon, $40) opens in 1769, when the dashing young millionaire Joseph Banks alighted on Tahiti, a paradisiacal isle that was to host Captain James Cook's observations of the transit of Venus -- though, as the crewmen discovered, the island's other charms lent the name of their temporary establishment, Fort Venus, more suggestive shades. Banks is the figure that unites a whole panorama of Romantic heroes: as president of the Royal Society, he went on to sponsor all sorts ...
The Ninth (Writings from an Unbound Europe) by Ferenc Barnas
The Ninth by Ferenc Barnas
A review by Josh Maday
Telling a story from a child's point of view is one of the most difficult modes of fiction to write successfully. The narrator of Ferenc Barnas's The Ninth is a nine-year-old boy -- the ninth child of ten (eleven, counting the brother who died) in a large Hungarian family -- whose inexperience and bare vocabulary are compounded by a speech disability. In writing The Ninth, Barnas seems to have wanted to give himself a taste of what difficulty his narrator must face when trying to give expression to his experience. Overall, Barnas succeeds, using simple language and a conversational style...
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Satanic Panic
A review by Spencer Dew
In the 1980s, America was gripped by a phenomenon so frightening and shameful that it has all too quickly been brushed under history's rug. The fusion of journalism and entertainment -- personified by leading figure Geraldo Rivera -- led to "the Satanic Panic," wherein viewers fell for the unfounded (and fantastic) claims conveyed by Rivera during several primetime specials devoted to devil-worshipping cults, demonic conspiracies, ritual child abuse, and even the occasional act of cannibalism. "Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera proclaimed to a...
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Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar
Telling the Utterly Confounding Truth
A review by Cheryl Strayed
I'll say it now: Irene Vilar had 15 abortions in 15 years. That's the blunt opening one-liner that fails to tell the whole story of this beautiful and brave book. Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict is a memoir less about 15 abortions than it is the story of a young woman who never got enough love. At age 8, Vilar watched her mother commit suicide by leaping out of a car. At 12, she read The Diary of Anne Frank and felt scarred -- not from the horror of the Holocaust, but because she so deeply understood the plight of a girl who lived in an attic and had to ask...
Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev by Lorraine Mortimer
The Last Yugoslav
A review by Richard Byrne
It is one of the most perplexing mysteries of world cinema. In the early 1970s Dusan Makavejev was the brightest star in the avant-garde firmament. A breathless dispatch in the New York Times filed from a midnight screening of one of Makavejev's films at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival offers a glimpse of his glow:
Somewhere along in every film festival there comes that one film that electrifies everyone, that sets everyone from the man in the street to critics to the president of a major American company talking about it with the same passionate enthusiasm.... A standing-room-...
Feminism, Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture by Emilie Zaslow
Girl Power Less
A review by Jennifer Cognard-Black
Run a Google image search on "girl power," and what comes up is a series of visual contradictions: a pink woman's symbol with a fist in the circle; a photo of a businesswoman's legs, in stockings and stilettos in front of a chorus line of men's trousers; girls sporting athletic gear; "girl power" emblazoned across bikini underwear; and an ad for a porn film. In these images the power afforded girls is mixed. A working woman is reduced to her girly fashion sense. A little girl's source of influence is what's written on her panties. And almost every image is linked to consumerism. "Girl power...
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