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Saturday, November 21st


 

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton

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By Book or by Crook

A review by Gerry Donaghy

At a recent Book Expo America, author Sherman Alexie, in speaking to an audience of independent booksellers, expressed his desire to hit a woman who he saw using Amazon's Kindle on his flight to New York. I wonder if Alexie would have been so quick to resort to fisticuffs if the woman in question was reading one of his books (he claims to refuse to allow electronic versions of his novels to exist, but he seems okay with his poetry on the Kindle).

But such is the emotional power that books have over readers. They inspire thought and action, and they are brandished as totems to express who we are (or at least who we aspire to be). And while many people could go their lives without books of any kind beyond a telephone directory, most readers are passionate about them, both as vessels of information and objects to fetishize. And, like certain pugilistic Native American writers, readers have passionate ideas about what books represent.

Academic and director of the Harvard Library...



Previous Reviews

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...



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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