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Yes, Yes, Cherries: Stories by Mary Otis
Love Bites
A review by John Burgman
The characters in Mary Otis's debut story collection, Yes, Yes, Cherries, operate in a gray space between blissful connection and utter detachment. Love, adolescence, divorce, and infidelity keep them floating. Everyone is almost happy, but not unhappy either. In "Pilgrim Girl," teenage Allison is smitten with her older, increasingly creepy, married neighbor who drives her to school. That ride leads to lunch, and that lunch leads to tender moments behind the dumpster of Cappy's Clam Shack. Otis's sometimes-connected stories work best when her characters demonstrate quirky acts of...
Autobiography by Helmut Newton
Remembrance of Naked Chicks Past
A review by Charles Taylor
If all obsessives were as content as Helmut Newton seems to be, the world would be a happier place. Maybe it's easy to be happy when you're as self-involved as Newton cheerfully admits he is. Perhaps people looking at the icy eroticism of Newton's high-fashion photography, images so precise they beg the adjective "Germanic," don't expect warmth. The striking thing about Newton's Autobiography is that it both is and isn't what you'd expect from the man. The warmth of the book comes from Newton's memories of what gave him pleasure. He seems oblivious to anything else, even Adolf Hitler...
The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister Mcgrath
Bible beating
A review by John Habgood
Atheism is in trouble. Its main hope for the future lies in the growth of fundamentalism, whose easily disposable dogmatic certainties are one of atheism's main assets. In its golden age, starting with the French Revolution, the targets were more plentiful. It could capture the popular imagination as a liberation from archaic ideas and oppressive restrictions, enforced by corrupt and powerful ecclesiastical establishments. No doubt there is still room for criticism, but such denunciation of mainstream Churches nowadays tends to sound unimaginative and querulous. The intellectual scene has...
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What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard W. Lewis
How to succeed in religion
A review by Ruth Walker
Bernard Lewis has pulled off the kind of coup scholars hope for: A book long in preparation suddenly validated by external events, in this case the Sept.11 terrorist attacks and the attendant surge of American interest in learning about Islamic and Arabic culture. As multitudes throng bookstores and libraries in search of answers to President Bush's question, "Why do they hate us?" Lewis will be one of the sources they turn to. But this slender book, a compilation of lectures by the Princeton professor emeritus, sometimes described as the doyen of Middle East scholars, may pose more...
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester's Well-Navigated "Atlantic"
A review by Anne Saker
Among the extraordinary jewels of information that Simon Winchester displays in his latest masterwork is an electronic map of the world with the flight paths of all air traffic. Seeing how we have belted the Atlantic Ocean, as Winchester's haunting and cautionary words dance around, the reader can draw only one conclusion: The Lilliputians have tied down the giant. The British-born Winchester, now living in Massachusetts, is a skillful and artistic chronicler of human comprehension of large things and large tasks. His "also by" list describes where this passion has taken him, and then his...
Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed by Judy Pasternak
Uranium Mining's Disastrous Consequences
A review by Wendy Smith
Studded with vivid character sketches and evocative descriptions of the American landscape, journalist Judy Pasternak's scarifying account of uranium mining's disastrous consequences often reads like a novel -- though you will wish that the bad guys got punished as effectively as they do in commercial fiction. Real life is complicated, and Pasternak, a veteran of 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, does justice to the historical and ethical ambiguities of her tale while crafting a narrative of exemplary clarity. The story she tells in Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and ...
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