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Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Monumental, Mathematical, And Monastic
A review by Alice Dodge
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, one of the most influential Cyberpunk novels, combined a breakneck pace with cool tech, the theory that language acts as a virus, and a main character called, unforgettably, Hiro Protagonist. It was the book that coined the term 'avatar' in its electronic sense, bringing us a sexy, cybernetic, dystopian future that was fantastically enjoyable to read about. Stephenson has resisted the urge to let us live in that world in the five novels he's published since. His recent Baroque Cycle (2003-04), a three-tome series that acts as a prequel to Cryptonomicon (1999), is ...
The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking: An Insider's Guide to Making Movies Outside of Hollywood by Mark Polish
A review by Chris Bolton
The downside of how-to-make-a-movie books is their tendency to become outdated as quickly as a pop culture riff in a bad Tarantino rip-off. Robert Rodriguez's Rebel without a Crew is a fun, energetic primer for how to make a film under $7,000... in the early '90s. Today the technology has changed so dramatically that Rodriguez's methods hardly even apply. The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking isn't loaded with the latest news on the most up-to-date desktop editing methods, reviews of hardware and software, or the best film resources on the Web. Considering how long it takes a book to...
Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females by Martin N. Muller
Despicable, Yes, but Not Inexplicable
A review by Craig Stanford
When A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion was published nearly a decade ago, a lot of people were angered by its claims. The authors, Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, contended that rapists were men with limited social skills or limited mating opportunities who were carrying out a Pleistocene-engineered program that dictated that any attempt at procreation was better than none at all. Scholars, including myself, heaped criticism on the book because almost nowhere in it did Thornhill and Palmer present any empirical data in support of their view. And many people...
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Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Making It New
A review by James Wood
In the last twenty years, British and American fiction has been renewed by what might be called the immigration of content. In America, this useful novelty has tended to result from the inevitable hyphenation of the once apparently stable monad of Americanness (Cuban-American fiction, Puerto Rican-American, Asian American, and so on). In Britain, the vast centrifuge of empire has more often resulted in fiction set outside Britain, or, when set in Britain, fiction explicitly about immigration. Hyphenation has been, for immigrants, a trickier train to catch in Britain than in the more...
Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China by Kang Zhengguo
He Won't Give In
A review by Jonathan Mirsky
On June 4, 1989, having heard that the Tiananmen demonstrations had been lethally crushed, Kang Zhengguo, a professor of literature at a university in Shaanxi province, pinned a piece of paper to his chest displaying the words "AIM YOUR GUNS HERE." Then he joined with his students who were marching to protest the killings that had taken place in Beijing the night before. This open defiance of the Party and its most senior leaders was typical of Kang. "I am incapable of saying what people want to hear," he writes in his unique and sensitively written account of what it was like to grow up in...
One Sunday Morning: A Novel by Amy Ephron
Thoroughly Modern Amy
A review by Georgie Lewis
One Sunday Morning is a slip of a book, elegantly packaged and as pleasurable to drink in on a summer afternoon as a lemony Tanqueray and tonic. Set in the Jazz age in prohibition-era New York and then moving on to France, the story is pinned on a deceptively simple premise. Four women at a bridge party see the beautiful unmarried Lizzie Carswell leaving a hotel with Billy Holmes, who is engaged to marry their good friend Clara Hart. Assumptions are made, along with promises not to mention it again. While no one admits to it, word does get out and Lizzie is spurned at the opera the next...
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