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Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem--And What We Should Do about It by Noah Feldman
One nation, divisible
A review by Michelle Goldberg
Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University with a Ph.D. in Islamic thought from Oxford, has thought long and deep about the problem of balancing religious fervor and democratic liberties in the Muslim world. His 2003 book After Jihad argued for the possibility of Islamic democracy and urged America away from its policy of supporting Middle Eastern autocrats out of fear that, if they fell, fundamentalists would rise in their place. He was a senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, an experience that informed his well-regarded 2004 book, What We ...
You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel by Jonathan Lethem
You've Got To Hear This
A review by Snowden Wright
Everybody loves discovering a new band. It's about bragging you knew them first. It's about personally fueling the fame engine. It's about being in the know. And now, it's the subject of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet. The short novel, more coffeehouse act than stadium concert, follows Lucinda Hoekke, complaint line operator by day, bass guitarist by night. As Lucinda's band is discovered and then forgotten, and as her love life becomes more farce than reality, the novel delves into the differences between temporary success and long-term achievement, both in love and in ...
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester
A review by Doug Brown
Biology has Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Physics has Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. Astronomy had Carl Sagan. But aside from a couple excellent geology-based works by John McPhee, geology hasn't had a popular spokesperson - until now. Winchester started his geology oeuvre with The Map that Changed the World and continued with Krakatoa; now we have A Crack in the Edge of the World, about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. A Crack in the Edge of the World follows the same basic mold of Krakatoa. In fact, my only quibble is that it is structurally a bit too similar to...
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The Virgin's Guide to Mexico: A Novel by Eric B. Martin
Siestas, Fiestas, and Drag Queen Hookers
A review by John Burgman
What did you do with all that Spanish you learned in high school? Weasel your way out of jail time during your Spring Break in Tijuana? Impress your novia with your pronunciation of chalupas? Well, Alma Price used it to hitch across the Mexican border and party with a band of drugged-out hooligans and tranny whores. In Eric B. Martin's novel, The Virgin's Guide to Mexico, this outcast teenager blows off Harvard, disguises her gender, and learns that witches do exist, all to answer some burning questions: Why does my Mexican mother hate Mexicans? How far can these stolen credit cards take me? <...
The Widows of Eastwick: A Novel by John Updike
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
A review by Elaine Showalter
From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Shirley Jackson, American writers have been fascinated by the legacy of Salem witchcraft. Whether the good and wicked witches of Oz or the repressed and malicious teenage girls of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, literary witches have represented our culture's attraction to, and fear of, female sexuality, empowerment and creativity. John Updike first attempted to update witchcraft in his playful novel The Witches of Eastwick (1984), which places three 30something divorcees in the late 1960s, the era of sexual revolution and women's liberation. Living in a seaside...
Letters to a Young Mathematician by Ian Stewart
Clever Proof That Math Has Its Charms
A review by Paul A. Robinson Jr.
Is it possible to trisect an angle using only a straight edge and a compass? This is not the central point of Ian Stewart's Letters to a Young Mathematician, but it is one of the curious threads woven into these delightful letters written to "Meg," a fictitious mentee, as she advances through a career in mathematics.
Stewart begins by framing and discussing the questions that most non-mathematicians ask. "What is mathematics? Hasn't it all been done? What do mathematicians do?" If this was all this book did it would simply follow in the wake of G.H. Hardy's...
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