|
In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000 by Michelle P. (edt) Brown
Getting the Word Out
A review by Anthony Grafton
The numinous objects displayed in "In the Beginning," the exhibition of Bibles from before the year 1000 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., are beautiful, and their arrangement helps the visitor to the show (and the student of its extraordinary catalogue) see important things in a new light. Beauty first: the archipelago of dimly lit vitrines that stretches through several dark rooms reveals handwritten Bibles as genuine works of art. These illuminated manuscripts really glow. The varied and elegant scripts, the wild decorations and superbly drawn figures that populate...
The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman
An Inconvenient Truth
A review by Elizabeth Hand
Allegra Goodman alludes to a number of children's classics in The Other Side of the Island, including Bridge to Terabithia, The Wizard of Oz and The Secret Garden. It's a risky ploy, inviting comparison to beloved books. But in Goodman's case, it pays off, as this gripping, beautifully written novel may one day join their ranks. A dystopian page-turner, The Other Side of the Island evokes other YA favorites -- in particular, Lois Lowry's The Giver -- books that use well-worn tropes of science fiction and coming-of-age tales to confront adult issues such as authoritarian governments and global ...
Fanon by John Edgar Wideman
Fanon
A review by John Leonard
In Fanon (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95), as in most fiction by John Edgar Wideman, the wounds are equally personal and historical, equally inside out and outside in, jury-rigged and hardwire. So Wideman, thinking about the West Indian psychiatrist and political activist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, who fought for France against the Nazis and against France in Algeria's war for independence, will invent a novelist named Thomas who wants to write a book on Fanon and/or make a film about him with Jean-Luc Godard, who also puts in a truculent appearance. But don't expect to learn more about...
|
The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism by Penelope Fitzgerald
A review by Benjamin Schwarz
Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, was a very English novelist — quiet, restrained, precise. She admired those who eschewed "making too much of things," and her ideals were of the sort that, as she discerned, George Eliot esteemed: "work, steadiness, harmony, peace." The editors of this unusually intelligent and sensitively selected collection of her criticism have chosen mainly those pieces that explore the authors of the "books of her heart" — mostly minor, often overlooked writers who were, as she lovingly describes E. M. Delafield, "accurate, calm, and lucid," and who composed books...
Glue by Irvine Welsh
A review by Amy Benfer
Reading anything by Irvine Welsh is sort of like reading Chaucer if you are not fluent in Middle English. Of course, if you are fluent in Middle English, you will probably not understand much of Welsh's working-class Scottish brogue. There's a lot of talk about boys "gitting their hole," "shagging cunts" (sometimes two at a time) and "leathering laddies" after "fitba" matches by bopping them on the "heid" with "boutils." If something is good, it's "barry," if it's not so good, it's "wide." And we haven't even covered the verbs or the prepositions yet. It's best to shrug one's shoulders...
The Gun by C. J. Chivers
Armed for a Fight
A review by Andrew Exum
The real use of gunpowder, essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote, is "that it makes all men tall." As far as inventions go, none have had as democratizing an effect as the rifle. While the battlefield before the advent of firearms was marked by a class system as rigid as the one that ruled the larger society -- with armored knights on horseback directing the masses (quite literally beneath them) -- rifles and muskets meant that a well-trained peasant could as easily kill a nobleman as vice versa. The development of small arms is one of the most important evolutionary processes in warfare, though...
|
Don't Miss
