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A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade by Christopher Benfey
Cultural Reconstruction After the Civil War
A review by Art Winslow
Christopher Benfey, a scholar of Emily Dickinson and Gilded Age America, would not have his book A Summer of Hummingbirds had Dickinson not responded to a small floral painting sent to her in 1882 by writing an eight-line poem in return, which spoke of "A Route of Evanescence" in describing the essence of a hummingbird. "The exchange of gifts had lasting repercussions for American literature," Benfey asserts well into his book -- not a case he has made by that point, despite putting forth some related and imaginative other propositions -- but he is referring to the fact that the sender of...
The Novel: An Alternative History by Steven Moore
The Ancient Made New Again
A review by Scott Bryan Wilson
The best book published this year might be a book about books -- specifically, Gaddis scholar Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600. Moore opens with a lengthy defense of innovative, imaginative, non-mainstream, literary fiction: art for art's sake. It's tempting to quote his thirty-seven-page introduction in full -- taking on Dale Peck, B.R. Myers, and Jonathan Franzen, it's brilliant, funny, informative, thoughtful, demanding, and more than anything, radiates an excitement for the novel and literature. "For some people," he writes, "resentment rather than...
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J K Rowling
Fear of Not Flying
A review by Lee Siegel
Once upon a time, a boy on a broomstick flew into a nation that was significantly free from tradition and prescribed custom. So great was its freedom in this regard that it turned every social incident and every cultural expression into a symbolic occasion that might supply a sorely needed orientation to national life. If two teenagers went on a rampage of killing in a high school, the slaughter had partly to embody the nation's surrender to television or computers. If a series of books came out about the adventures of a nearly adolescent boy swooping around on a broomstick, the rapturous...
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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 ...
Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly by Michael D. Gordin
The First Proliferation: Waiting for the Soviet Bomb
A review by Frank N. von Hippel
At a time when the world is reluctantly learning to live with North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons and is trying to keep Iran from joining the club, it is useful to be reminded of how it felt to be waiting for nuclear proliferation the first time around. In Red Cloud at Dawn, Michael D. Gordin describes the key decisions made with regard to nuclear weapons policy during the period when the United States had a monopoly on such weapons after World War II. Topics covered include U.S. expectations regarding how long that monopoly would last, the extent to which spies advanced the Soviet ...
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
Friendship by the book
A review by Ron Charles
I'm instinctively wary of genetic engineering, but Karen Fowler may have produced a literary equivalent of the elusive Super Tomato. The Jane Austen Book Club is modern chick lit spliced with genes from 19th-century romantic comedy. In fact, Fowler has so craftily designed this new novel to appeal to smart, middle-aged, book-buying women that one regards its demographic precision cynically. I'm sorry to report that it's delightful. Her leisurely story revolves around the monthly meetings of six people — five women and one man — who gather to discuss Jane Austen's domestic...
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