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 of remarkable -- today largely forgotten -- -scientists, explorers, and writers. Rather than dwell on the overly familiar Victorians -- Stanley and Livingstone, Dickens and Darwin -- Holmes brings to life no less notable scientific and artistic geniuses. Whether he is describing Caroline and William Herschel, a brother-and-sister team of astronomers who discovered Uranus and who revolutionized...
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Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations by Henry Fairlie
 When I first set foot in Fleet Street forty years ago, it still wore an air of romance, and it still existed as more than a street sign. We sometimes say "Fleet Street" as synecdoche for the London press even now that newspaper offices have been scattered from the Daily Telegraph on the distant...
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 For a long time, the spirit of pinched traditionalism pervaded postwar British culture. Writers such as Angus Wilson and C. P. Snow vied with one another to reproduce old-fashioned narratives, upholding the values of gentility via the tired means of drawing-room comedies or novels of manners. In...
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 Rebekkah, who has fled her hateful family and the ferocious Christian sectarianism of seventeenth-century England for marriage to a stranger in the New World wilderness of Mary's Land, has reason to wonder after so much silence, absence, vacancy, and death: "I don't think God knows who we are. I...
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 Consider Hannah Green's rose garden, Sylvia Plath's bell jar, Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, and Marilyn Monroe's pills. Or such textbooks on falling apart as Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, R.D. Laing's The Divided Self, Erving Goffman's Asylums...
Why Poetry Matters (Why X Matters Why X Matters) by Jay Parini
 If you were to write a book called Why Poetry Matters, you would be wise to concede, as Jay Parini does, that "to most people" it doesn't. "That is, most people don't write it, don't read it, and don't have any idea why anybody would spend valuable time doing such a thing." Especially if, again...
2666 by Roberto Bolano
 Almost halfway through Roberto Bolano's novel 2666, a seventy-year-old seer and healer named Florita Almada appears on a local TV talk show. Local, in this case, means Sonora, a state that includes the city Bolano calls Santa Teresa, which is based on Ciudad Juarez -- a bleak, industrial desert...
Beijing Coma by Ma Jian
 Bejing Coma (Picador, $18.00) is two thousand years of Chinese history and mythology-from the classic Book of Mountains and Seas in the second century A.D. to the murder of students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Although Ma Jian, author of Stick Out Your Tongue and The Noodle Maker, was...
Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck
 Thirty years ago, it seemed that Elsa Morante had established herself as a major literary figure. History: A Novel (1974), which was a best-selling book in Italy, was widely reviewed in the United States when it was published here in 1977; such critics as Alfred Kazin and Stephen Spender debated...
Camus, A Romance by Elizabeth Hawes
 I don't imagine many readers bother to peruse the acknowledgments section of a biography, that laundry list of copyright holders, helpful archivists, encouraging spouses, and generous foundations without whom the work would never have seen the light of day, and none of whom bear any blame for the...
Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport '56 by John Fass Morton
 Through our remarkable technology we witness the fundamental dilemma of our age, which is the use of machines that bespeak the genius of the species for the trivialization of the profound. We have thus become accustomed to a blizzard of fluff delivered by ingenious high-tech means. An aspect of...
My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (P.S.)
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The Forever War (Vintage)
by Dexter Filkins
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Brooklyn
by Colm Toibin
Season of Migration to the North
by Tayeb Salih
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