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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

"The Great Divorce" and "The Courtiers"


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday August 31, 2010
THE GREAT DIVORCE: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times
Ilyon Woo
Atlantic Monthly
ISBN 978-0-8921-1946-9
404 pages
$25

Reviewed by Elaine Showalter
The title of historian Ilyon Woo's provocative book certainly sparks curiosity and debate. Which of our many American divorces merits the epithet "great"? In this case, it's the legislative decree won in New York by Eunice Chapman in 1818, a victory for maternal custody rights in an era when children legally belonged to their fathers. And what about the challenging subtitle? Woo vividly tells the story of the Chapman's broken family, beginning with a dramatic sentence worthy of Stephen King: "Five years after the children first disappeared, it had come to this: a hundred strangers circling the Shaker village, torches lit." It sounds like the villagers marching on Dracula's castle, or the Texas rangers laying siege to the Mormon fundamentalist compound in 2008. In their 19th-century heyday, the Shakers, now nearly extinct and benevolent curators of quaint museums and expensive furniture, were a flourishing radical sect that lived communally, prayed vigorously, saw carnal love as the cause of sin and demanded celibacy from their followers. But they were neither predators nor polygamists. So why did Eunice Chapman have to fight them?
The full story of the Chapman divorce is more controversial than sensational. In 1804, poor and desperately afraid of becoming a spinster, 26-year-old Eunice Hawley married James Chapman, a widower 15 years older whom she found "disagreeable, and repulsive." They had three children, but he turned out to be an alcoholic, a philanderer and a failure. In 1811, James decided to strike out for a new life on his own, selling their home in Durham, N.Y., and abandoning the family. With the help of her relatives and the Presbyterian church, Eunice managed to find shelter and support her children.
By 1812, however, James had a religious conversion and decided to join a Shaker community in nearby Watervliet, which offered to cleanse him of his sins, give him a home and financial security, and bestow "a sense of acceptance and a reason to live." In exchange, he entered a period of probation during which he promised to settle his affairs, make amends to his wife and children, and, if possible, bring them all into the Shaker fold. But Eunice refused. Although the Shaker community was prosperous and immaculate, she did not like their way of life or attitudes about sexuality, maternity and chastity. Eunice hoped to force James to provide child support. Instead, he forcibly abducted the children -- George, 10; Susan, 8; and Julia, 4 -- and took them to Watervliet, where the Shakers took them in.
In a few states, abandoned spouses of Shaker converts could sue for divorce and claim property rights. But in New York, where divorce was granted only on the grounds of adultery, Eunice had to obtain a special legislative act of relief, approved by both houses in Albany and ratified by a higher Council of Revision. She took four years to achieve her purpose, despite exhausting delays, reversals, vetoes and retrials. The divorce, however, did not give her custody rights to the children, who had been secretly moved to another Shaker community; she had to locate and reclaim them by "collecting my forces for a new invasion," using moral and media pressure to obtain their release. By the time she had achieved her goal, the children were "bona fide Believers" who had to be deprogrammed and reconciled to life in the sinful world.
Eunice's triumphant battle, Woo concludes, has continuing resonance both internationally and in the Unites States, where "the competing issues of custody, marital, religious, and state rights persist." But the story Woo tells in nuanced and absorbing detail is far more ethically complex. Eunice's special divorce and custody act was an exceptional case that had little effect on divorce law overall. New York law was not revised until the 1960s. Moreover, the children's rights, needs and preferences were completely ignored by all. Most important. Eunice's tactics left their legacy in American politics, too. She used her personal charm to conduct an anti-Shaker smear campaign, falsely accusing them of child abuse and covert sexual practices, depicting them as "evil captors" rather than generous protectors, threatening them with arson and mob violence and exploiting American anti-sect emotions in the media. Woo calls this divorce "great" because it was accomplished against overwhelming odds, by a mother with fervent belief in her maternal rights. But it is hard to say whether the victory was also unbiased and honorable, let alone exemplary.
Elaine Showalter is a professor emeritus of English at Princeton University and the author of "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx."

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE COURTIERS: Splendor and Intrigue in the Georgian Court at Kensington Palace
Lucy Worsley
Walker
ISBN 978-0802719874
402 pages
$30

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
As inspiration for this account of life in the 18th-century Georgian court, Lucy Worsley takes the "portraits of forty-five royal servants that look down upon palace visitors from the walls and ceiling of the King's Grand Staircase" in Kensington Palace, best known today as the final residence of Princess Diana. This palace was "the one royal home that George I and his son (George II) really transformed and made their own," a place where the servants "witnessed romance and violence, intrigue and infighting, and almost unimaginable acts of hatred and cruelty between members of the same family."
She tells the story of the two Georges and their family through sketches of several of these servants, but her focus really -- and understandably -- is on the royal family itself. Brought over from Hanover (a part of what is now Germany) to replace the Stuart dynasty in 1714, the family was as dysfunctional as anything portrayed in the sleaziest of reality television. Father and son detested each other, with ramifications that rippled from one end of the family to the other and turned the court into "a bloody battlefield," a "world of skullduggery, politicking, wigs and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like flick knives." This is how Worsley summarizes the family's history:
"As a child, George II had lost his own mother when she was imprisoned for adultery. Then he lost contact with his eldest son through the move to Britain in 1714. Next he effectively lost his own father through (a) quarrel that also saw his three eldest daughters taken from him. His second son was snatched and died in George I's care, cementing the enmity between them. After a few short years of peaceful life with what was left of his family, George II lost his richly, truly, deeply beloved (wife) Caroline. His grandchildren were turned against him, and he lost his eldest son to a premature death. Death took three more daughters, Louisa, Anne and Caroline, while an ill-considered, snarling slight saw his only remaining son sink into silent enmity."
All of which is to say that "The Courtiers" is an exercise in the higher (or, depending on one's view of royalty, lower) gossip. Worsley, who as chief curator for a number of England's historic royal palaces appears to be something of a court groupie, writes breezy, chatty prose marred from time to time by the misuse of "hopefully" and "like." One does expect better of the Brits than that. Still, "The Courtiers" is amusing and, among other things, a useful reminder that, contrary to what many believe, sex was not invented in the 1960s.
Presumably Worsley and/or her publisher have put Kensington palace in the subtitle because of its association with Princess Di, but the real focus of the book is St. James' Palace, "a poorly designed, makeshift mansion for the monarchy since the great palace of Whitehall burned down in 1698" but one that "still provided the stage upon which the Georgia court's most important rituals were performed." In the early 18th century, "with the passing of greater power to Parliament the court was gradually becoming a backwater, and the ambitious no longer vied for the great court offices such as Groom of the Stool," but the period saw "a last great gasp of court life and a late flowering of that strange, complex, alluring but destructive organism called the royal household."
The palace drawing room where the court assembled looked more like a zoo than the elegant salon we imagine it to have been: "In the crush people would 'jostle and squeeze by one another,' shouting 'pardon' over their shoulders; it was simply 'impossible to hold a conversation.' Everyone laughed when Lord Onslow tumbled 'backward among all the crowd' and lay sprawling, while another gentleman, 'drunk and saucy,' had to be ejected for throwing a punch." First as Prince of Wales, then as king, George II "turned his backside to those he did not wish to acknowledge, a technique known as 'rumping.' The 'rumped' or spurned could console themselves with having earned membership of the exclusive 'Rumpsteak Club.'"
Both as prince and as king, George II was happily married to Caroline, but he was never without one or more mistresses. The first of these, Henrietta Howard, "was living apart from her brutal, heavy-drinking husband," simultaneously serving George's libidinous urges and, as one of six "Women of Princess Caroline's Bedchamber," the sartorial demands of his wife. That everyone managed to keep a stiff upper lip through this arrangement will seem bizarre to today's reader, but mistresses were a given of 18th-century court life, and wives did their best to tolerate them, in some instances to befriend them. When Henrietta decided she wanted to break away from the court and retreat into quiet private life, Caroline resisted her departure as strongly as George did, though in the end they capitulated, an exceedingly rare instance of royalty giving way to the wishes of an inferior.
This happened in 1731. Six years later Caroline took grievously ill, was totally misdiagnosed by her attending doctors -- scarcely unusual for the time, but ironic considering that both she and George II strongly supported medical science -- and died of complications from "a 'mortified,' or decayed, part of her bowel" after an agonizing decline. George was grief-stricken but quickly began scouting about for a new mistress: "The sight of the elderly king hunting for women was beginning to amuse and to horrify: observers thought he was simply getting too old for japes of this kind. He was now nearly sixty, a considerable age by the standards of his century." What he really wanted was "sympathy, rather than sex," and after a number of trial runs he found a measure of both.
Though women were prized at court and sometimes wielded influence beyond their status, they had few rights and were held in low esteem; Lord Chesterfield spoke for the male hierarchy when he called them "children of larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never in my life knew one that had it." In truth, though, "the whole sumptuous and luxurious cocoon of court life was in many ways a prison," as much for the men as for the women, since toadying was in even greater supply than rumping. The accounts Worsley gives of lords and ladies willingly sacrificing what dignity remained to them as they tried to wiggle their way upward on the court's greased pole is not pretty, though on the other hand not really any uglier than what goes on every day in the year 2010 in the salons of Imperial Washington.
To her credit, Worsley makes no attempt to underscore the parallels between the courtiers of Georgian England and those of London and Washington three centuries later, but they're self-evident. The human capacity for self-debasement in the search for glitter by association is deeply ingrained and hasn't changed despite the quantum leap from quill pens to iPads. The rooms in which the strivers now gather are warmer in winter and cooler in summer than was the King's Drawing Room at Kensington Palace, and the people in those rooms now smell a good deal better than George II's unbathed courtiers, but there's another stench that hasn't gone away, and won't.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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Monday, August 30, 2010

"Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday August 30, 2010
THREE BOOKS ABOUT EDUCATION REFORM
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Reviewed by Diane Ravitch
Now that the Obama administration has invited the states to compete for $5 billion in stimulus funds, the winners will not be those that come up with the best reform ideas, but those that agree to do what the administration wants: create privately managed charter schools, evaluate teachers by their students' test scores, and close low-performing schools. Since so much power and money are arrayed on one side of the issue, it is useful to consider some dissenting views. These three books have the power to change the national discussion of what now passes for "school reform."
Linda Darling-Hammond's "The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future" (Teachers College, $21.95) contains a valuable lode of practical and research-based advice about how to improve our schools. Darling-Hammond does something that the Obama administration has failed to do: She reviews what the top-performing school systems around the world do to get great results. Their highest priorities, she shows, are building a strong, experienced staff and making sure that every school has access to a rich, well-balanced curriculum in the arts and sciences. Finland, the highest-performing nation, has not relied on testing and accountability to achieve its current status.
Barbara Torre Veltri's "Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach for America Teacher" (Information Age; $29.99, paper). If American education has a sacred cow, it is Teach for America, which recently won $50 million from the U.S. Department of Education. The organization recruits bright college graduates to work for two years in the nation's poorest schools. Veltri has taught many of these recruits in her job at the University of Arizona, and she interviewed hundreds for this book. While she admires the young people who join the program, she raises important questions about the value of placing unprepared teachers in classes with the nation's neediest children.
If I were assigning reading to staff members at the U.S. Department of Education, I would ask them to study Richard Rothstein's "Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right" (Teachers College and Economic Policy Institute; $19.95, paper). Rothstein and his colleagues explain in plain language why current accountability policies, which focus only on basic skills, are making education worse, not better, by narrowing the curriculum. With apt examples, they also show how the pursuit of numbers distorts more important goals and how schools may get higher test scores without supplying better education.
Diane Ravitch is a former assistant secretary of education. Her latest book is "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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BABY, WE WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER: In Praise of Adoption
Scott Simon
Random House
ISBN 978-1-4000-6849-4
180 pages
$22

Reviewed by Sarah Halzack
Scott Simon's first night as an adoptive parent wasn't an easy one. Holed up in a hotel on a rainy night in Nanchang, China, he and his wife tried everything to comfort their new daughter as she cried. "Her eyes were dull, defiant, and blistering. Her small cheeks burned so, I wondered if her tears would sizzle," he writes. Still, the hysteria could not mitigate the deep feelings Simon and his wife felt for the child. "Our baby had opened new chambers in our hearts," he writes.
That sense of completeness and unconditional love is what anchors "Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other," Simon's memoir about adoption. Simon weaves together his own experience adopting two daughters from China with the stories of other adoptive parents and adopted children. Simon, an NPR host, and the families he interviews are strikingly candid about the challenges of adoption and the events that lead to it -- the suspense and heartbreak of unsuccessful fertility treatments, the nosy questions from neighbors about how much a child costs, the decision of whether to respond to overtures from a biological parent. Simon's unvarnished portrait is nonetheless an ode to adoption and the joy it can bring to both parent and child. It's clear that each family Simon highlights, including his own, is bound by a strong sense of generosity, empathy and love.
Sarah Halzack can be reached at halzacks(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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Sunday, August 29, 2010

"The Novel: An Alternative History Beginnings to 1600," more


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday August 29, 2010
THE TENTH PARALLEL: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
Eliza Griswold
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0-374-27318-7
317 pages
$27

Reviewed by Michael Mewshaw
Several hundred miles north of the equator, a lengthy portion of the tenth parallel forms what Eliza Griswold calls a "faith- based fault line" along which Islam and Christianity intersect and often clash in bloody spasms of violence. Starting in 2003, during the Bush administration's global war on terror, Griswold traveled extensively in this area, reporting on conflicts and tense truces in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Although many of these events might be described as religious wars, Griswold takes pains to point out that they are also struggles for local political and economic control, as well as geopolitical grabs for emerging markets and resources, especially oil.
An American poet and experienced journalist, the author brings to her book a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of place. By her own admission, she also brings personal baggage. As the daughter of Frank Griswold, the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, she grew up a preacher's kid, deeply steeped in Christian traditions and at home with evangelicals and international proselytizers such as Billy Graham's son Franklin. But she has done her homework on Islam, and as a young woman traveling alone, she appears to have encountered no obstacles in Muslim countries that she couldn't overcome.
Admirably evenhanded, she recounts the excesses of fundamentalism on both sides. For readers more accustomed to hearing about Islamic inflexibility, she recalls the callous myopia of Christianity. "Dr. Richard Furman, the head of the World Medical Mission, the medical arm of (Franklin) Graham's organization, told me that in one of the Samaritan's Purse's African hospitals, the doctors will draw a plus or minus sign on a patient's chart to indicate whether he is an evangelical Christian. If not, his operation may be postponed until someone shares the Gospel with him lest he die without an opportunity for salvation."
With no self-congratulatory New Journalistic posturing, she visits some of the riskiest places on the planet and tracks down terrorists, warlords, renegade priests and aspiring Christian martyrs. Like any ambitious reporter, she's not reluctant to take advantage of official press conferences in Khartoum or an NGO helicopter into otherwise inaccessible Mogadishu. What's extraordinary, however, is her persistence in leaving the beaten path to interview the American son of a Somali warlord or a U.S. missionary who survived a Muslim kidnapping that killed her husband or a repentant terrorist responsible for dozens of deaths in Malaysia.
But unfortunately, the sheer surfeit of names, places, dates and historical data sometimes threatens to swamp the narrative, and Griswold has the same trouble as the reader holding so much information in mind. Early on, Anglican archbishop Benjamin Kwashi says, "God has moved his work to Africa." Later, Griswold recycles the quote. When Franklin Graham meets Sudan's President Bashir, she describes the palace grounds where "Charles 'Chinese' Gordon was murdered by the jihadis." Two pages later, she repeats herself. On four occasions she writes that Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population. Three times in 10 pages, she refers to the island of Mindanao as the main home of Muslims in the Philippines. On countless occasions she notes that most Muslims in northern Africa are Sufis.
The reason for this repetitiveness would appear to be that "The Tenth Parallel" draws heavily on articles published over several years in newspapers and magazines. When they were stitched together into a book, extraneous material somehow escaped the copy editor's blue pencil and has left lumpy seams.
More crucially, it escaped someone's attention that Griswold repeats herself in structuring scenes. The result is a pattern of interviews with "the most notorious member of Balik Islam" or "the most powerful commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front" or the Pope of Terrorism, Hassan Al-Turabi, "the architect of the most violent jihad of modern times." After building expectations, the author often rushes through the actual encounter without producing anything meaningful. It's understandable how she might be grateful just to get in and get out of so many menacing situations alive; no one can fault her courage. But the cruel truth of journalism is that an interview that doesn't advance the story needs to be omitted.
Still, Griswold deserves credit for going where so few dare to venture. In a sense, like the best Christian missionaries, she serves as a witness in both meanings of the word, showing readers and people on the ground something valuable about women, whites and Americans.
Michael Mewshaw is the author of 11 novels and eight books of nonfiction, most recently, "Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Journey Across North Africa."

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE NOVEL: An Alternative History Beginnings to 1600
Steven Moore
Continuum
ISBN 978 1 4411 7704 9
698 pages
$39.95

Reviewed by Alberto Manguel
We tell stories to know the world. Stories teach us who we are and where we are. They allow us to ask why and to imagine ourselves as someone or somewhere else. Readers can bring to life the world that another person, perhaps centuries and oceans away, has put into words for them and make it their own. Every reader becomes a wanderer like Ulysses, a lost adolescent like Holden Caulfield, a murderer like Raskolnikov, a seducer-victim like Lolita, a justice-seeker like Don Quixote. Through the ages this distinctly human impulse to inhabit an imaginary world has taken on many forms before becoming what is known today as the modern novel.
Steven Moore, a former managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, has attempted to trace the roots of the modern novel to the first stories told around campfires in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Moore's survey is splendidly comprehensive and shows a true passion for his subject. Ranging from those early ancestors to the classics of Asian fiction, from the love stories of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the philosophical fables of the Enlightenment, and well into our time, the book displays Moore's impressive knowledge of the world of make-believe. Not only does he explore the delightful intricacies of such classics as Apuleius' "The Golden Ass" and the Sanskrit Panchatantra, but he guides us through the adventures of early Egyptian heroes (from which Agatha Christie, among others, drew inspiration), the love tribulations of the Greeks, the colossal enterprises of Indian demigods and the vast family sagas of Japan and China. The Arthurian legend, the Scandinavian epics and the picaresque tales of medieval Europe are also subjects of his keen analysis.
Moore makes deft connections between past and present, too. For instance, he tracks the lineage of a genre he calls "tranny classics" -- a group that includes Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckenbridge" -- back to a late 11th-century anonymous Japanese novel "The Changelings," a book whose gender-crossing protagonists seemed scandalous to generations of readers well into the 19th century.
As astute and thorough as this book is, however, it is based on a tenuous premise: That "the standard history of the novel" states that the form "was born in 18th-century England." This is not quite fair: A whole library of histories of the novel has traced the genre's origins to the same ancient sources that Moore discusses. Margaret Anne Doody's "The True History of the Novel" (1996) is perhaps the best known, but in the 1930s, Dorothy L. Sayers was tracking the detective novel back to the Bible and the Greeks. In the 1890s, Spanish scholars searched for models of Don Quixote in ancient tales such as the Alexander Romance and the Kalilah and Dimnah story cycle.
Though it is true that the word "novel" did not come into common use in Europe until the 18th century, the thing itself thrived under many other names in the literatures of almost every country. When in the early 16th century the tag "novel" began to be used in English to describe a certain kind of narrative (a short history first and an extended tale afterwards), the split between fiction and reality became so ingrained in the collective psyche that less than two centuries later, in 1726, when Jonathan Swift published "Gulliver's Travels" as a "true account," a certain Irish bishop observed that "the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it." For the Irish bishop, a book had to be fiction or nonfiction: It could not be both.
Leaving aside the question of originality, Moore tells his story with erudition and wit, and in doing so restores to the reader of good fiction confidence in the craft. Ultimately, Moore's book is less a genealogical history of the novel than a reader's treasure trove. It is also a celebration of challenging novels such as "Finnegans Wake" and "The Death of Virgil." These books, Moore points out, "are admittedly not for everyone" (and he could add to the list the remote classics enshrined in the libraries of archeologist-scholars); "but they are for some of us." Exactly.
Reading, in the deepest, most difficult, ultimately satisfying sense is, and always was, the craft of an elite, but, in spite of what demagogues and anti-intellectuals would have us believe, an elite to which almost anyone can choose to belong.
Alberto Manguel is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, "A Reader on Reading."

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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New Books Newsletter
For You
Sunday August 29, 2010
Are your kids ready for the upcoming school year? The ArcaMax Book Club has dozens of classic books commonly assigned for summer reading at schools across the country. Subscribe now and encourage them to read at their own page -- either by e-mail or right online. It's free, and a great way to encourage your kids to get reading. For newer books to try and buy online, sign up for BookDaily.com.

This Week's Featured Books
Fiction
- Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
- Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
- The Story of a Monkey on a Stick, Laura Lee Hope
Non Fiction
- The Art of War, Sun Tzu
- Rome in 1860, Edward Dicey
- The World War and What Was Behind It, Louis P. Benezet
Short Stories
- Tales of Unrest, Joseph Conrad
- Tales from Two Hemispheres, Hjalmar Hjorth Boysen
- The Wife et al., Anton Chekhov
Poetry
- Moments of Vision, Thomas Hardy
- The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
Plays
- School for Scandal, Richard Sheridan
- The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
- The Miser, Moliere
Sci Fi
- Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott
- Michael Strogoff, Jules Verne
- The Land That Time Forgot, Edgar Rice Burroughs
Philosophy
- Erewhon, Samuel Butler
- Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
- Erewhon Revisited, Samuel Butler
Religion
- Bible - Book 44: Malachi, Challoner Revision
- Bible - Book 66: James, Challoner Revision
- Bible - Book 13: 1 Chronicles, Challoner Revision
Biography
- Life of Chopin, Franz Lizst
- The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin
- Chaucer's Official Life, James Root Hulbert



Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley

(Aug. 30, 1797 - Feb. 1, 1851)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London, and eloped early in life - at age 16 - with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was in an unhappy marriage at the time. Their marriage was consecrated two years later, by which point Shelley had resigned herself to her husband's apparent fickleness when it came to other women. Her most famous novel, "Frankenstein," came out of a ghost-story writing contest - none of the other works written among her friends stood the test of time as well as this. After her husband died, she worked to publish and edit the material he left behind. She continued tirelessly in this endeavor until her death in 1851.

Featured Book and Quizzes


Featured book by Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

This week's quizzes:
Sci-Fi First Lines
H.G. Wells
Biology


This Week's Birthdays


William Saroyan -- August 31, 1908
Optimistic American writer of the Depression era.
Edgar Rice Burroughs -- September 1, 1875
Sci-fi writer and creator of Tarzan.
Read more about Edgar Rice Burroughs
Read Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs at BookDaily.

Richard Wright -- September 4, 1908
American novelist most famous for the novel Native Son.
Read Native Son by Richard Wright at BookDaily.




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Saturday, August 28, 2010

"Let's Take the Long Way Home," more


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday August 28, 2010
LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME: A Memoir of Friendship
Gail Caldwell
Random House
ISBN 978-1-4000-6738-1
190 pages
$23

Reviewed by Heller McAlpin
You can shelve "Let's Take the Long Way Home," Gail Caldwell's beautifully written book about the best friend she lost to cancer in 2002, next to "The Year of Magical Thinking," Joan Didion's searing memoir about losing her husband to heart failure. But that's assuming it makes it to your shelf: This is a book you'll want to share with your own "necessary pillars of life," as Caldwell refers to her nearest and dearest.
What's the draw in reading about "unspeakable sorrow"? Well, despite Caldwell's assertion that "the only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course," sensitive portraits of love and loss stir our nobler, empathic feelings, reminding us of our possibilities -- and realities -- as human beings.
Actually, Caldwell's book is more heartwarming than devastating. It's about the joys of friendship as much as the ravages of "intolerable loss." She evokes the sort of soul mate most of us yearn for. A Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Boston Globe, Caldwell writes of meeting Caroline Knapp, a columnist for the Boston Phoenix, in the mid-1990s: "Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived."
They certainly had a lot in common: Both writers were exercise fanatics who were single by choice and temperament and worked at home. Each lived alone in Cambridge, Mass., with a beloved dog. Both were high strung, sensitive and thin. Caldwell, nearly nine years older, had grown up in the Texas Panhandle and survived not just a "family tree (with) a root system soggy with alcohol," but childhood polio that left her with a limp. She had "given up a lot of what didn't work," including cigarettes, and was disturbed that Knapp, who had beaten anorexia and was the daughter of a Cambridge psychoanalyst, continued to smoke until shortly before her diagnosis with stage four lung cancer.
An even deeper connection was their shared history of alcoholism -- "that empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction." Both had stopped drinking in their early 30s, a fact Caldwell gleaned from Knapp's forthright 1996 memoir, "Drinking: a Love Story," before they became close. Caldwell had told few people about her sodden past. She writes about her alcoholism for the first time, partly because of its importance to her link with Knapp. "I used to think this was an awful story -- shameful and dramatic and sad. I don't think that anymore. Now I just think it's human, which is why I decided to tell it."
The two women bonded over their dogs, which they took on rambling, bucolic, "analytic walks." They had "endless conversations about whether we were living our lives correctly," discussions they prolonged by deliberately taking the long way home. In "Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs" (1999), Knapp described these walks as "one of the most sustaining aspects of my life, weekly shots to the soul of connection and laughter."
Together, the two women were "the merry recluse" and "the cheerful depressive" who "named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the Inner Marine" and "gave the other permission to lower the bar." Caldwell introduced Knapp to the joys of swimming laps, while Knapp initiated Caldwell into rowing on the Charles River. How's this for an elegant description of how a supportive friend helps you blossom? "The dailiness of our alliance was both muted and essential: We were the lattice that made room for the rose."
If you want a great memoir written about you, it helps if you're close to a writer: Trite as it sounds, writers process life by writing about it. As Caldwell comments, writing about Knapp years after her death helped provide "a happy limbo in which I have brought her along on the journey." Boswell's "Life of Johnson" may be the mother of all friendship biographies; Caldwell's memoir is more akin to the recent spate of tributes to writer-spouses, including Didion's "Magical Thinking," John Bayley's "Elegy for Iris" and Donald Hall's "Without," along with Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty," about her intense friendship with writer Lucy Grealy.
Caldwell is aware that she's telling "an old, old story": "I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too," she opens, noting later that "it's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it." Actually, what transforms the story is a combination of fearlessness and grace. Caldwell dares to ask, "What if dying weren't a bad thing?" and concludes, "Caroline's death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight." Her memoir, a tribute to the enduring power of friendship, is a lovely gift to readers.
Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR.org, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING
Steven Amsterdam
Pantheon
ISBN 978 0 307 37850 7
199 pages
$24

Reviewed by W. Ralph Eubanks
"Everything will be fine until it's not. Then we can worry," someone says in the first story of Steven Amsterdam's debut collection, "Things We Didn't See Coming." Those 11 words establish the tone for the rest of this book.
The setting is the eve of the millennium, and the 9-year-old narrator is fleeing the city for his grandparents' country home ahead of an anticipated Y2K calamity. As we all know, Y2K turned out to be much ado about nothing; in Amsterdam's fictional world, however, it triggers events that cascade across these connected stories, bringing about an apocalyptic transformation of the world. In each well-crafted piece, the narrator grows older, endures downpours that last for months, encounters victims of a highly infectious disease and finally finds his one true love.
This is not, however, a collection of "my-God-what-have-we-done?" tales that will add to your laundry list of worries about modern life. "Things We Didn't See Coming" captures contemporary anxieties about environmental destruction and the influence of technology, but the book is nonetheless hopeful. As the unnamed narrator develops from cheeky preteen to adolescent thief to adult survivor and government bureaucrat, the reader marvels at his adaptability, growth and transformation. The stories are as much about the human instinct for survival as about what we are doing to the world.
The milieu that Amsterdam depicts has something in common with our daily concerns about pandemics and climate change, though conditions have become much more harrowing. "The Profit Motive" opens with this description: "This is an era of violence. Border clashes, the flu, the weather, and all the migrations they caused -- none of it has fostered anything like camaraderie."
Sound vaguely familiar?
Given that "Things We Didn't See Coming" progresses like a Dickensian serialization, one might argue that it is a novel. As the title suggests, the reader really cannot see what is coming from story to story. Amsterdam keeps us wondering how the setting will change as the world deteriorates and is reborn into something both familiar and breathtakingly strange. The landscape appears to be an amalgam of the author's adopted country of Australia and his native New York City. "Dry Land," with its description of torrential rains that keep grapes from growing and make wine a precious commodity, seems to imagine what would happen to Australia's drought-ridden farmland if it got months, even years of constant precipitation. In the stories "What We Know Now" and "The Theft That Got Me Here," the city that his characters are fleeing, with its diligent checkpoints and police presence, feels more like post-9/11 Manhattan than Melbourne.
Still, the stories have a universality about them. No matter where you're from or what landscape is imbedded in your mind's eye, there are common emotions to connect with. Perhaps that is why I never grew tired of these pieces and read each one straight through, eagerly anticipating the next. They are fresh and original. Amsterdam is an innovative storyteller with a great gift for dialogue and staging.
"Things We Didn't See Coming" is the kind of book that can inspire us to think differently about the world and entertain us at the same time. In its occasional darkness, we can also see light.
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of "Ever Is a Long Time" and "The House at the End of the Road."

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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