jueves, 23 de junio de 2011

Book Review


Book News and Reviews
Thor Hanson
Kathleen Ballard Photography
Thor Hanson
BOOKS OF THE TIMES

‘Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle’

The biologist Thor Hanson assembles an overview of the structural marvel that is the feather.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Picture Books About Farm Animals

“Farmyard Beat” and “Moo, Moo, Brown Cow, Have You Any Milk” invite young readers to sing along.
BLUNT Chad Kultgen's third novel, “Men, Women and Children,” went on sale this week. His first, “The Average American Male,” sold 100,000 copies.

A Raw Voice of Young Manhood Makes a Bid for Literary Respect

In his third novel, Chad Kultgen tries to be “something more substantial.”
Eva Gabrielsson, who lived with the Swedish author Stieg Larsson for 32 years before his death in 2004, said she has a laptop with a manuscript of his unpublished fourth novel.

The Girl Who Cast a Viking Spell

The longtime companion of Stieg Larsson, the posthumously best-selling author of the Millennium trilogy, has resorted to unusual means to win control of Larsson’s literary legacy.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Suzanne Fagence Cooper

‘Effie’

A biography of Effie Gray, whose marriage to the Victorian critic John Ruskin notoriously ran aground.
To see authors at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, Calif., customers can buy a gift card or the book.

Come Meet the Author, but Open Your Wallet

To increase revenue, independent bookstores are charging for author events.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Adam Ross

‘Ladies and Gentlemen: Stories’

This collection of stories by Adam Ross underscores the same dark view of human relationships that animated his debut novel, “Mr. Peanut.”
BOOKS
A cape weaver building its intricate nest.

A Feat of Engineering That Doubles as a Home

“Avian Architecture” provides what it calls “case studies” of each of 10 broad categories of nests, with photographs and detailed drawings.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Lee Martin

‘Break the Skin’

In “Break the Skin” Lee Martin weaves the stories of two women to explore the evils that can lie beneath the banality of small-town life.
THE MEDIA EQUATION

Ugly Details in Selling Newspapers

James O’Shea reported out the deals that tipped over the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune.
BOOKSHELF
SCANDAL Augusta Nack, the center of an 1897 love triangle.

Femme Fatale of a Newspaper War

Books about the dawn of the tabloid wars, enduring sights of historic Dutch New York and civil rights in the city.
The writer Donald Windham, who died last year, in 1991.

A Writer’s Estate to Yield $150,000 Literary Prizes

A surprise from the estate of the memoirist Donald Windham: at least $1 million a year in grants to writers.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Scott Carney

‘The Red Market’

The journalist Scott Carney reports on the grisly market for human body parts.
Files from Timothy Leary's archive.

New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary’s Papers

The archive of the drug guru Timothy Leary includes accounts of Allen Ginsburg’s and Jack Kerouac’s experiments with psilocybin.
Elaine Sciolino

‘La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life’

The Times’s Elaine Sciolino explains the French art de vivre.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Bob Mould

‘See a Little Light’

The Hüsker Dü guitarist Bob Mould traces his career and life in and out of the closet in “See a Little Light.”
Hugo Mercier is among the researchers now asserting that reason evolved to win arguments, not seek truth.

Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth

Rationality evolved to win arguments, some scholars suggest, and flawed reasoning is itself an adaptation.
Sunday Book Review
Adam Cohen

‘Ten Thousand Saints’

Eleanor Henderson’s fierce, elegiac novel follows a group of friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

‘The Secret Knowledge’

David Mamet comes out swinging against liberalism, offering his views on religion and American culture.
Ann Patchett

‘State of Wonder’

Ann Patchett’s heroine, on the trail of a reclusive scientist in the Amazon, faces demons real and imagined.
Malcolm X in 1961.

‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’

Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X draws upon letters, diaries, F.B.I. reports and interviews with contemporaries to trace his career and illuminate his intellectual and spiritual development.
Sibling rival: Heinrich Mann was a good writer rather than a great one.

‘House of Exile’

The cultural diaspora of the Nazi years, through the eyes of Thomas Mann’s brother and unlikely sister-in-law.
Robert Jay Lifton in 1976.

‘Witness to an Extreme Century’

A memoir by Robert Jay Lifton, a leading “psychohistorian” who studied how individuals have coped with extreme circumstances: war, torture, genocide.

‘A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion’

A sensational Jazz Age crime that also inspired James M. Cain and William Styron is the basis for Ron Hansen’s propulsive novel.
“Pornography masquerading as intellectual inquiry”: a photograph of a patient at Salpêtrière, titled “Onset of an Attack: Cry,” by Paul Regnard (circa 1878).

‘Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris’

Asti Hustvedt examines the dubious research of a 19th-century French doctor who used hypnosis to induce hysteria in female subjects.
Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, circa 1975; clockwise from left: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert and Fred Alan Wolf.

‘How the Hippies Saved Physics’

In the 1970s, eccentric young scientists challenged convention and re-energized modern physics.
A “Parliament of Ladyes,” woodcut frontispiece from a royalist pamphlet (1647).

‘Separated by Their Sex’

Between 1640 and 1760, Mary Beth Norton contends, men were increasingly viewed as public beings and women as private ones.

‘Vaclav & Lena’

A first novel about young love in a Russian émigré community.
German soldiers surrendering to the Russians in late 1941.

‘The Storm of War’

This clear, accessible account of World War II asks how the Wehrmacht, the best fighting force, wound up losing.
Jogger case protesters in Manhattan on Dec. 5, 2002.

‘The Central Park Five’

This is the first sustained treatment of the Central Park jogger case since the defendants’ convictions were vacated.
Children’s Books

Paradoxical Stories for Children

A dreamy experience: from “The Lying Carpet.”
A dreamy experience: from “The Lying Carpet.”
“The Lying Carpet” and “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making” celebrate paradox and the transformative power of storytelling.

‘Junonia’

A blossoming 10-year-old seeks a rare seashell in this middle grade novel.
In “999 Tadpoles,” a sprawling frog family outgrows its pond and sets off in search of more spacious quarters.

Picture Books About Frogs

“Leap Back Home to Me” and “999 Tadpoles” involve little frogs and the security that family brings.

Picture Books About the Backyard

“My Baby Blue Jays” chronicles a family of birds living on the author’s balcony; and “How Things Work in the Ward” explains the everyday mysteries of acorns, dandelions, rocks and dirt.

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