Word: books
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Longitude, Sobel's previous nonfiction narrative, was a concise and intellectually tense retelling of the beginning of modern navigation. It was also one of the surprise publishing successes of 1995. Her new book adds a little-known personal dimension to the life of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century Pisan mathematician and astronomer who was tried, convicted and humbled for challenging church dogma that placed the earth at the center of the universe...
This novel has pretensions, but they are overridden by Allende's riproaring girl's adventure story. In fact, the book exemplifies the new feminist approach by plugging late 20th century cultural attitudes into a spacious 19th century literary vehicle. Like Una Spencer, Eliza Sommers makes her way in the world by cross-dressing. She befriends a Chinese healer who becomes her confidant, her partner in an alternative-medicine practice and eventually her soul mate for life. Throughout it all, Allende projects a woman's point of view with confidence, control and an expansive definition of romance as a fact...
...goes up to a maitre d' to shake his hand, Grunwald is told that he has just greeted a statue of a monkey. The eye, we learn early, is not just a camera but a "portal of light." In that respect, as in many others, this lucid, elegant book is a piercing reflection of (and on) the way that...
DIED. ALAN HEIMERT, 70, influential Harvard literature professor; of complications from cardiovascular disease; in Washington. Heimert's best-known book, Religion and the American Mind (1966), suggested that Evangelicals helped prompt the American Revolution...
DIED. DAISY BATES, 84, civil rights leader whose memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, won a 1988 American Book Award; in Little Rock, Ark. During rioting in 1957 over the integration of Central High, Bates advised the nine black students. With her husband, she founded the Arkansas State Press--a key voice for the movement. Her crusade, she said, "had a lot to do with removing fear that people have for getting involved...