Word: brilliants
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...pulls out all the stops for "The Crimson Petal and the White" by Michael Faber (Harcourt; September), giving it a starred, boxed review. "Faber's bawdy, brilliant second novel tells an intricate tale of love and ambition and paints a new portrait of Victorian England and its citizens in prose crackling with insight and bravado. Using the wealthy Rackham clan as a focal point for his sprawling, gorgeous epic, Faber, like Dickens or Hardy, explores an era's secrets and social hypocrisy...A marvelous story of erotic love, sin, familial conflicts and class prejudice, this is a deeply entertaining masterwork...
...benign John Ashcroft, and his protege John Anderton (Tom Cruise) run a system that prevents murders by arresting people before they commit them. Yet the Precrime apparatus is so goofily anach-ronistic--three young mind readers floating in a tank and billiard balls rolling through plastic tubes--that your brilliant, mad old uncle could have concocted it in his basement. This two-edged look fits with Spielberg's idea of marrying science fiction with film noir; this is a 50-years-ago detective story set 50 years from...
Person of the Week RED MEANS GO At 22, Ronaldinho overshadowed legendary teammates Ronaldo and Rivaldo, scoring a brilliant free-kick goal in Brazil's World Cup triumph over England. But he also got sent off?a major blow to his nation's semifinal aspirations and to all aficionados of sheer footballing genius...
...dance-you'll-like me number, from "Swing Time." And I can't imagine a more beautiful expression of reluctant rapture than Ginger's in the "Cheek to Cheek" dance from "Top Hat." And not just the song (Berlin's finest) or the dance (one of Astaire's most brilliant). I'm thinking of the coda: a startlingly suspenseful 12 seconds of silence as Ginger considers the ecstasy she has just shared with a man she believes to be married. It's post-coital remorse and wistfulness at its most poignant...
...Kirkus dusts of its copy of "The Origin of the Species," giving "Charles Darwin: The Power of Place" by Janet Browne (Knopf; September 17) a starred review. "Continuing where 'Charles Darwin: Voyaging' (1995) left off, the British science historian completes her brilliant two-volume biography...For all his apparent desire to be left alone to lead the life of a country gentleman, Darwin was a shrewd self-promoter, vigorously publicizing his work even in the depths of a long illness that Browne suggests may have been brought on in part by his tireless labors...A richly detailed, vivid, and definitive...