Word: novels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This anecdote appears in The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon; 576 pages), which is the most flat-out fascinating book so far this year. You wouldn't get that from its title, which sounds like a tender coming-of-age novel, nor from its subtitle - How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - which sounds like a course you napped through in college. But Holmes' account of experimental science at the end of the 1700s - when amateurs could still make major discoveries, when one new data point could overthrow a worldview - is beyond riveting. Science...
...fitting that as I was writing my previous book, an historical novel called Heyday published in 2007, I turned 50. Once your life has lasted a full historical unit of time - half a century! - and assuming you've been paying reasonably close attention, "history" becomes less of a bookish abstraction about treaties and battles and bills and dates, and begins to acquire a more palpable reality. Around age 50, I started to feel, in ways I really hadn't when I was younger, as if I could see and feel the rhythms of history. The year of my birth...
...single named storm has popped onto the radar. If that makes people complacent, it only makes weather watchers worry even more about what is to come. Officials and insurers are concerned about the ramifications of a "Big One," and Florida, the most ravaged of states, is looking at several novel approaches to riding out the storms - or even preventing them altogether. (Read a story about whether Florida can survive...
...storms can't be warded off, the state is also looking to ways of responding to them more efficiently. Florida's top emergency manager has floated a novel idea to turn the housing crash into an advantage, by using 250,000 foreclosed homes as temporary hurricane shelters. "This option didn't exist two or three years ago before the real-estate market crashed," Ruben Almaguer, interim director of Florida's emergency management division, told the Miami Herald last month following a mock-disaster drill that highlighted the shortage of hurricane shelters in the state. "We can't not look...
...speaking of Leonard, Inherent Vice is like nothing so much as an Elmore Leonard novel with metaphysical aims. It has the same deadpan dialogue, the same lowlife panache, the same Venice Beach-to-Vegas locales that Leonard has touched down in. But the earthbound author of Get Shorty doesn't go in for Pynchon's lyrical riffs about the immemorial forces that pull the world's secret levers and keep the dispossessed of all kinds - the poor, the nonwhite, the nonconforming - from coming into their...