Word: scribners
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...latest book, Timeless Healing (Scribner; $24), Benson moves beyond the purely pragmatic use of meditation into the realm of spirituality. He ventures to say humans are actually engineered for religious faith. Benson bases this contention on his work with a subgroup of patients who report that they sense a closeness to God while meditating. In a five-year study of patients using meditation to battle chronic illnesses, Benson found that those who claim to feel the intimate presence of a higher power had better health and more rapid recoveries...
What hardly anyone expected was Accordion Crimes (Scribner; 381 pages; $25), a book that is, in at least one crucial respect, the antithesis of The Shipping News. Accordion Crimes has no central character, unless that term is stretched to include a 19-button green accordion that is brought by its Sicilian maker to New Orleans in the early 1890s. This instrument spends roughly the next 100 years--and the entire novel--drifting haphazardly into the possession of different people or, more precisely, members of different immigrant groups struggling to establish themselves in the U.S. After the accordion maker (who, somewhat...
Confronted with the task of reviewing The End of Alice (Scribner; 270 pages; $22), the third novel by A.M. Homes, a critic certainly feels the impulse to pull a Croce. Why actually wade through the book when we know from the publicity what we're in for: a story that demands to disturb and repulse, a portrait of a sick mind filled with sexual imagery repellent enough to make Robert Mapplethorpe photos look like Tommy Hilfiger ads by comparison...
BOOKS . . . THE END OF ALICE: The third novel by A. M. Homes (Scribner; 270 pages; $22) revolves around the gruesome psychoses of an unnamed murderer and pedophile whom we meet during his 23rd year in prison. "He is one of those genius wackos who make easy references to Flemish painters and Eastern boarding schools -- the kind of felon who exists maddeningly often in pop culture and rarely ever in real life, where major crimes are not generally committed by people who sound as though they've been reading Roland Barthes between mutilations," says TIME's Ginia Bellafante. The story demands...
WITH THE PROMISE OF REST (Scribner; 353 pages; $24), a powerful, brooding novel of a father who eases his son's death from aids, Reynolds Price closes a remarkable trilogy that began in 1975 with The Surface of Earth and continued six years later with The Source of Light. As is usually said about concluding volumes of trilogies, the new novel can stand alone, which in this case means not only that it makes good dramatic sense by itself, but also that it is not necessary to know its writing was an act of heroism. For the past few years...