Word: simonizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...addition her husband Richard, trying to address an opposition political rally in the Kenyan town of Nakuru two weeks ago, was among a group beaten by a mob wielding ax handles and whips. As Virginia Morell shows in Ancestral Passions, her splendid new collective biography of the Leakey family (Simon & Schuster; $30), this is no surprise; Leakeys have been prominent and colorful figures in paleontology and Kenyan affairs for almost a century...
...effect of double image, of not quite being in focus, mars Ursula Hegi's Salt Dancers (Simon & Schuster; 235 pages; $22), a forcefully written novel of child abuse and parental desertion. The author's strength is her unfailing immediacy of language, which illuminated her fine previous novel Stones from the River. Her scenes, as character grates on troubled character, are real and vivid; they command attention. But the book's structure might have been designed by a committee to illustrate how bitter, unresolved childhood memories can be coped with. (Hegi's dedication is "For my women's group"; is there...
...physicists into politicians and politicians into physicists. Scientists were forced to reckon with the repercussions of what they had wrought, while political and military leaders had to comprehend the power they held at their fingertips. In Richard Rhodes' epic and fascinating Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon & Schuster; 731 pages; $32.50), a sequel to his Pulitzer prizewinning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes shows how the failure of scientists and political leaders to understand each others' realms almost brought the world to nuclear Armageddon...
Europe's benchmark bloodsucker is generally considered to be Vlad the Impaler, an inspiration for Dracula. Andrei Codrescu's novel The Blood Countess (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23) offers an equally unattractive alternative: Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian tyrant alleged to have killed 650 girls in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth and beauty. Though never tried for mass murder, Bathory is said to have been confined to a room of her castle, where after five years she died...
There's much to like in Ursula Hegi's forcefully written novel (Simon & Schuster; 235 pages; $22) of child abuse and parental desertion. The author's strengths -- an unfailing immediacy of language and real, vivid scenes that command attention -- are all on display. But the book's structure, saysTIME's John Skow, "might have been designed by a committee to illustrate how bitter, unresolved childhood memories can be coped with." What we're left with is a plot straight out of a bad soap opera, and even a writer as gifted as Hegi can't dress it up as anything...