Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rarely seen on the Chicago social circuit, and spends most of her nights at home reading. "I read in themes," she says. "One year it was black authors. Another year all the books I was supposed to read in college but didn't. This is my spiritual summer." Her current fave: A Course in Miracles, a spiritual text that offers positive-thinking lessons for life. Her boyfriend, Stedman Graham, a former basketball player, is now based in North Carolina as vice president of a public relations firm; they usually see each other every couple of weeks...
...procedurals and spy stories published in the U.S. each year. Characters are frequently sketchy, plots more elaborate than coherent, dialogue archly unnatural, and exotic settings tacked on rather than integral to the narrative. Many authors seem to think that a new gimmick -- a detective who is a librarian or social worker, one who works in the Berkshires or the Depression-era Dakotas -- will revitalize a formulaic story. Or they believe adopting a topical theme such as child abuse or computer fraud amounts to having something...
...expose how the family's pieties about mankind have masked a cruel indifference to individual people. The field of potential suspects thereby doubles to include the noble clan. More important, what happened on a moonlit lawn, and why, becomes less a puzzle and more a metaphor for a social system on the brink of change. Throughout, Barnard's narrative never loses its tight focus on a domestic world as richly evoked as in anything by Galsworthy or Trollope...
Simon's swift-paced and snappily told tale cannot compare, however, with Jonathan Kellerman's The Butcher's Theater (Bantam; 627 pages; $19.95), a sprawling yet spellbinding plunge into Jerusalem's ethnic, religious and social cauldron. Kellerman, a clinical psychologist whose previous books have featured a psychologist as detective, turns here to tracking the emotional evolution of a serial killer and the creation of a multiethnic police team to catch him before his savagery destroys the fragile equilibrium among Jews, Arabs and Christians. The mawkishly melodramatic finale is Kellerman's only miscalculation in a vivid, fascinating tale...
Like myths of Eden, the stories of Huck and Tom endure in the American imagination. But they have a dark side too. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck's journey in the Delectable Land is also a drama of alcoholism, child abuse, young runaways, social breakdown, violence, hypocrisy, racism and a child's struggle to understand right and wrong in a society that has lost its bearings. Huckleberry Finn is still the best book about American childhood, as contemporary as a milk carton bearing the photograph of a missing child...