Word: tales
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...satisfying, if slightly chauvinistic tale, but experts in human evolution have known for years that it is dead wrong. The evolution of a successful animal species almost always involves trial and error, false starts and failed experiments. "Humans are no exception to this," says anthropologist Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, "no matter what we like to think...
...third book, Dark Wind: A Survivor's Tale of Love and Loss (Atlantic Monthly Press; 225 pages; $23), author Gordon Chaplin is an Ishmael--perhaps merely an incompetent--who lives after the boat goes down and, haunted, tells the story...
...tale is this: in middle age Chaplin, a journalist, and Susan Atkinson, a nurse married to Chaplin's college roommate, embark upon "an illicit, dangerous romance." In 1989, after years of landlocked child-rearing (four daughters between them), they leave their marriages and decide, like the owl and the pussycat, to set off to sea in the 36-ft. double-ended motor-sailor Lord Jim. Throughout the chronicle blow dark gusts of both families' anger and disapproval--bad emotional weather that is the underlying motif of Chaplin's memoir, even when tropical sun shines on the romantic fugitives...
...grads Alice (Claire Danes) and Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) lark off to Thailand, where they get framed on a heroin rap. The dank, formulaic script allows few of the moral ambiguities of 1998's Return to Paradise (there the country was Malaysia, and the American prisoner sort of guilty). The tale also has little of the pulpy juice of the B-movies Kaplan made in the '70s. The only guilty pleasure is watching Danes' wildly noble emoting. Her tears are as strong as a porn queen's orgasm...
...doctor's true passion is listening to classical music, preferably that composed by the great melodists of the 19th century. The literary equivalent of melody is, of course, story, the engaging what-next of narrative prose. Hansen's tersely told tale hangs expectantly on the outcome of Mistress Blum's treatment, which unexpectedly includes the arcane input of the enchanting Madame Helena Barrett and her spiritualist friends...