The Virginia Quarterly Review back issues from April 2004:
Correction
Apr 01, 2004; ... Correction: The review of Literature after Feminism by Rita Felski ...
Not Till We Are Lost
Apr 01, 2004; ... Not Till We Are Lost, by William Wenthe. LSU, December 2003. $22.95 These poems by a Jersey boy dislocated into West Texas ripple with ...
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship
Apr 01, 2004; ... Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, by Ann Patchett. HarperCollins, May 2004. $23.95 A painfully honest exploration of what makes great ...
I Sailed with Magellan
Apr 01, 2004; ... I Sailed with Magellan, by Stuart Dybek. FSG, November 2003. $24 A brilliantly wrought sequence ...
Language of Blood
Apr 01, 2004; ... Language of Blood, by Jane JeongTrenka. Borealis Books, September 2003. $23.95 A Korean adoptee wrestles with her ...
Remaking a Norton Anthology
Apr 01, 2004; ... Sharing a suffix with such academically serious words such as philology, anthropology, and oncology, the word anthology sounds respectable enough. But anthos, I belatedly discovered, is Greek for flower, and iogia means collecting. So that's it?-devoting the last few years to editing the third ...
Argument & Song
Apr 01, 2004; ... ALSO NEW & NOTEWORTHY Argument & Song, by Stanley Plumly, Handset Book, December 2003. $30 With a hard ...
Pragmatism and Religion
Apr 01, 2004; ... Pragmatism and Religion, edited by Stuart Rosenbaum. Illinois, October 2003. $24.95 The recent turn to religion in the American academy has traveled along the road of pragmatism. Pragmatism and Religion is an elegantly edited collection of historic and contemporary essays that ...
Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths
Apr 01, 2004; ... Creek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths, by Mary Lefkowitz. Yale, November 2003. $30 This author garnered national attention with the publication of Not Out of Africa, a work that defied political correctness by claiming to expose the weakness of certain aspects of emerging ...
Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory
Apr 01, 2004; ... Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory, by Edward J. Larson. Random House, May 2004. $21.95 Who would dare attempt ...
Dark Age Ahead
Apr 01, 2004; ... Dark Age Ahead, by Jane Jacobs. Random House, May 2004. $23.95 Jacobs's quintessential Death and Life of Great ...
Aristotle's Children: How Muslims, Christians, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages
Apr 01, 2004; ... Aristotle's Children: How Muslims, Christians, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages, by Richard Rubenstein. Harcourt, October 2003. $27 Rubenstein, who has written widely in the fields of history and religion, has given us a timely book. In an era when one ...
Understanding the Language of Science
Apr 01, 2004; ... Understanding the Language of Science, by Steven Darian. Texas, September 2003. $27.95 Science differs from other ways of knowing because it offers a means of observing and a way of thinking that permit both the verification and the sharing of knowledge about attributes or properties of ...
On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World
Apr 01, 2004; ... SCIENCE On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, by Jacqueline Rose. Princeton, October 2003. $29.95 Recent critics of psychoanalysis have tried to decry the movement's importance by either discrediting its therapeutic efficacy or attacking its theoretical ...
Lessons of the Masters
Apr 01, 2004; ... Lessons of the Masters, by George Steiner. Harvard, November 2003. $19.95 You know that guy at cocktail parties who just starts talking and never stops, the one who quotes philosopher after writer after philosopher, all to no point at all but to impress you with what he knows? That guy ...
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
Apr 01, 2004; ... War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black. Four Walls Eight Windows, September 2003. $27 There are a lot of ugly stories in the creation of America. The eugenics campaign has got to rank among the ugliest. As the 2oth century began, the ...
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
Apr 01, 2004; ... PHILOSOPHY & RELIGIOUS STUDIES American Jesus: How the Son of Cod Became a National Icon, by Stephen Prothero. FSG, December 2003. $25 In the 18405, the German philosopher Feuerbach startled Christian Europe with his book The Essence of Christianity, which argued that God is the ...
Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact
Apr 01, 2004; ... Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact, by John Cornwell. Viking, October 2003. $29.95 Early in the 20th century, German science was supreme, but then came Adolf Hitler and German science changed. John Cornwell, of the department of history and philosophy of science at ...
Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series
Apr 01, 2004; ... Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 7919 World Series, by David Pietrusza. Carroll and Graf, September 2003. $27 The doings and undoing of gambler Arnold Rothstein have been a perennial puzzle and-unsurprisingly-the stuff that fiction's made on. AR ...
In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa
Apr 01, 2004; ... In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa, by Daniel Bergner. FSG, October 2003. $22 Bergner's work recounts his travels in Sierra Leone amongst the wreckage, both material and human, of a vicious, decade-long civil war. In this little-known West African ...
Paul Bowles on Music
Apr 01, 2004; ... Paul Bowles on Music, by Paul Bowles. Edited by Timothy Mangan and Irene Hermann. California, September 2003. $34.95 Before turning his attention to writing fiction, Paul Bowles, who was also a composer, worked as music critic for Modern Music and the New York Herald Tribune from 1939 to ...
Art of War
Apr 01, 2004; ... Art of War, by Niccolo Machiavelli. Edited and translated by Christopher Lynch. Chicago, September 2003. $25 Throughout bis career as a secretary and statesman in Florentine politics, military life fascinated Machiavelli. In 1521, the Art of War was published, and in the words of ...
Woody Allen: A Life in Film
Apr 01, 2004; ... Woody Alten: A Life in Film, by Richard Schicket. Ivan R. Dee, September 2003. $22.50 In 2002 Woody Alien sat for an unprecedented four-hour interview on camera with Time film critic Richard Schickel. The interview became the basis for a highly acclaimed ninety-minute biographical ...
Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers
Apr 01, 2004; ... Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, by Linda Perlstein. FSG, September 2003. $24 Perlstein, an education reporter for the Washington Post, spent a year immersed in the lives of five Maryland middle school students. What emerges is a fascinating, intimate, ...
Feast: A History of Grand Eating
Apr 01, 2004; ... Feast: A History of Grand Eating, by Roy Strong. Harcourt, November 2003. $35 This history of the feast, from ancient Greek times to the 2Oth century, investigates not so much the food served, as the traditions, rules, and rituals that governed lavish dining. Feasts have been a microcosm ...
The Rented Violin
Apr 01, 2004; ... POETRY The Rented Violin, by Karen Whalley. Ausable Press, November 2003. $14 "Beauty is a form of suffering," declares this book's opening poem, a volley across the bow of a poetic landscape where "nothing ever ends / And nothing ever lasts." Whalley's work tends to find its occasion ...
The Beast in the Garden
Apr 01, 2004; ... The Beast in the Garden, by David Baron. Norton, November 2003. $24.95 On a mild winter day in iggi in Idaho Springs, Colorado, a mountain lion of moderate size made a quick kill of an eighteen-year-old athlete and dragged him away for dinner. There had been forcwarnings of such an event ...
An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland
Apr 01, 2004; ... An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland, by Michael Dirda. Norton, October 2003. $24.95 Michael Dirda, senior editor of the Washington Post Book World, knew early in life that "books and I were drawn together." But his father, a steelworker in Lorain, Ohio, couldn't understand why ...
Collected Later Poems
Apr 01, 2004; ... Collected Later Poems, by Anthony Hecht. Knopf, October 2003. $25 Collected Later Poems brings together the complete text of Hecht's last three collections of his poems. The book is a small, handsome volume, with no preface or introduction. Randall Jarrell once wrote, famously, that a ...
Occasions of Sin: A Memoir
Apr 01, 2004; ... GENERAL NONFICTION Occasions of SIn: A Memoir, by Sandra Scofield. Norton, January 2004. $24.95 Even in a sea of outstanding memoirs, this one stands out as particularly excellent. From the most ordinary of circumstances, the author crafts a riveting, deeply moving story about her West ...
Don Quixote
Apr 01, 2004; ... Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, Translated by Edith Grossman. Introduction by Harold Bloom. Ecco, October 2003. $29.95 If you have never read Don Quixote-and you know you should read it at least once in your life-here's your chance. This extraordinary novel, universally applauded as ...
Love
Apr 01, 2004; ... Love, by Toni Morrison. Knopf, November 2003. $23.95 Love-Toni Morrison's eighth novel-is unarguably a Toni Morrison novel. It deals with women's relationships, the complexities of race and class, the overwhelming power of the past, and cooking. Its narrative loops dreamily through time ...
American Wives
Apr 01, 2004; ... American Wives, by Beth Helms. Iowa, September 2003. $15.95 In Beth Helms's debut short story collection, a subtle and surprisingly sad representation of love will leave the reader astonished-and somewhat unnerved. The winner of the 2003 Iowa Award, this book displays marriage, romance, ...
Elizabeth Costello
Apr 01, 2004; ... Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Viking, October 2003. $21.95 Elizabeth Costello is a bleak work, witnessing a novelist's urgent need near the end of her life to uncompromisingly tell what she has learned of the human condition. Coetzee denies the reader even the distraction of ...
True Cross
Apr 01, 2004; ... True Cross, by T. R. Pearson. Viking, September 2003. $24.95 If it were not for Pearson's ability to mix wry humor with social commentary, True Cross would be just another story about a roaming rural accountant on a quest for a backbone. As it is, Paul Tatum hails "from an uninterrupted ...
Fanny: A Fiction
Apr 01, 2004; ... Fanny: A Fiction, by Edmund White. Ecco, October 2003. $24.95 Fanny Trollope, the Englishwoman who caused a furor in this country with the 1832 publication of her travel book Domestic Manners of the Americans, has been skewered by an American once again, this time by the insightful and ...
Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States
Apr 01, 2004; ... Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, edited by BiIIV. Mullen and James Smethurst. North Carolina, October 2003. $55 cloth, $19.95 paper Pursuing the line of cultural analysis made famous by Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, ...
Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall
Apr 01, 2004; ... Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall, by Andrew Meier. Norton, September 2003. $28.95 There is something about the Slavic East that invites travelogues which also strive to explain contemporary history. The more tortured the present, the more interesting the journey. The ...
The Book of Ralph
Apr 01, 2004; ... FICTION The Book of Ralph, by John McNaIIy. Free Press, March 2004. $24 You may not have met Ralph and Hank, but you already know them. If you survived suburban junior high, then you know Ralph, the pyromaniac whose interest in optics extends only to trying to set his next door neighbor ...
Ireland and Postcolonial Theory
Apr 01, 2004; ... Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Clare Carroll and Patricia King. Notre Dame, October 2003. $25 For those initiates to postcolonial theory and Irish studies, it will be enough to say that this collection includes field-redirecting essays by Kevin Whelan, David Lloyd, Joe deary, ...
The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1900
Apr 01, 2004; ... LITERARY STUDIES The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1900, by Jane Turner Censer. LSU1 December 2003. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper While recent decades have seen a surge in works on women in the antebellum and Civil War eras, not since 1970 has a scholar focused ...
Lone Star Literature
Apr 01, 2004; ... Lone Star Literature, edited by Don Graham. Norton, November 2003. $29.95 Cracking the cover on a new anthology is like heading out to shop in an upscale store; we anticipate that all the goods presented will be of high quality but expect to be allured into buying only a few items. I ...
Dismantling Democratic States
Apr 01, 2004; ... Dismantling Democratic States, by Ezra Suleiman. Princeton, October 2003. $39.50 Although not suggested by the title, Dismantling Democratic States is a book focusing on issues concerning the existence and reform of state bureaucracies. Among Suleiman's central arguments is that for ...
Daniel Boone: An American Life
Apr 01, 2004; ... Daniel Boone: An American Life, by Michael A. Lafaro. Kentucky, September 2003. $25 Biographers are always helped by having interesting lives to narrate. Few Americans offer better stories to write about than those of Daniel Boone. But such rich materials come at a cost: few American ...
An Alliance at Risk: The United States and Europe since September 11
Apr 01, 2004; ... An Alliance at Risk: The United States and Europe since September 11, by Laurent Cohen-Tanugi. Johns Hopkins, September 2003. $19.95 A timely and remarkably wise prescriptive analysis of U.S.-European relations in the wake of 9/11. Cohen-Tanugi's book has critical words for both sides of ...
Siting Jefferson
Apr 01, 2004; ... Siting Jefferson, edited by Jill Hartz. Virginia, September 2003. $19.95 This album of photos and accompanying essays represents the only permanent record of an exhibition mounted in the summer of 2000, by the University of Virginia Art Museum, to show site-specific artworks created by ...
Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks
Apr 01, 2004; ... Modem Jihad: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks, by Loretta Napoleoni. Pluto, September 2003. $24.95 Loretta Napoleoni, a journalist and economist, examines global terrorism not as a political tool or an expression of religious fervor, but as an economic system that generates ...
Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age
Apr 01, 2004; ... Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age, by Tom C. Crouch. Norton, November 2003. $29.95 Timed for the Wright Brothers centennial, this survey of the history of the airplane, written by the senior curator of the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum, ...
Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace
Apr 01, 2004; ... CURRENT EVENTS Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace, by Timothy W. Crawford. Cornell, December 2003. $39.95 Timothy Crawford has written a well-supported, theoretically intriguing book that has significant relevance to American foreign policy. The primary ...
Boomlay, Boomlay, Boomlay, BLOOM
Apr 01, 2004; ... Boomlay, Boomlay, Boomlay, BLOOM The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Frost. Ed. Harold Bloom. HarperCollins, March 2004. $34.95 The poems I have chosen to memorize over the years answer to an odd mixture of social occasions and opportunities. When asked to ...
The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II
Apr 01, 2004; ... The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the ChinaBurma-India Theater in World War II, by Donovan Webster. FSC, October 2003. $25 The Burma Road is an important work in two respects. First, while the bulk of the popular historical literature on the second World War has been devoted to the ...
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Apr 01, 2004; ... HISTORY Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Knopf, April 2004. $30 This is a most implausible and frustrating piece of work. The author evidently set out to write simultaneously an ambitious academic monograph and a sensationalistic best-seller. he acknowledges ...
Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life
Apr 01, 2004; ... Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life, by William Howard Adams. Yale, October 2003. $30 Adams, an independent scholar who has written about Jefferson's years in France, has given us an excellent account of a remarkable life. Morris, a New York patrician who played a leading role during ...
Terminator: The Legacy of Ted Hughes
Apr 01, 2004; ... Terminator: The Legacy of Ted Hughes Her Husband: Hughes and Plath-A Marriage. By Diane Middlebrook. Viking, October 2003. $25.95 Collected Poems. By Ted Hughes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2003. $50 The lunatic, the lover and the poet, Are of imagination all ...
Untitled in Four Parts
Apr 01, 2004; ... i. Dawn boils up like milk, cloudy with disrespect. Like Tin Pan Alley hacks, paid for each line, neighborhood wrens bang out their high-pitched notes. The narrow windows offer nothing, the glass brushed with dark leaf-shapes, like a Japanese ...
The Slavery Debates, 1952-7990: A Retrospective
Apr 01, 2004; ... The Slavery Debates, 7952-7990: A Retrospective, by Robert W. Fogel. LSU, December 2003. $22.95 This slender volume, based on his 2001 Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, is Robert Fogel's personal retrospective on the debates that raged over slavery during the last half of ...
Couplets
Apr 01, 2004; ... Once he looked deep in her muddy brown eyes and saw nothing there but the whirling flies. Love is religion and love is the law by which the unloved forgive every flaw. The soldiers came running and threw down their arms at the thought of enjoying her ...
Hating America, at Home and Abroad
Apr 01, 2004; ... Hating America, at Home and Abroad Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World. By Jedediah Purdy. Knopf, February 2004. $14 (paper) Five Shades of Shadow. By Tracy Daugherty. Nebraska, March 2003. $27.95 The idea of America is wrapped around the twin ...
New Perspectives on Japanese Prints
Apr 01, 2004; ... "The Moon Has No Home": Japanese Color Woodblock Prints from the Collection of the University of Virginia Art Museum Visitors fortunate enough to have seen "The Moon Has No Home" were introduced to a striking new perspective on an art form that has enthralled interested viewers ...
Or Fail to Smile: Three Recent Books by William Kloefkorn
Apr 01, 2004; ... Or Fail to Smile: Three Recent Books by William Kloefkorn Restoring the Burnt Child: A Primer. Nebraska, September 2003. $22 This Death by Drowning. Nebraska, September 1997. $15 Sergeant Patrick Gass, Chief Carpenter: On the Trail with Lewis and dark. Spoon River Poetry, July ...
Some Thoughts on Sylvia Plath
Apr 01, 2004; ... O vase of acid, It is love you are full of ... Walking into class at Boston University one February in 1959,1 sat down next to a young woman who, like myself, had gotten there early. The chairs were in disarray around the seminar table, and the windows looked out on busy ...
Concubine
Apr 01, 2004; ... As you dress, early mist reflects moonlight and silence between the winter hills until blackened teeth, shaven eyebrows, and powdered skin thrive like secrets on shadow. That aura caught by your long brushed hair is sky ...
Torn
Apr 01, 2004; ... There was the knife and the broken syringe then the needle in my hand, the Tru-Cut followed by the night-blue suture. The wall behind registration listed a man with his face open. Through the glass doors, I saw the sky going blue to black as it ...
The Immortals
Apr 01, 2004; ... In Chicago, while taking the El from Wrigley Field to Evanston, Rudy O'Hara was certain he recognized the woman sitting across the train's aisle, but he couldn't place her. he wanted to lean forward and say, We know each other, don't we? but years ago in New York he had asked a woman on a train ...
Calligraphy
Apr 01, 2004; ... Hoping characters ring true, the master assigns just two words, war and peace, for the final class. In light of tradition, he examines every stroke, satisfied our work on war has nowhere else to turn, but peace is another ...