The Virginia Quarterly Review back issues from July 2005:
On Meeting Writers
Jul 01, 2005; ... It's after midnight, and I'm tapping on the murky aquarium glass to see if the two scrawny lobsters inside are, as the sign promises, "LIVE." We're in some dive a few blocks from Ground Zero, and John McNaIIy and Tom Bissell are playing pool on a purple table. The fluorescent balls and their ...
Late Empire
Jul 01, 2005; ... I mean after the lashing. After the welts that the lash gave rise to have healed so beautifully, we forget where they were. Here, we say, pointing vaguely, as toward a bird that could as easily be a sparrow hawk, any other falcon-as if it made no real ...
AGUA
Jul 01, 2005; ... An exclusive excerpt from the new novel by CORMAC McCARTHY Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars. His hat pushed back on his head. Elbows propped on his knees. The ...
House of Cards
Jul 01, 2005; ... I miss you winter evenings With your dim lights. The shut lips of my mother And our held-breaths As we sat at a dining room table. Her long, thin fingers Stacking the cards, Then waiting for them to fall. The sound of boots in the ...
A Life of Fragments
Jul 01, 2005; ... Like a box of old photographs Some of them already ripped in pieces You found on the dump And helped yourself to a few While the wind swept the rest. It was a cold blue autumn evening As you laid them out on the table In the kitchen and ...
The Last of the Gentlemen Heartbreakers
Jul 01, 2005; ... -for C.B. Southern romantic that you always were, what fallacy recalls you better than the pathetic one? If lightning fried a single swampy pine anywhere south of Cincinnati, you were gassing up the bagpipe and drinking to your fallen ...
Vision of the End of the World in the Valdosta Holiday Inn
Jul 01, 2005; ... About the nether world, I -would rather live in Manhattan, Kansas, and belong to the garden club except for Fiona Hubbard and Mrs. John Widman III, who are setting up for a PowerPoint presentation on November's topic: the care and nourishment of cacti in ...
crawl
Jul 01, 2005; ... The smell would not go away. They knew what it was, but there was nothing they could do, and people were coming over. They'd cleaned. They'd disinfected. They'd made many a bleach flambé. Rand had sprayed aerosol disinfectants, and Maddy had yelled at him about toxicity before burning all the ...
Stablehand's Song
Jul 01, 2005; ... Today, in the fields, the season's last cutting: square bales. My German neighbor and his son stand for a moment in the stillness seeing the barn loft where they're going to stack the hay in layers so exact, one across another, horizontal then ...
Scenes From a Documentary History of Mississippi
Jul 01, 2005; ... 1. King Cotton, 1907 From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to form an arch, the great bales of cotton rise up from the ground like a giant swell, a wave of history flooding the town. When Roosevelt ...
Canoeing with Master Williams
Jul 01, 2005; ... Our ancient and approved friend, Roger Williams. -John Thornton The root of a nearby apple tree was growing in his grave after two centuries, some claim, its form a human skeleton's, as though he were the saint of orchardists or founder of some ...
Son's Blessing
Jul 01, 2005; ... My father's father rises from his grave and moves within the night until he stands before his only child. The dead are not received alone, and in my father's gaze, his vision marks the longing of all sons. My father's father turns his hat in ...
A Polar Turn of Mind
Jul 01, 2005; ... Finding Peace and Quiet in the High Canadian Arctic For most North Americans travel means moving sideways or, slightly more exotically, south. The former journey unwires one's circadian rhythm while the latter equinoctially scrambles the night sky. What of going North, then? As it turns ...
The Shadow at Cabourg
Jul 01, 2005; ... 1 Once dusk has dimmed this could be a film studio At the foot of a long parallelepiped bearing the legend Grand hotel an assortment of scenery : children's day-camps, beach bars a patch of parasols their blue-striped petals folded around ...
Humboldt's Gift
Jul 01, 2005; ... Whenever someone asks me to name my favorite novel, I find myself putting on a ridiculous but revealing little performance, pretending to a natural consternation-after all, who can narrow a lifetime's evolving preferences down to a single title?-but in fact using the consternation as a cover for ...
THE WAGON
Jul 01, 2005; ... The dead seek the lowest places in Chicago. We find them in basements, laundry rooms, on floors next to couches, sticking out of parked cars or shrubs next to the sidewalk. It is more than gravity that pulls them down, for in every dead body there is something more willfully downward, ...
Prodigal
Jul 01, 2005; ... Suppose there were no fatted calf. The timing is off: his father dead, his mother too sick and old to celebrate. She stretches a frail hand toward her beloved, but can't remember who he is. His brother's wife is the one she knows, the one who ...
Nocturne
Jul 01, 2005; ... You up-end the mattress, over your shoulders, carry it out under the navy blue sky, drop it on the lawn. On the hilltop, all around us, nebula, Milky Way, Orion's belt close enough to unbuckle, the moon a narrow slit made for ...
The Tortoise and the Hare; Or, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and the Vagaries of Fiction Writing
Jul 01, 2005; ... In 1959, a thirty-one-year-old writer named Cynthia Ozick was hard at work, in her determined tortoise-like way, on an ambitious novel that, seven years later, would be published as Trust; and also in 1959, a young, in-your-face writer named Philip Roth published Goodbye, Columbus, and Five ...
The American Ulysses: Rehabilitating U. S. Grant
Jul 01, 2005; ... The American Ulysses: Rehabilitating U. S. Grant Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero, by Michael Korda. Harper Collins. October 2004. $19.95 Ulysses S. Grant, by Josiah Bunting III. Times Books. September 2004. $20 Ulysses S. Grant's standing in the American pantheon has undergone ...
Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology
Jul 01, 2005; ... CURRENTS EVENTS Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, by Peter Viereck. Transaction, February 2005. $24.95 Peter Viereck may have won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry in 1949, but his most lasting impression may be as an advocate of the culturalist and somewhat ...
The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi'i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi'i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran, by Kamran Scot Aghaie. Washington, January 2005. $24.95 For those concerned with the political currency of religious ritual and symbolism among the Shi'ites of Iran, take heed of Kamran Scot Aghaie's Martyrs of Karbala. In ...
The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History, by Carl R. Lounsbury. Virginia, March 2005. $65 This is a handsome, richly illustrated social history. Lounsbury quite rightly extends the notion of architecture to include not just the physical structure but also the use of ...
No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in American Politics
Jul 01, 2005; ... No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in American Politics, by Frederick J. Blue. LSU, January 2005. $54.95 Blue has written a book that should interest not only the academic but also the general reader who seeks to understand the passions that led to the American Civil War. Focusing on ...
Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany
Jul 01, 2005; ... Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, by Isabel V. Hull. Cornell, January 2005. $45 Military culture-a phrase defined by Isabel Hull as "the unexamined assumptions and institutional habits of the military [that explain] why an army acts the ...
The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism, By Thomas S. Kidd. Yale, January 2005. $40 The Protestant Interest is a genealogy of American Puritanism, and it seeks to answer the question: How did the Puritanism of seventeenth-century New England-which was isolationist, ...
Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy
Jul 01, 2005; ... Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy. Edited by Benedetto Fontana, Gary Nederman and Gary Remer. Penn State, December 2004. $55 First a disclaimer: I'm not a specialist in political theory and had to work my way fairly slowly through many of the essays in ...
Scandal at Bizarre
Jul 01, 2005; ... Scandal at Bizarre, by Cynthia A. Kierner. Patgrave, December 2004. $26.95 When a lovely woman stoops to folly and fails to heed Oliver Goldsmith's suggestion to die, what does become of her? In one eighteenthcentury Virginia case, she goes on to marry a wealthy and prominent New Yorker ...
The Correspondence of William James, Volume 12: April 1908-August 1910
Jul 01, 2005; ... LITERARY STUDIES The Correspondence of William James, Volume 12: April 1908-August 1910, edited by lgnas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Virginia, January 2005. $95 The study of philosophy occupied the last quarter of William James's sixty-eight years. Plagued with illness in ...
John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War
Jul 01, 2005; ... UVA FACULTY BOOKS John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War, by Franny Nudelman, North Carolina, September 2004. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper One of the chief ideological struggles for any nation in war time takes place over the meaning assigned to the dead. Since the ...
On Literature
Jul 01, 2005; ... On Literature, by Umberto Eco. Translated by Martin McLaughlin. Harcourt, December 2004. $26 Umberto Eco remains one of our most provocative writers, and the more you know about the subjects he writes on, the more you glimpse how deeply playful he can be. His only rival in our time would ...
The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, edited by Robin Lane Fox. Yale, December 2004. $45 Robin Fox has performed an important service in focusing the considerations of a dozen leading scholars (including himself) on a wide range of interesting aspects of Xenophon's famous work ....
The Damned
Jul 01, 2005; ... With an ease considerably past what even we'd expected, the brush took fire. The birds unhid themselves, flew abruptly elsewhere, like shame when, from the wrong end of a foundering argument, it at last lets go. Is it risk, for example, if what gets lost goes ...
The Complete History of New Mexico: Stories
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Complete History of New Mexico: Stories by Kevin Mcllvoy. Craywolf, January 2005. $15 This collection of stories is more aptly a novel told in stories, rather than a collection of separate pieces. While all the stories are coherent as individual units, characters and themes weave in ...
Fallen from a Chariot
Jul 01, 2005; ... POETRY Fallen from a Chariot, by Kevin Prufer. Carnegie Mellon, April 2005. $24.95 cloth, $13.95 paper The Sack of Rome might be taking place in Lower Manhattan, and Kevin Prufer applies the fall of that empire to the reader's world. His subject is wreckage, whether of automobiles or ...
Memories of the Future
Jul 01, 2005; ... There are one or two murderers in any crowd. They do not suspect their destinies yet. Wars are started to make it easy for them To kill that woman pushing a baby carriage. The animals in the zoo don't hide their worry. They pace their cages or shy away ...
Campo Santo
Jul 01, 2005; ... Campo Santo, by W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell. Random House, March 2005. $24.95 Although a posthumous collection of previously published essays and reviews, these are not scraps from the master's table. In writing about Kafka, Nabokov, Bruce Chatwin, and postwar German writers ...
Ghost Ship
Jul 01, 2005; ... My soul is a ghost ship Set adrift on the seas of eternity. A battered old wreck Even the rats have abandoned, Its one remaining mast Like a cross on a pauper's grave I hold on to like a drunk, Counting the little white caps As they ...
Drunken Sailor
Jul 01, 2005; ... Drunken Sailor, by John Montague. Wake Forest, January 2005. $11.95 I confess I did not know John Montague's work. I opened Drunken Sailor randomly, to the poem "Clabber: the Poet at Three Years." "'That's clabber! Clutching clabber / sucks caddies down,' said my father harshly / while I ...
Of the Poet's Youth
Jul 01, 2005; ... When the man behind the counter said, "You pay by the orifice," what could we do but purchase them all? Ah, Sandy, you were unquestionably the deluxe model, modish and pert in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days, where you hung in the ...
The Hurtling
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Hurtling, by John Witte. Orchises Press, January 2005. $14.95 With the exception of some notable outliers (the sonnet sequence, or James Kimbrell's or Mary Oliver's idiomatically stair-stepped stanzas), we're unused to seeing a poet with the allegiance John Witte shows his tercet ....
Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World
Jul 01, 2005; ... GENERAL NONFICTION Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World, by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, and Che Guevara. Ocean Press, April 2005. $15.95 This collection of essays provides a good introduction to socialist criticism of modern society. Its ...
Courtship
Jul 01, 2005; ... How much medication human mating requires in the United States, in the twenty-first century, gallons of beer and rum, kilos of hash and marijuana, all to dispel the counsel of parents, and priests, and mirrors, so every Bev and Bill can function as healthy adult ...
An A to Z of a Life
Jul 01, 2005; ... An A to Z of a Life, by Carlos Fuentes. Random House, February 2005. $26.95 This is a lovely, often moving, book, a combination of autobiographical details, philosophical musings, literary criticism, and observations on subjects ranging from God to Wittgenstein, Faulkner to Xenophobia ....
Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy
Jul 01, 2005; ... Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum. Cornell, February 2005. $24.95 What was Fascism's relationship to aesthetics? In many ways, this should be one of the first questions asked in ...
Election 2004: What Happened?
Jul 01, 2005; ... I have no way to prove it statistically, but the 2004 Presidential campaign sounded to me like the most dishonest in memory. Not that American politics has often been a model of truth, and to give 2004 credit, nobody went as far as to accuse Bush or Kerry of being a cannibal-one of the many more ...
The Beast in the Garden
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Beast in the Garden, by David Baron. Norton, January 2005. $14.95 Culture. Habituation. Averse conditioning. Learned behaviors. These are terms of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and behavioralism. These social sciences examine human beings-how they live, how they create social ...
The Secret Wars of Judi Bari
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Secret Wars of Judi Bari by Kate Coleman. Encounter Books, January 2005. $25.95 Judy Bari, it must be recalled, was the Earth First! forestry activist who in 1990 was driving an automobile with a male friend in Oakland, California, near its boundary with neighboring Berkeley, when a ...
WALKING WITH THE DOG TO DOVER
Jul 01, 2005; ... The strongest of all warriors are these two-Time and Patience. -LEO TOLSTOY, WAR AND PEACE The aborigines of New Zealand are called Maoris, a Polynesian people .... Among them, it was supposed that the seat of the soul was the left eye. -LINCOLN LIBRARY OF ESSENTIAL ...
Sprezzatura
Jul 01, 2005; ... A few men in Milton, West Virginia, have it. They go to work in cut-off jeans, tee shirts and sneakers, casual as going to the park for a softball game. Each begins his day by dipping a hollow steel rod into molten glass the color of egg yolk, and ...
Children's Literature
Jul 01, 2005; ... On this page, the stranger stands at the screen door, holding a bunch of tulips wrapped in wet newspaper, the ink a bruise spreading across his thumb and palm. "Take them," he says, "I can't stand the sting of the smeared text. There's no prophesy ...
Anticipate the Coming Reservoir
Jul 01, 2005; ... In my dream, I'm clearing bottom in an upstate county with a pair of oxen yoked to a plow. The off-ox is sickly & gaunt. He struggles with his pride & body to keep up to the task at hand. In my dream, my shoulder strains ...
Miguel Hernández, Madrid, 1934
Jul 01, 2005; ... Before his father turned back from the news to tend the goats' predictable appetites in the stony yard, before the exiled breath hissed from Miguel's teeth in the last of his prisons, before even the first water ached his lungs and the one long needle's ...
The GHOSTS We LOVE
Jul 01, 2005; ... When I was eleven my father died in a tragic inner-tube accident. If he hadn't, then maybe I would not have become what I am-namely, a forty-two-year-old brother betrayer, marriage wrecker, mother killer, second husband, ghost impersonator, amateur historian, and home renter. But I am these ...
Planting Tulips
Jul 01, 2005; ... They bend into each other's stamens, tendrils leaning, sucking and bulging, calyx swaying in blade, lamina, burning under a trusted sun. Cottage Tulips, Single Earlies, Double Earlies, Darwins, Parrots. Plant them in the fall to see their torsos rise in ...
The Scarlet Ibis
Jul 01, 2005; ... I It begins on a tip of the ear in reality or metaphor- it doesn't matter. The matter out of which we're made more determined than any life guide shoved at us by mother or by father. What is this condition? ...
The New Anti-Semitism
Jul 01, 2005; ... The New Anti-Semitism The case for Israel, by Alan M. Dershowitz. Wiley, August 2003. $19.95 The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do about It, by Phyllis Chesler. Jossey-Bass, July 2003. $24.95 Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe, by ...
Kidney Season: a story
Jul 01, 2005; ... In June Kate's daughter Megan came home to Massachusetts from college in a strangely exalted state her mother had never seen before. Her husband advised Kate to remain calm. "Much will be revealed," he said after supper the first night. Walter was a high school guidance counselor. Sometimes his ...
State of the World, 2005
Jul 01, 2005; ... State of the World, 2005, by the Worldwatch Institute, Norton, January 2005. $18.95 The Worldwatch Institute has published an annual State of the World Report since 1984. The 22nd edition issued in 2005 upholds the Worldwatch Institute's reputation for generating readable and ...
Old Wine in New (Medicine) Bottles?
Jul 01, 2005; ... Old Wine in New (Medicine) Bottles? Jefferson's secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, by Andrew Burstein. Basic Books, February 2005. $25 Do we really need another book about Thomas Jefferson? Andrew Burstein apparently thinks so, and to prove his point, he has produced a ...
Stealing God's Thunder, Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America
Jul 01, 2005; ... HISTORY Stealing God's Thunder, Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, by Philip Dray. Random House, August 2005. $25.95 Imagine a time when houses lacked electricity. Easy, break out the candles. Now try to imagine a time when no one knew what electricity was or ...
Fitz Lee: A Military Biography of Major General Fitzhugh Lee, C.S.A.
Jul 01, 2005; ... Fitz Lee: A Military Biography of Major General Fitzhugh Lee, C.S.A., by Edward G. Longacre. DaCapo, December 2004. $30 As a youth, the grandson of Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee and nephew of Robert E. Lee, Fitzhugh Lee, or "Fitz" as he was known throughout his life, was a happy-go-lucky ...
The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800, by Muzaffar Alam. Chicago, January 2005. $25 Muzaffar Alam's latest contribution to the history of medieval South Asia presents a refreshing view of the politics of language in the subcontinent. It also engages the history of political ...
The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733-1748
Jul 01, 2005; ... The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733-1748, edited by Edith B. Celles. Yale, January 2005. $35. This book is to all intents and purposes a reprint of the Letters of the Franks Family, edited by Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer, published in 1968 by the American Jewish Historical ...
Strength and Honor: The Life of Dolley Madison
Jul 01, 2005; ... Strength and Honor: The Life of Dolley Madison, by Richard N. Côté. Corinthian Books, January 2005. $29.95 This biography is a testament to both the assiduous scholarship of the author and the research and archiving accomplishments of the University of Virginia's James Madison Project ....