The Virginia Quarterly Review back issues from October 2005:
HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, and the World Sixty Years Later
Oct 01, 2005; ... On August 6, 1945, just before 8:15 A.M., Japan time, fourteen-year-old Akihiro Takahashi and his classmates at Hiroshima Municipal Junior High School were lining up in the schoolyard for morning assembly. High up in the sky, he saw a B-29 approaching. Instinctively, he pointed, and soon all of ...
Shirtless Days: On Living and Writing in the Jungles of Papua
Oct 01, 2005; ... Once upon a time I, Chuang-chou, dreamed that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, enjoying itself. I did not know that I was Chuang-chou. Suddenly I awoke, and veritably was Chuang-chou again. But I do not know whether I was I dreaming that I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly ...
Obedience, or The Lying Tale
Oct 01, 2005; ... I will do everything you tell me, Mother. I will charm three gold hairs from the demon's head. I will choke the mouse that gnaws an apple tree's roots and keep its skin for a glove. To the wolf, I will be pretty and kind, and curtsy his ...
Michelangelo's Seizure
Oct 01, 2005; ... When it happened, finally, on the preparation bridge, where he had stood all morning grinding the pigments, grooming his brush-tips to a fine point so that he could thread Eve's hair like a serpent down her back, his head rocked forward on ...
Dead Enough? The Paradox of Brain Death
Oct 01, 2005; ... An Essay A perfect liver On ice has a nearly radiant sheen, a wet brown anterior so flawless that it reflects light. The broad, curved surfaces meet in sharp juxtaposition at the periphery, creating fine edges that would slice your fingertips if they were made of steel and not ...
Revision
Oct 01, 2005; ... After two weeks under the Italian sun, he would dash off a note to Fanny Brawne: "Weather marvelous. Fully recovered. Come soon and bring summer dresses." And she would come. She would pull his miraculous heart to her breast, and they would listen ...
Late Poem
Oct 01, 2005; ... for Donald Justice (1925-2004) The late evening fog comes quickly in again, pours over the same San Francisco you once loved. Now, the silence is what I notice most here along the Great Highway, the flowers brighter now for lack of simple ...
An End to the Marriage: My Stepmother Buys Twin Beds
Oct 01, 2005; ... How, years later, when I think of those beds And my father's obvious displeasure, Am I to believe she ever took him in her hand, And then into her, Returning her petals to the stem? From here on there's only the nightstand beside him, My dead ...
INA GROVE
Oct 01, 2005; ... INA GROVE The Rockbridge County Gazette, June 28, 1904 PAINTER, THE IRISH CREEK DESPERADO, ARRAIGNED by Reese Prescott -Lexington: After two hours of deliberation, a panel of magistrates today in the circuit court of Rockbridge turned in an indictment in the rape ...
PEACEKEEPER
Oct 01, 2005; ... Spring, 1993: There were more direct routes to the Oddfellows Hall, on a dry knob north of town, but Helen Farraley could not see below the muddy flood waters, couldn't risk wrecking the boat on a tree, or chimney, or telephone pole; who knew what was just below the surface? The streets of town ...
On the Necessity of Negative Capability
Oct 01, 2005; ... In the winter of 1945, New Yorker managing editor William Shawn pitched an idea to staff writer John Hersey: an in-depth, on-the-ground description of Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb was dropped. Shawn wanted the article in time for the first anniversary. In May, Hersey traveled to Japan ...
Apologia pro Vita Sua
Oct 01, 2005; ... i. In the iced depths of Suffolk's one thatched church, the gilt saints swaggered off to jury duty they'd packed the stable loft, the beetled woodpile, masked like raccoons in paint. Only the stare of crucifixion saved them from the pyre. Daughter, ...
Lovers' Conversation
Oct 01, 2005; ... Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), "Colloque sentimental" Just now, under branches furred with ice, two figures passed. Almost nothing stirred. Their eyes: vacant. Their lips: soft, blurred. It could hardly be heard, what they were saying. Old branches ...
Water for Sale
Oct 01, 2005; ... CURRENT EVENTS Water for Sale, by Fredrik Segerfeldt. Cato Institute, June 2005. $12.95 The Cato Institute can be depended upon to publish work which genuflects before the market, abhors government regulation, and searches for situations in which the miracles of privatization can be ...
Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice, and Cheese
Oct 01, 2005; ... Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice, and Cheese, by Denis Boyles. Encounter Books, March 2005. $23.95 Depending on one's politics, France-bashing is-for an American-either outright fun or a suppressed urge; for only a minority is it disturbing on principle. For Denis Boyles, it's ...
The Romanian Revolution of December 1989
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Romanian Revolution of December 1989, by Peter Siani-Davies. Cornell, April 2005. $45 Among the Communist governments in eastern Europe that collapsed, nowhere was the overthrow as violent and bloody as in the Romanian revolution of 1989, which cost more than 1,000 lives ....
Retreat from Gettysburg
Oct 01, 2005; ... Retreat from Gettysburg, by Kent Masterson Brown. North Carolina, April 2005. $34.95 For those who are interested in the battle of Gettysburg and its repercussions, Brown provides a well-researched account of Lee's withdrawal. His access to the official military records allows him to ...
AFTER THE FALL
Oct 01, 2005; ... MORGAN-2:30 A.M., APRIL 25, 2005, HO CHI MINH CITY (NÉE SAIGON), THI MINH KHAI STREET Certain parts of late-night Saigon have a windy quiet that seems almost pastoral. Maybe it's the closeness of the city, the fortress-like squatness of its blocks, the numerous trees, or the way that the ...
A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin
Oct 01, 2005; ... A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, by Judith Flanders. Norton, March 2005. $27.95 There was, in Victorian England, an itinerant Methodist preacher named George MacDonald, a good if unremarkable man leading what would just pass, ...
Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World
Oct 01, 2005; ... Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet. Pennsylvania, March 2005. $24.95 By assembling this collection of essays by a number of distinguished scholars in history and literature, the editors have ...
The Exile's Tale
Oct 01, 2005; ... The country I come from is far to the north: our wedding dresses are lined with wolfs fur and the stars are fixed. We share the dwellings of white bears, who never wake from their winter sleep, whose dreams, in the religion of my land, comprise the human ...
Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice
Oct 01, 2005; ... LITERARY STUDIES Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice, by James Scully, with a foreword by Adrienne Rich. Curbstone, August 2005. $14.95 The difference between political and nonpolitical writing, Terry Eagleton wrote, "is just the difference between the prime minister and the monarch: ...
Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don't Publish
Oct 01, 2005; ... Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don't Publish, by Myles Weber. Georgia, April 2005. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper Silence is fascinating. It is also something we little expect from those we call authors. Myles Weber wants to change all that. In this fresh and exciting study, he ...
The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius, by Dino Franco Felluga. SUNY, January 2005. $65 Dino Felluga works up a complex mixture of theory and history to explore the writing and reception of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, far and away the two ...
The Company Car
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Company Car, by C. J. Hribal. Random House, May 2005. $24.95 This rewarding story of a 1950s Catholic family caught up in the desperation of a Chicago suburb and the isolation of a Wisconsin farm captures just the right balance of harmless naïveté and anxious provincialism. Hribal's ...
UNFINISHED: On Vincent Desiderio's Sleep
Oct 01, 2005; ... HE WAS HAVING A TERRIBLE TIME GIVING THE THING UP. The painting-a stunningly ambitious tableau, eight feet high, fully twenty-four feet long, and portraying twelve mostly naked figures, as visioned from above, arrayed, recumbent, one beside the next, knotted up in sheets and tossed by ...
Collected Stories
Oct 01, 2005; ... Collected Stories, by Carol Shields. Fourth Estate, February 2005. $29.95 This satisfying volume gathers together fifty-six short stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Carol Shields (1935-2003). In addition to reprinting the contents of her three published story ...
Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction
Oct 01, 2005; ... Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction, edited by Massimo Riva. Yale, February 2005. $30 A first thing to note about this accessible anthology of translations gathered and edited by Massimo Riva is that it has been put together according to the guiding principle of ...
Ledger
Oct 01, 2005; ... Ledger, by Susan Wheeler. Iowa, April 2005. $14 A ledger keeps a record of what's owed and what's gained. In the first poem, Wheeler offers a generative moment, when "a dream began to grow in me. / Or despair, and so I chose the dream," and after waking, "beside me, pinned to a green ...
180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day
Oct 01, 2005; ... POETRY 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins. Random House, April 2005. $14-95 This collection, selected and introduced by former Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins, brims with wit, honesty, insight, and intelligence. It follows Collins's 2003 ...
Cold Pastoral
Oct 01, 2005; ... Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 1 Sometime around four in the afternoon, Friday, February 23,1821, Severn, now part-time painter, full-time nurse, lifted Keats once again from what seemed like drowning. The mild Roman winter had ...
Refusing Heaven
Oct 01, 2005; ... Refusing Heaven, by Jack Gilbert. Knopf, March 2005. $25 After winning the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1962 for Views of Jeopardy, Gilbert published only at great intervals: Monolithos in 1982, The Great Fires in 1994, and now Refusing Heaven. Though years have passed, Gilbert's style ...
Rope Bridge
Oct 01, 2005; ... Rope Bridge, by Nan Cohen. Cherry Grove Collections, March 2005. $17 Though this is her first book, Nan Cohen's poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and have won her various honors, including, most recently, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. In this collection, ...
Red Again
Oct 01, 2005; ... Brush fires burn below in the valley and we talk of the hands in my friend's garden ceramic palms that rise through the lilies as if someone were alive in the dirt. Hands this open and calmed, should the loss of a daughter be turned loose in this rainless ...
Nerve Endings: The Discovery of the Synapse
Oct 01, 2005; ... Nerve Endings: The Discovery of the Synapse, by Richard Rapport, M.D. Norton, May 2005. $23.95 In Nerve Endings, neurosurgeon Richard Rapport delivers a brief yet enchanting account of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Camillo Golgi, two scientific luminaries whose neuroanatomical studies at ...
Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition
Oct 01, 2005; ... Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition, by Hendrik Spruyt. Cornell, May 2005. $55 cloth, $22.50 paper Second only to the Cold War, the most significant-and certainly the most contested and painful-geopolitical development of the past sixty years has been the ...
Jane Doe
Oct 01, 2005; ... The day they drag the river to come up with a girl will be a long one whatever silt-covered ghost they'll raise, tangled in grasses and bulrush will be the day you decide to forget all about the night travel of such broken women, the odd nomad, ...
SMOTHER
Oct 01, 2005; ... Only a doll, Alva! Like you. That's what they told her. Their voices were a single voice. She was very young then. It had to be 1974 because she was in second grade at Buhr Elementary School, which was the faded-red-brick building set back from the busy street; she has forgotten ...
The Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood, by Michelle Herman. Nebraska, March 2005. $25 The Middle of Everything is a poignant, provocative, and painful book about one of life's biggest issues-being a wonderful mother. Michelle Herman, a fiction writer, brings her storyteller's ...
The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, by Maurie D. McInnis. North Carolina, June 2005. $39.95 Charleston is every tourist's dream city-quaint, genteel, lovely to look at and wander around in, and charming. It has been that way for more than a century (just after the Civil War ...
Cleaning Out the Gutters
Oct 01, 2005; ... Even starlight needs work. I hire out, a little light, a little warmth, a few odd jobs. But who wants to hoist the wooden ladder against the clapboard siding to clean the copper gutters? They apron her house at the eaves above like an inner ring of ...
The Nights in June
Oct 01, 2005; ... Victor Hugo (1802-1885), "Nuits de juin" (1840) In summer, near the far end of the day, wildflowers covering the plain spray -outward and up, into the distances an intoxicating light perfume. In a trance, both eyes closed, your ears just ...
The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, edited by David Gies. Cambridge, January 2005. $160 With the recent publication of The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, we have now the most comprehensive study to date on the origins, development, and most recent aspects of literature ...
I Learned It All the Hard Way
Oct 01, 2005; ... Everything I learned in Grad School, Howard Tate Taught Me I first heard Howard Tate back in 1995. These were the happy Clinton years. The mean kids hadn't taken over the playground yet. We were all a little dizzy on peace. I was living in the suburbs of the South, Greensboro to be ...
The Most Contemptible Moth: Lowell in Letters
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Most Contemptible Moth: Lowell in Letters The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 2005. $40 In the spring of 1936, Ezra Pound received a letter of introduction from a young poet. I am 19, a freshman at Harvard, and some ...
The Faith of the American Soldier
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Faith of the American Soldier, by Stephen Mansfield. Tarcher, May 2005. $19.99 No one will accuse Mansfield of writing an unnecessarily difficult book. By the same token, few people will praise Mansfield for writing a difficult book. We Americans are still a nation at war, and this ...
The Thames
Oct 01, 2005; ... HISTORY The Thames, by Jonathan Schneer. Yale, May 2005. $35 The author, a professor of modern British history who clearly enjoys both social and cultural history (if in fact they are separate phenomena), has written a book that will greatly please Anglophiles in particular. Locating the ...
Medieval Religion: New Approaches
Oct 01, 2005; ... Medieval Religion: New Approaches, edited by Constance Hoffman Berman. Routledge, April 2005. $34.95 This work on medieval church history is part of the Rewriting Histories series, which focuses on the new findings on historical themes that have come out in the last twenty years or so ....
Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy: Founding West Point
Oct 01, 2005; ... Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy: Founding West Point, edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. Virginia, March 2005. $35 The least often cited of Jefferson's noteworthy accomplishments is his founding and supporting the development of the United States Military Academy at West Point. When ...
The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1890-1900
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1890-1900, by Richard Thomson. Yale, March 2005. $60 Thomson, professor of fine art at the University of Edinburgh, has written an excellent book about a fascinating decade in modern history. His subject is the ...
Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West
Oct 01, 2005; ... Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West, by Craig Thompson Friend. Tennessee, March 2005. $42 Compared with other major thoroughfares of the early republic, the Maysville Road has received very little attention from scholars. But, as Friend ...
The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy, by Robert Baker. Notre Dame, July 2005. $65 cloth, $30 paper The Extravagant is a fascinating and ambitious study of the interplay between philosophy and poetry in the modern period. Plato famously banished poets from his ...
Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents
Oct 01, 2005; ... Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, by Elaine Showalter. Pennsylvania, February 2005. $24.95 Elaine Showalter delights in revealing that she has been portrayed in academic fiction twice: "once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, ...
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Oct 01, 2005; ... FICTION Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See. Random House, July 2005. $21.95 Written with the delicate precision of an ivory quill on rice paper, Lisa See's latest work, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, chronicles the friendship of two women physically and emotionally bound to ...
Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe
Oct 01, 2005; ... Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, by Doreen Baingana. Massachusetts, February 2005. $24.95 In the visually and emotionally rich Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, Baingana traces the lives of three Ugandan sisters from preadolescence to adulthood, following them as they shift ...
A Perfect Stranger
Oct 01, 2005; ... A Perfect Stranger, by Roxana Robinson. Random House, April 2005. $23.95 Here is a remarkably thoughtful collection of short stories that touch, however subtly, on the modern feminine experience in America. These thirteen narratives-concise, fluid, and stimulating-are each graced with a ...
No Country for Old Men
Oct 01, 2005; ... No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, July 2005. $24.95 When Ancient American History is taught in the Classics Departments of the future (a blip in the rear view of bigger and better empires), will Cormac McCarthy be read at all? Why not? If any writer knew that the end was ...
School of the Arts
Oct 01, 2005; ... School of the Arts, by Mark Doty. HarperCollins, April 2005. $22.95 Doty's seventh collection grounds subtle meditations on time and death in the quotidian-humans and dogs, nightclubs and airplanes, a dismantled church spire, a cottage painting at a Cape Cod street fair. More haunted by ...
Bosh and Flapdoodle
Oct 01, 2005; ... Bosh and Flapdoodle, by A. R. Ammons. Norton, March 2005. $22.95 A. R. Ammons died in February 2001 at the age of seventy-five, a member of the extraordinary generation of American poets born in the 1920s. Written during the end of 1996, this is Ammons's twenty-fifth book of poems and ...
Olympic Wandering
Oct 01, 2005; ... GENERAL NONFICTION Olympic Wandering, by David Lundberg. Zante, July 2005. $19.95 David Lundberg describes Olympic Wandering as "time travel through Greece" and uses a concatenation of stories about Ulysses to explain Greek character, both ancient and modern. Lundberg chose Ulysses to ...
Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
Oct 01, 2005; ... Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection, by Sherman A. Jackson. Oxford, May 2005. $29.95 Destined to become a fixture in any course dealing with Islam in America, Jackson's treatment of the subject offers many helpful insights while giving a voice to ...
Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oct 01, 2005; ... Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Lynda Mugglestone. Yale, May 2005. $30 The Oxford English Dictionary, known the world over as the OED, is now almost a kind of cultural archetype, signifying scholarly authority, breadth, and depth. In Lynda ...
What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History
Oct 01, 2005; ... UVA FACULTY BOOKS What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History, by Edward L. Ayers. Norton, June 2005. $24.95 Ayers, the dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, has rightly earned a reputation as a first-rate ...
Realist Vision
Oct 01, 2005; ... Realist Vision, by Peter Brooks. Yale, May 2005. $27 You think you know what's "real." Well, think again. With Brooks as your guide, that rethinking will produce a new way of approaching the depiction of reality in European literature and painting. Focusing on paradigmatic examples from ...
The Path of Muhammad: A Book on Islamic Morals and Ethics
Oct 01, 2005; ... The Path of Muhammad: A Book on Islamic Morals and Ethics, by Imam Birgivi, interpreted by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti. World Wisdom Books, March 2005. $21.95 This influential text, written by a 16th-century Turkish mystic, has appeal for a wide-ranging audience: ethicists, ...