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 Heads by Harry: A Novel
by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Hawaii has found a bard of sorts, the novelist Lois-Ann Yamanaka, but the world she sings of is anything but a paradise. In a series of remarkable narratives she describes with disturbing realism and peppery black humor the hard life of the islands' Asian-immigrant underclass. Her Hawaii is green but cruel, and the "work-day world" grinds her characters down with squalor and violence. In her previous books Yamanaka revealed in sometimes sensationalistic ways the racism that divides the islands' inhabitants; in her new novel, Heads by Harry, she explores the outer frontiers of sexual politics and the complex power struggles of a modern island family... |
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 Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil
by Ronald Rosenbaum
Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler is a picaresque excursion through the landscape of theories about Hitler's criminality and especially his hatred of Jews. A journalist and novelist by profession, Rosenbaum adapts the strategies of both disciplines to assess the findings of those who have committed themselves to one or another side of the debate about Hitler's rationale for the "Final Solution." He roams the intellectual countryside in pursuit of Hitler's authentic identity, meeting along the way a cast of characters including historians, theologians, psychologists, filmmakers, critics, and some cranks, all of whom have different ideas about the nature and origin of the evil -- if it was conscious evil -- that led to the destruction of European Jewry... |
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 Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery
by Sander L. Gilman
Gilman calls happiness "the central goal of aesthetic surgery" ("aesthetic" with an ae because, he explains, that's the way it is most often spelled by the surgeons themselves, who confer on their work "a classical lineage" by harking back to ancient Greece). Face-lifts, nose jobs, liposuction, decircumcision, buttocks implants, breast augmentation, and breast reduction, among other procedures, present themselves, Gilman drily notes, as surgical cures for what is often essentially a psychological problem -- a persistent sense of discontent.... |
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