Monday, May 12th   Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Displaced Passions A Review by Sarah Kerr Jhumpa Lahiri is, and is not, an old-fashioned writer. She is too natural to be anyone's imitator. Yet the kind of relationship she invites readers into can feel familiar from some of the books we were drawn into long ago, when we were first learning about the good company reading can provide. Among the pleasingly varied, carefully sequenced notes struck in Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Lahiri's first collection of stories, there are a couple of almost mythical-feeling character studies, painful in content but comic in execution, of unlucky Calcutta women and their watchful neighbors. A scene at an ancient temple casts judgment on a heedlessly selfish young Indian-American mother revisiting the old country. There are trysts and marriages: the flaming and fizzling of a Boston public radio worker's affair with an unavailable Indian husband, a young couple undone by a stillbirth, a Hartford housewarming thrown by mismatched newlyweds, one stodgy and the other chic and carefree. The...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books

The Lolita Effect: Why the Media Sexualize Young Girls and What You Can Do about It by M. Gigi, Ph.d. Durham More than a Little Naughty A Review by Brenda R. Weber The Lolita Effect makes alarmingly clear that Lolita, the flirty, 12-year-old protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, has grown into cultural shorthand for a "prematurely, even inappropriately sexual, little girl." M. Gigi Durham argues that the media oversexualizes girls and supports her case with an accounting of a range of products advertised for them, such as the Little Miss Naughty push-up bras for preteens and Peekaboo Pole Dancing kits for children. These products, as well as television, music, magazines and print ads, conspire to turn young girls into what Durham terms "prosti-...   Read the entire review More reviews from Ms. Magazine				Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman Fun Physics for Literary People A Review by Doug Brown Perelman was a Russian author who wrote a classic two-volume set of books called Physics for Entertainment in the 1930s, introducing physics concepts to the chelovek on the street. As volume one of the set was unavailable, this translation is only of volume two. However, the volumes were clearly meant to stand alone; there is no disorienting impression of coming in midway through the semester. The title of this book may sound like an oxymoron to many readers, but it really is a fun volume filled with everyday simple experiments and observations. A common theme through the book could be...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com
The Outlander by Gil Adamson Into the Wild A Review by Ron Charles Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page: Men with hounds are chasing a young woman through the woods at night. Nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton has murdered her husband and now, still wearing a black mourning dress made from curtains, she's running from her brothers-in-law, massive, red-headed twins with rifles across their backs. Welcome to The Outlander, an absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. Of course, the Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature, a staple...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World				Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea by Richard Kluger The Old Frontiers A Review by Alan Taylor In 1893, more than twelve million Americans traveled to Chicago to attend a national exposition celebrating the quadricentennial of Columbus's voyage of American discovery. "The World's Columbian Exposition" summoned Americans to celebrate the astonishing rapidity of their own ascent to continental dominance and international power. Barely one hundred years old, the United States had spread westward across North America to become one of the great powers on the earth, a nation capable of exerting influence and might throughout the Americas and across the Pacific to Asia. That expansion and...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online
The Region of Lost Names by Fred Arroyo Not Just a Love Story A Review by Rigoberto González The Region of Lost Names by debut novelist Fred Arroyo tells the touching tale of Ernest and Magdalene, star-crossed lovers separated by conflicts that predate their families' migration from Puerto Rico. College-educated and building careers in the Midwest, the two discover that they are not immune to repeating their parents' mistakes -- though, unlike their elders, they hope to earn forgiveness for the errors of their ways. Ernest grows up in an agricultural town in Michigan, where his manhood is shaped by the burdens of hard labor and by his cruel co-workers, including Changó, his...   Read the entire review More reviews from National Book Critics Circle				Life on the Mississippi (Modern Library Classics) by Mark Twain Life on the Mississippi: A Review [Ed. note: This review was published in the Atlantic Monthly, September 1883.] Of the first fifteen chapters of Mr. Clemens's book, twelve are reprinted from The Atlantic; but they are so full of entertaining and instructive matter that they will repay a second reading. In the three introductory ones which precede these, the physical character of the river is sketched, and brief reference is made to the early travelers and explorers of the stream, -- De Soto, Marquette, and La Salle; these latter belonging to the epoch of what Mr. Clemens quaintly calls "historical history," as...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly