Things Noted Here & There
Louisa Thomas,"Their Love is Alive," Newsweek, 4 September, looks again at Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's authorship of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.
James M. McPherson,"Lincoln Off His Pedestal," NYRB, 24 September, reviews Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Catherine Clinton's Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, and Ronald C. White, Jr.'s A. Lincoln: A Biography.
Nicholas Shakespeare reviews Selina Hastings' The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham for the Telegraph 5 September.
Judith Thurman,"Missing Woman," New Yorker, 14 September, reviews Ric Gillespie's Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance.
Garry Wills,"Conservatives: The Tanenhaus Taxonomy," NYRB, 24 September, reviews Sam Tanenhaus's The Death of Conservatism.
Lorrie Moore,"The Brazilian Sphinx," NYRB, 24 September, reviews Benjamin Moser's Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.
Christine Stansell,"The Aftermath and After," TNR, 5 September, reviews Lee Ann Fujii's Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, Jean Hatzfeld's The Antelope's Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide, Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster*, and After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post- Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond, edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman.
*Solnit's book is getting widespread attention in the press. See also these recent interviews with her: Stuart Jeffries,"Anarchy with a smile," Guardian, 31 May 2005; Peter Terzian,"Room to Roam," CJR, July/August 2007; and Benjamin Cohen,"Rebecca Solnit," The Believer, September.