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And Bear In Mind


Published: March 7, 2004

(Editors' choices of other recent books of particular interest)

THE BRONTË MYTH, by Lucasta Miller. (Knopf, $26.95.) In a book about biography as much as about the Brontës, Miller surveys the mythification of the three brilliant bad-luck sisters on the blasted heath of Yorkshire as a growth industry, a process of romantic adoption and transformation that started while Charlotte, the last to die, was still on the scene.

A QUESTION OF BLOOD, by Ian Rankin. (Little, Brown, $22.95.) Rankin's 14th novel (the first was published in 1987) about Inspector John Rebus adheres fairly closely to the procedural formula, though its author sometimes cites the perceptions of the Rolling Stones. This time around, Rebus himself is in trouble for being seen drinking with a man who turns up the following day as a murder victim.

GRACELAND, by Chris Abani. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Abani's protagonist, Elvis Oke, lives in a slum near Lagos, Nigeria, where the poor pick on the extremely poor, violence is ubiquitous and justice rare. The author was arrested in 1985, when he was 18, in connection with a politically dangerous novel he had written two years earlier.

THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE, by Frank Kermode. (Modern Library, $21.95.) A characteristically lucid study by a critic and scholar whose overview of Tudor politics and English Christianity serves as background to the breathtaking development of English drama from nothing much to the heights of Shakespeare in less than a generation.

THE ANATOMY OF HOPE: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness, by Jerome Groopman. (Random House, $24.95.) Groopman, a physician and a writer for The New Yorker, derives from the surprising, often troubling stories of his patients the proposition that hope itself is a kind of vital organ that needs mindful handling in negotiations between doctor and patient.

TROUBLE IN MIND: Poems, by Lucie Brock-Broido. (Knopf, $23.) The inner landscape of a poet who has seemed to allegorize her own life has become northern, bleak, full of negation; the book appears to circle obsessively about its griefs as the poet's incantations are directed toward death and the diminished self; elegy and epitaph abound.

DOT IN THE UNIVERSE, by Lucy Ellmann. (Bloomsbury, paper, $13.95.) A cheerfully subversive novel whose heroine, Dot, an inconspicuous wifey in an English seaside town, acquires a taste for blood in an accident and takes to wiping folk out, including herself; after a spell in hell, she is reborn to an American family, but retains, for social observation and comment, all her British powers of snideness.

DANCING WITH CUBA: A Memoir of the Revolution, by Alma Guillermoprieto. (Pantheon, $25.) In 1969 the author, then a 20-year-old Merce Cunningham dance student, took a teaching job in Castro's Cuba. She and Cuba did not get on; though she did her best, she found homosexual artists more appealing than Fidelista officials. She grew up to become not a dancer but a splendid reporter, and this book is a sagaciously observed view of her memories.

Photos (Photographs by Mark Alcarez; Neil Libbert)
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