Word: book
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shelf Discovery is a dizzyingly crowded, joyful hodgepodge of book reports, 65 of them written by Skurnick, eight contributed by other writers. There are loving - and less reverent - remembrances of books by Judy Blume, Lois Duncan, Madeleine L'Engle, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Katherine Paterson, among many others, all illustrated with the original (or era-correct) cover art. This is potent nostalgia for girlhoods past; the strawberry scent of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers practically wafts off the pages. (Read "Why Girls Have BFFs and Boys Hang Out in Packs...
...Skurnick's goals is to encourage glorious detours, she succeeds; just a few chapters in, I paused to reworship A Wrinkle in Time. Her enthusiasm can hardly be contained. "It's taking all my strength to not type the book for you in its entirety," she writes of Little House in the Big Woods. Only occasionally does a former treasure disappoint; on revisiting Go Ask Alice, Skurnick dismisses it as "TRULY THE WORST-WRITTEN BOOK IN THE WORLD...
...reading them in book form, one longs for more intellectual heft - Skurnick is certainly capable of it - and fewer of the cheery colloquialisms that were apparently needed to hold the fleeting attention of the average Web surfer. Many essays feel too slim and too eager to please rather than provoke. And as intimate as its tone is, this "reading memoir" lacks a broader sense of Skurnick herself. A tougher editor would have sharpened Skurnick's focus, and it would have paid off. When she introduces you to, say, Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, with its depiction of sisterly jealousy...
This anecdote appears in The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon; 576 pages), which is the most flat-out fascinating book so far this year. You wouldn't get that from its title, which sounds like a tender coming-of-age novel, nor from its subtitle - How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - which sounds like a course you napped through in college. But Holmes' account of experimental science at the end of the 1700s - when amateurs could still make major discoveries, when one new data point could overthrow a worldview - is beyond riveting. Science...
...book is organized as a series of linked biographical sketches. One of them is of Humphry Davy, a cocky little guy who was born in Cornwall, England, in 1778. He was an apothecary's apprentice who practically frothed with genius and ambition. Over the course of his career, he postulated the carbon cycle, used electricity to isolate sodium and potassium and saved countless lives by inventing a safety lamp for coal miners. He also studied the health benefits of nitrous oxide - laughing gas. Oh, to be a fly on the wall while Davy huffed 18th century whippits with Robert Southey...