Word: simonal
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Europe's benchmark bloodsucker is generally considered to be Vlad the Impaler, an inspiration for Dracula. Andrei Codrescu's novel The Blood Countess (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23) offers an equally unattractive alternative: Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian tyrant alleged to have killed 650 girls in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth and beauty. Though never tried for mass murder, Bathory is said to have been confined to a room of her castle, where after five years she died...
There's much to like in Ursula Hegi's forcefully written novel (Simon & Schuster; 235 pages; $22) of child abuse and parental desertion. The author's strengths -- an unfailing immediacy of language and real, vivid scenes that command attention -- are all on display. But the book's structure, saysTIME's John Skow, "might have been designed by a committee to illustrate how bitter, unresolved childhood memories can be coped with." What we're left with is a plot straight out of a bad soap opera, and even a writer as gifted as Hegi can't dress it up as anything...
...same time that the Bunker Hill was aflame, Lieut. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the American forces fighting to capture Okinawa, was undertaking a new offensive to seize control of the island. The Americans knew the tiny speck in the Pacific was the ultimate stepping-stone to the empire's home islands. Throughout the 83-day struggle for Okinawa, Buckner's favorite toast, over bourbon and water, was "May you walk in the ashes of Tokyo." Aware of this objective, his enemy, Lieut. General Mitsuru Ushijima, prepared a war of attrition to keep Okinawa from becoming a staging ground...
TIME's R.Z. Sheppard says that if novelist and sometime National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu continues with the kinks and Gothic whoopee of his new book (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23), he could become as rich as Anne Rice. The only thing that may hold him back is his attempt to thicken his plot with serious themes. The story centers on Elizabeth Bathory, a real life 16th century Hungarian tyrant alleged to have killed 650 girls in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth and beauty. Codrescu pleats the 16th and 20th centuries together address...
directed by Simon Wincer...