Word: victorianism
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...night it snowed in the Green Mountains, coming down so densely in places that vision ceased just in front of the head lamps on the car, an engineer with General Motors, a troubleshooter in the Chevrolet division, stopped off for the evening in one of those wonderful old Victorian inns in Vermont. The innkeeper was bearded, avuncular, inquisitive, fleshy, and given now and again to alcohol and nicotine. His wife sometimes fretted that he might be a heart in search of an attack. There was a cheery blaze in the fireplace...
...Life and Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee ∙The Penitent, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙Pitch Dark, Renata Adler ∙Rates of Exchange, Malcolm Bradbury ∙5hame, Salman Rushdie NONFICTION: The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin ∙The Oxford Book of Dreams, edited by Stephen Brook Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, Phyllis Rose ∙The Rosenberg File, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton ∙Siegfried Sassoon's Long Journey, edited by Paul Fussell The Spiritualists, Ruth Brandon
...Christine, who has the body of a '58 Plymouth Fury but the mind of a Victorian murderess. At birth, on the Chrysler assembly line, she mysteriously killed a mechanic who dared to drop cigar ash on her upholstery. (Alfred Hitchcock once tried, unsuccessfully, to work a scene like this into a movie; now the trick has been solved.) Two decades later, Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), nerd of high school nerds, owns Christine-and is possessed by her. In a trice this four-eyed Faust is transformed into a cool dude with clear skin, wrap-around shades, slick black hair...
...Spiritualists, British Journalist Ruth Brandon takes a narrow-eyed view of an obsession that haunted 19th and early 20th century life. As she cannily observes, Darwin's legacy of doubt had weakened the moral underpinnings of Victorian and American society. But it had merely replaced religious faith with another dogma: the authority of Science. New believers turned to evidence of the world beyond the senses, "proof given by mediums who could communicate with the dead, make ectoplasm appear in darkened chambers and order inanimate objects to move at will. Katherine and Margaretta Fox of Arcadia, N.Y., were the superstars...
Such exposures eventually cooled the public passion for made-to-order miracles. But, as the author acutely notes, it will not do to dismiss the Victorian period as a simpler time, when the naive were easily swayed by con men and shadowy ladies. Today every paperback emporium offers tiers of books claiming intimate acquaintance with the text of the future and the leaders of the past. Thanatologist Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross tells followers she speaks with the dead. A new edition of the prophecies of Nostradamus, "receded by computer" to give the requisite scientific gloss, has recently sold more than...