Book Review Round-Up

In the last collection of my reviews, I bemoaned the fact that all the non-fiction I’d read in the previous year had been soapy tell-all celebrity bios. I’ve certainly turned around that unfortunate trend in the last six months. A biography of Wilkie Collins, who isn’t so much a celebrity as Charles Dickens’ also-ran, just doesn’t count.

The best page-turner of this lot was The Museum of Extraordinary Things. The best re-reads were Brat Farrar and Bab: A Sub-Deb (of course). My nomination for most dreadful book of the year, so far, is Havisham; my most disappointing re-reads were Thank You, Jeeves and And the Band Played On.

Thank You, Jeeves
by P. G. Wodehouse
3 of 5 stars

Taken as a whole, the majority of Wodehouse's Jeeves stories and novels—delightful and genuinely funny as they are—are an indistinguishable stew of cow creamers, ukelele-playing, Bertie Wooster's aunts, mistaken identities, uncooperative cats, and country home farce. To the modern reader, Thank You, Jeeves, however, has the misfortune to be the book in which Wodehouse relies heavily on racist tropes in order to pull off his usual high-concept humor.

Jeeves fans contemporary to the book's publication no doubt didn't bat an eyelash at Bertie Wooster's liberal employment of a certain racial epithet that today's readers consider provocative and even taboo. The fact that Bertie spends two-thirds of the novel in blackface chased by police certainly advances the plot, from Wodehouse's perspective, but again to modern readers more sensitive to these issues, it's unsettling to witness the racist assumptions of another era played out on the comedic stage.

Wodehouse's intentions aren't to blame here, and his wit and comedic style are intact as ever. As a document of the period in which it was written, however, Thank You, Jeeves is enough to make even the author's diehard fans wince and distance themselves from this volume.

I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Forger
by Frank Wynne
4 of 5 stars

Wynne's fast-moving account of Han van Meegeren, the Dutch forger who made a fortune forging Vermeer paintings, is paced like a thriller and steeped in art world lore. Despite the book's briskness, Wynne manages to address a good many questions about the nature of art itself, the 'reality' of its authorship, and the emotional ways in which its owners and admirers become attached. The book could've done with a few plates of the works in question, but that omission doesn't detract from a fun, interesting read.

Havisham
by Ronald Frame
2 of 5 stars

There's a point, early on in Ronald Frame's alternate literary take on Miss Havisham, at which I thought he was going to go the whole Sarah Waters route, complete with lesbian passion and Victorian intrigue in a Grand Guignol setting.

A pity he didn't. All that's left is an unconvincing tale told in bland snippets of dialogue and juvenile rumination better suited to notes passed in a sophomore's algebra class. Never before have I been so close to cheering whenever Miss Havisham got too near the fireplace.

The Invisible Woman
by Claire Tomalin
5 of 5 stars

What's astonishing about Nelly Ternan—daughter of Victorian thespians and a would-be actor herself—is how throughly her contemporaries erased any trace of her from the historical record during the nearly two decades she was mistress to famed author Charles Dickens. In the name of protecting her reputation, Dickens and the Ternans made the young woman virtually invisible to history. The affair was well-known to contemporaries, however; Dickens burned as much correspondence mentioning her as possible, and begged his friends and family to do the same. Even those few records that escaped the purge often refer to the woman only in code, or initials. The pseudonyms Dickens employed to hire houses for his love reveal the lengths to which he was willing to go in order to shield her from the world.

Reconstructing the affair is a challenge for Tomalin in The Invisible Woman, as so much of the documentation a thorough biography requires has been lost or destroyed. Still, working from what traces are left and by filling in with ample historical context, she manages to create a portrait of the woman who caused Dickens famously to separate from his wife. However vivid and convincing a portrayal she manages, it's still shrouded in mystery; Tomalin confesses quite frankly that parts of her narrative are speculation. Her extrapolations are convincingly documented, however, and the biography itself moves along at a swift pace. For lovers of literature—and of literary scandal—The Invisible Woman is a must-read.

Death of a Schoolgirl (The Jane Eyre Chronicles, #1)
by Joanna Campbell Slan
3 of 5 stars

As a general rule I have a soft spot for the literary pastiche, particularly of nineteenth-century novels. When they're done well—Joan Aiken's sequels to Jane Austen come to mind—they not only serve to stimulate memories of why I find the originals so delightful, but to renew my delight in them and in their characters in unexpected and novel ways.

I can't declare that Slan's Death of a Schoolgirl, a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, is an altogether unsuccessful pastiche. The highly-readable first few chapters are a convincing approximation of Brontë's style that propel newly-married Jane Rochester toward her promised new career as an amateur detective at a brisk and satisfying pace. When Jane stumbles upon a murder at the finishing school where Mr. Rochester's ward, Adele, has been lodged, however, the book's Jane becomes a different creature from its inspiration. Brontë's Jane Eyre is poised, staunch in the face of adversity, emotional yet determined, and possesses a loquacity born of her vast appetite for reading. Slan's Jane Rochester is a gin-tippling gossip who performs actual spit-takes, allows herself to be mowed over by lesser tyrants than she encountered in her abusive girlhood, is wishy-washy to the point of endangering Adele by not whisking her back home, and who abandons her command of the English language by recording for posterity such sentences as "Oof!"

Her hallucinatory visions of a long-dead Helen from Lowood make me suspect she might do well to step away from that gin bottle, too.

If Jane Rochester were a gifted detective, I might forgive some of the shortcomings in the facsimile. She's no great shakes in that department either, however. Reader, a gentle hint: if your Jane Rochester recognizes early in a book that the cane marks on the backs of several schoolgirls could be the decisive lead in a murder investigation, perhaps she might—you know—actually ask one of the girls about them before, oh, thirty pages before the book's end.

What's left is Brontë Lite. It's more readable and fun than P. D. James' dreadful Death Comes to Pemberley, in which Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy snooze their way through a Regency-era murder. It's more authentic in reproducing the prose of its inspiration than is Ronald Frame's Havisham, by a long shot. Taken as a lark, it's silly good fun. But the one thing that Charlotte Brontë's Jane never, ever was, is silly.

The Days of Anna Madrigal (Tales of the City, #9)
by Armistead Maupin
5 of 5 stars

Like a whistled melody fading on autumn wind, this last of the Tales of the City series is sweet and elegiac. While its plotlines are neither as many nor as multi-stranded as earlier series entries, what remains is a celebratory ending for many of Maupin's beloved characters as they face their own mortality, seek redemption, and come to terms with their own shortcomings. There's a lovely glow to this last volume; it's as touching as anything the author has ever written.

From Scratch: Inside the Food Network
by Allen Salkin
4 of 5 stars

I'll confess straight up that although I used to enjoy the Food Network's programming a decade ago, when its programs specialized in interesting and engaging talk about food and its preparation, I rarely give the network a view now that gimmicky game show competitions rule its airwaves. In From Scratch, Allen Salkin takes a broad look at the bumpy ride the network has taken over the years since its premiere in 1993. He especially concentrates upon the paradigm shifts that have shifted the network from its instructional roots to a type of lowest-common-denominator programming in which "it was not the network's job to teach or to have a conscience or a memory or to always put something beautiful on the plate . . . the network's prime directive was to sell as many Ginsu knives, boxes of detergent, Corollas, and breath mints as it could for paying advertisers."

The network's lack of both conscience and memory appears throughout its history, as through multiple changes of ownership and direction its talent regularly got the shaft. When Jennifer Paterson of the immensely popular import Two Fat Ladies passed away, the funeral hadn't even been held before Food Network execs were making trans-Atlantic calls to the production company, blunting asking if they simply couldn't find another fat lady to replace the dead one. Chefs responsible for the network's early popularity had their shows canceled for cheaper, louder, less experienced personalities. Longterm stalwarts on the air for over a decade, such as Sara Moulton, found themselves fired without as much as a meeting or telephone call from the network's executives. Emeril Lagasse was stunned when he was suddenly shoved off the air after driving the Food Network's primetime schedule for a decade. David Rosengarten, who found himself iced out of the studios during one of the transitions in power, had been sacked for a good five years when a Food Network producer—unaware he'd once been one of their former bigger celebrities—called him up and said he had good television potential and would he like to try out for The Next Food Network Star? Talk about adding insult to injury.

There's no lack of insider gossip here, either. Salkin is blunt when it comes to dissecting how the channel's gamble to choose personalities over talent has led to a number of Food Network-related scandals over the years, from Robert Irvine's embellished claims to working in the White House and for Britain's royal family, to Ina Garten's publicity flak when she twice refused to allow a Make-A-Wish Foundation child to cook with her, to the infamous bad publicity that Guy Fieri received over his Manhattan eatery, to the more recent Paula Deen scandals.

Though the book is a little sloggy in its early parts before the Food Network really gets off the ground, it's an intense and often exciting read once the studio lights switch on and actual filming begins. As an insider look at the business institution that (depending upon one's perspective) either made the kitchen a national obsession, or else latched onto a zeitgeist at the right time and made its personalities national stars in the process, it's both eye-opening and invaluable.

The Bird's Nest
by Shirley Jackson
5 of 5 stars

As a cartographer of dark landscapes, Shirley Jackson is well known. Her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are masterpieces not only of spooky-house writing, but of the psychological specters that torment the living. Her ubiquitous short story "The Lottery" upset its original readers with reason, as it good-naturedly pulled back the skin of small-town life and revealed the skeleton of savagery beneath.

Where modern readers sell Jackson short, however, is in her accomplished ease as a humorist; her two domestic memoirs fall out of print with more regularity than her literary novels. It's a pity, because both memoirs are wickedly funny. Jackson's black humor is abundantly on display as well in her 1954 novel The Bird's Nest, a novel exploring the phenomenon of multiple personality. Published roughly simultaneously with the popular non-fiction account The Three Faces of Eve (the movie versions of both books would arrive at the same time, three years later), Jackson fearlessly plumbs the depths of a Elizabeth Richmond's struggle to assemble an integrated self from four distinct and often destructive splintered personalities.

Although the portions of the book devoted to the heroine's perspective are as terrifying as anything Jackson ever wrote, alternate sections are outright funny, and even comically silly. A chunk of the narrative arrives courtesy of Elizabeth's psychiatrist, Dr. Wright—and a more fatuous and pleased-with-himself raconteur has never graced a book's pages since the height of Victorian drollery. His accounts of the practical jokes Elizabeth's four personalities play on each other are an antidote to the grim surrealism of the heroine's inner narrative. Dr. Wright is almost a parody of the know-it-all psychiatrists of The Three Faces of Eve—and (according to Chris Sizemore herself, the subject of Eve's scrutiny) about as ineffective, despite their conviction otherwise. A drinking game could be made out of the number of times the good doctor resigns, or threatens to resign, from his groundbreaking case because of imagined effrontery to his dignity.

Elizabeth's beleaguered aunt, thrown into the deep end of caring for her mentally ill niece, provides a number of comic moments as well. Of particular note is a dryly humorous scene in which she supervises baths for the four personalities, one right after the other. (Spoiler alert: they use all her bath salts.)

Jackson's style is not to spell out the roots of Elizabeth Richmond's psychological trauma in plain language. Readers looking for an easy wrap-up of the causes of this particular multiple personality disorder may be disappointed. Like any good cartographer, however, Jackson provides all the clues to the answers as she maps Elizabeth's inner regressions and fantasies, and relives the girl's fears.
In an age of modern pharmaceuticals, The Bird's Nest's clinical approach might seem quaint and antiquated, but it's a testament to Jackson's equal adroitness with materials both comic and terrifying.

The House of the Stag
by Kage Baker
5 of 5 stars

Though its series predecessor, The Anvil of the World, hewed fairly close to Kage Baker's usual modis operandi of surrounding a fairly sane character with a cast of zanies, The House of the Stag is a far more sober fantasy. Fairytale-like in tone and narrative, its look at two unlikely opposites and the long paths they tread toward a mutual love is more like one of Lois McMaster Bujold's domestic science fiction novels than anything we might have expected from the author of the free-wheeling, absurdist novels of the Company.

The House of the Stag is truly lovely in spots; the protagonists' affection for each other is deeply moving. Although I enjoyed the raucous comedy of Anvil, its successor surpasses it in depth of feeling and sheer imagination.

The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion
by Fannie Flagg
4 of 5 stars

Fannie Flagg's literary output is basically Southern Gothic Lite—and for the most part, that's perfectly okay by me. As a born Southerner myself, I recognize her casts of eccentrics and well-meaning small town folk, and the tight-knit communities against which they strive to establish their own individuality.

The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion doesn't quite approach the rich textures nor the complexity of Flagg's career peaks, but it's a sweet tale pulled off with a bit of authorial misdirection. Long on charm and down-home wit, it's a warm blanket of a read on a chilly day.

The Bird of the River
by Kage Baker
3 of 5 stars

Kage Baker's last novel is as gently meandering as the river upon which it's set . . . and unfortunately, about as soporific.

People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
4 of 5 stars

There's always a danger, when an author writes a collection of short stories or vignettes centered around a central theme, that the episodes will vary in quality, with some miles above others. In People of the Book, however, Brooks' forays in a fictional past surrounding a very real historical volume known as the Sarajevo Haggadah are uniformly excellent. Each brief chapter that reaches back into the Haggadah's history is fully realized, tense in the telling, and rich in exploring the emotions of the people who fought to create and preserve this most unusual of documents.

It's a pity, then that the present-day story of a rare book expert that serves to link all the others is really such a dud. What a heavy burden it must be for the book's overarching narrator to be young and comely and not only to know it all but to be right about everything! Juxtaposing her mundane and unpleasant story against those who suffered through the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition does them no great service—in fact, I came to dread being yanked back to the conservationist's present-day narrative after being immersed in the book's haunting past. Still, People of the Book is a worthwhile read for the dips into previous centuries alone.

Bab: A Sub-Deb
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
5 of 5 stars

It's awfully tempting to compare Mary Roberts Rinehart's hilarious Bab: A Sub-Deb with the Anita Loos novel that followed in its footsteps in 1926: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Diary of a Professional Lady. Both books feature wildly unreliable narrators whose spelling, to be generous, could make a hapless reader's eyes cross. Both satirize sex and marriage, and society's expectations of women (or lack thereof) in the early twentieth century. Best of all, both are extremely funny.

Loos' Lorelei Lee, however, is infinitely more black at heart: that cloche and those blond tresses disguise a ferocious, almost feral acquisitiveness and a cunning that Machiavelli would envy. Bab, to put it bluntly, is merely a typical seventeen-year-old: ditzy, absent-minded, prone to fancifulness, and apt to stumble when strapping on the metaphorical heels of her elders.

Lorelei must have been Bab-like during her own adolescence. It may be that given nine years to catch up to her literary older sister, Bab might acquire Lorelei's flapper shrewdness . . . but it's doubtful. Rinehart has made Bab sweet-natured at her core, and Bab's unwitting heroism by the book's end renders her grounded in a way her successor would never appreciate. Readers appreciate Lorelei as a force of nature—but we love Bab, for all her faults and airs.

Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation
by Andrew Lycett
3 of 5 stars

Andrew Lycett's attempt to frame his biography of Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins as 'a life of sensation' is a bit misleading. As scandalous as Collins' life could be—the dude simultaneously maintained two entirely different households with women, to neither of whom he was married, complete with children—Lycett very much fails to draw the parallels between that life and the novels of sensation for which Collins gained a moderate amount of fame and notoriety. Working with seemingly less personal material, Claire Tomalin managed to elicit more juicy tidbits for two whole biographies of Collins' sometimes friend and consistent better, Charles Dickens, and of Dickens' mistress, Nelly Ternan.

Instead, Lycett commences with a chapter that promises immediately to plunge the reader into a wild and ribald tale of Collins' thoroughly unconventional sex life . . . and then follows through with a standard academic treatise of the life and works of a lesser-known novelist who never fully escaped the shadow cast by Dickens. It's tough to whip up interest in Collins when his biographer can't even invest much enthusiasm in recounting the sensational plots of his novels, much less adequately recount Collins' motivations for his unconventional love life. To be honest, I learned more about Wilkie Collins, the man, from Dan Simmons' fictional Drood.

I suggest that Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation be best read as an invitation to a drinking game. Take a shot every time Collins churns out yet another novel of which you've never heard! Take another every time he crabs in his correspondence about a novel's reception! Chug one down every time he and Dickens privately badmouth each other! Take more shots whenever he trots off for a cure for one of his several venereal diseases! You'll be plastered enough in no time to get through the plot descriptions of Collins' endless procession of dreary books.

(Though to be fair, I now do want to read the one with the decapitated floating head.)

Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater
by Michael Sokolove
2 of 5 stars

Lou Volpe, beloved drama instructor of Levittown's acclaimed and award-winning public high school drama program, is very probably a five-star teacher. Former student Michael Sokolove's account of him, however, is definitely not five-star writing.

Sokolove narrates his tale in a breathless, fawning style that attempts to mimic journalistic rigor by employing a full-frontal assault with the eternal present tense. Yet he also sets up the book with so many framing devices (I stopped counting at about five, which is four too many) and leaden digressions into the past that often it's nigh on impossible to tell exactly when its scenes are supposed to be taking place. Overall, his style is more appropriate for a scraping Sports Illustrated profile or a kiddy Tiger Beat puff piece than a serious look at what goes into the the creation of high art beneath a high school proscenium.

It's a pity that Sokolove can't seem to shake his adolescent hero worship of Volpe in order to write something less meandering and groveling. Volpe's theatrical achievements are magical, but his book certainly isn't.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
by Randy Shilts
3 of 5 stars

Revisiting Randy Shilts' groundbreaking history of the early day of the AIDS epidemic in the United States after my first reading of it some twenty-five years ago was a little bit of an eye-opening experience. I still admire Shilts' month-by-month analysis of how public health officials, the research science industry, the gay population affected most directly by the plague, and the government at both the local and federal level responded—or in most cases, failed to respond—to the burgeoning threat. His almost cinematic scope makes the work eminently readable, while the inherent drama in the ever-increasing numbers of people felled by the virus keeps the focus as tight as any summer action thriller.

I'm struck on this re-read, however, by some of Shilts' uglier and more manipulative stunts while posturing as an objective reporter to the unfolding of events. Sure, he's angry, and he's quick to point fingers and spread blame throughout the book. That stance is understandable—and frankly, there are plenty of people and institutions that deserve blame. When it comes to the gay community in particular, however, Shilts indulges in some incredibly guileful rhetoric to divide that community between the good gays and the disgusting, bad whores who ruined everything for everyone else.

He's not really all that subtle about it, either; the bad gays are not only sluttish bathhouse habitués, but are drawn in broad and villainous strokes as amyl nitrite addicts who all, to a soul, indulge in the vicious sports of fist-fucking and urinating upon each other. (The good gays in the book, in case you wonder, all very chastely are shown to lie next to each other upon their beds without having sex, and if they do, they "make love" after they confess their high school-like "crushes" on each other.) The bad gays populating the bathhouses and dark alleys are all insanely beautiful as well. They may have a "sensual charisma," or may prefer to be "the only charismatic guy in the room," or they're (God help us) “at the top of Manhattan's ziggurat of beauty." In fact, Shilts' biggest villain in the book walks around in chapter after chapter, flipping his hair and twiddling his mustache while smirking and thinking to himself in scenes that are clearly fictionalized (though in an afterword, Shilts claims to have fictionalized nothing) that he's "the prettiest one in the room."

The hyperbole Shilts employs in his obsession with "the royalty of gay beauty and . . . the stars of the homosexual jet set" is weirdly off-putting, this time around; he writes almost from the disgruntled perspective of the ugly kid laughed out of the high school junior prom. Worse yet, his demonization of hair-flipping Gaetan Dugas, the Canadian flight attendant he dubbed "Patient Zero" shows a callous zest for scapegoating instead of any kind of journalistic integrity. It's commonly accepted now that Patient Zero (who may or may not have been Dugas) was not the first person in the U.S. affected by AIDS, nor did he bring it to the country—yet Shilts is all too happy to write scene after scene of Dugas literally leaping out the bathhouse shadows, Boogey Man-style, to frighten its denizens with his Karposi's Sarcoma lesions after he's infected them all.

During the book's publicity tour, Shilts acceded to the publisher's requests to emphasize the Dugas story in his book's publicity; whether enthusiastically or not, he became a willing accessory to the conviction of the dead man without much of a trial. And it's difficult to buy Shilts' tepid disclaimer that "Whether Gaetan Dugas actually was the person who brought AIDS to North America remains a question of debate and is ultimately unanswerable," several hundred pages into the book, when all along Shilts has depicted him relentlessly as the Freddy Kreuger of the Castro.

But then, Shilts is quick to laud those he admires and vilify anyone he finds faintly disagreeable. If someone is angry with public officials and speaks out rashly, and that someone happens to be Larry Kramer, he's lauded as a hero (and has all the good reviews of his play quoted in one big lump). If someone else gets angry and speaks out rashly in pretty much the same way, Shilts feels free to damn him as a "sociopath." In a maddening chapter on some imaginary phenomenon he calls "AIDSpeak," Shilts dismisses as obstructionist and dangerous anyone from the gay community who at any time brought up issues relating to patient confidentiality in testing for HIV, or who worried about conservative demands for quarantining or for mass HIV testing to root homosexuals from their jobs and communities . . . even though those concerns were quite legitimate, and in some ways still are.

Again, as someone who lived through those terrible years myself, I understand Shilts' anger at everyone who delayed AIDS research and relief funds to a suffering population, or whose politicking precluded good public health care. However, I don't think it journalistic, or even professional, to play fast and loose with reputations in the name of telling a good story, while pretending to be neutral—especially with the crystal-clear focus that only comes with hindsight. There was a point late in the book in which Shilts tsk-tsks at the notion that outsiders might mentally divide the gay population into "the fist-fuckers of Folsom Street" and "respectable middle class gays" . . . when that's exactly what he’s done from page one of his epic.

For all of its sweep and its pace and its moments of justified, righteous anger, And the Band Played On apportions its blame not all that even-handedly. It's decidedly unsubtle at choosing its villains, and it rides roughshod over anyone who dares to have been sexual or who has even a passing regard for civil liberties in a time of crisis. His narrative choices are a telling relic from the era he covers, perhaps, but it doesn't make for an entirely impartial historical inquiry.

Brat Farrar
by Josephine Tey
5 of 5 stars

Josephine Tey's mysteries aren't necessarily the most intricately-plotted, nor the most outlandishly fiendish. Nor, as in Brat Farrar, are they always strict mysteries. (If you haven't figured out in the first third of this particular book whodunit, it's either because you aren't paying attention, or are under the assumption that there has to be a twist somewhere down the line. There isn't.) Although a contemporary of Christie in her heyday, her climaxes and resolutions aren't exactly true to the standard mystery-novel form, either—although the title character of this particular novel has a late-game epiphany of who the murderer is and how he accomplished the dirty deed, it's never, ever shared with the reader.

And yet there's something so damned charming about her books. With all of its oddities, Brat Farrar is a gust of bluebell-scented wind straight from one of the most unspoiled English countrysides in literature. Its characters—at least the good 'uns—are genuinely charismatic and amiable. She draws its hero, a reluctant con man who has assumed the identity of a lost heir shortly before he's due to inherit a country estate and its extensive breeding stables, with such love that even when he's committing fraud against a lot of sweet-hearted absolute ducks, one wants to cheer him on. It's an impressive feat.

Also impressive is Tey's ability to give the novel a timeless quality; though published in 1949, it can with very little mental effort be imagined in the nineteen-sixties, or even the present day. Tey's laissez-faire and nonjudgmental attitude toward gay themes seems cheerfully prescient for a book of its era; its occasional strains aren't even relegated to the subtext. Just happily acknowledged, shrugged at, and accepted.

Brat Farrar might frustrate the mystery reader looking for a serious challenge. Yet for lovers of suspense, or horses, or the English countryside, or just plain old good storytelling with winsome characters, the novel's an all-out triple-crown winner.

Cured: How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science
by Nathalia Holt
4 of 5 stars

The ability to explain complex scientific issues in layman's terms is a rare enough gift. Nathalia Holt's ability to explicate the intricacies of the HIV virus and its workings without condescending to the reader is nothing short of astonishing. In her assay of the various clinical attempts to analyze and develop strategies to rid the virus from the human body—or at least to effect a 'functional cure' for those affected by it—Holt manages to shed light into areas of medicine and biology normally murky to those of us with little exposure to the science of HIV and AIDS. In doing so, she has created a comprehensive and readable survey of current approaches to treatment—and identifies areas in which attention and funding is lacking.

Holt's book is also the only scientific work I've read in which a researcher is romanced by an Arab prince on a white horse. Thumbs up for that alone!

The Museum of Extraordinary Things
by Alice Hoffman
4 of 5 stars

Hoffman's The Museum of Extraordinary Things manages to combine page-turning action with passages of genuinely lovely, lyrical writing. It's a fairy tale of Beaux Arts New York City that occasionally reads as if it were intended to be an easy-listening, lite version of Ragtime with only a portion of actual historical figures to follow.

Although there are portions of the book in which Hoffman seems determined to shoehorn in her research on historical Coney Island and the labor repercussions of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the book is ultimately affecting and a cracking good read.