2. Also Reviewed This Week: Charles Affron's "Lillian Gish"
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Unbreakable Blossom
Overacting, fluttering femininity and D. W. Griffith went out of style, but Lillian Gish refused to go.
LILLIAN GISH
Her Legend, Her Life.
By Charles Affron.
Illustrated. 445 pp. New York:
A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner. $35.
Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life
By CHARLES AFFRON
Reviewed by RICHARD SCHICKEL
"[Affron] politely, consistently refutes Gish's line, remaining unfailingly generous to his subject's art and indomitability, all the while fastidiously and expertly devastating the fairy tale in which she wrapped herself."
Related Link
First Chapter: 'Lillian Gish'
"Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life," by Charles Affron
In his review of this new biography, Richard Schickel, who reviews movies for Time and is the author of ''D. W. Griffith: An American Life,'' writes that Gish's legend, "self-created and self-propagated," causes a justifiable "steady murmur of discontent to arise from Affron's judicious biography." The problem was "Gish's excessive -- not to say slightly loopy -- idealization of her discoverer and mentor, D. W. Griffith."
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"Eclipse," by John Banville
The protagonist of John Banville's 12th novel is "the unhappily aptly named Alexander Cleave," celebrated throughout Britain, who "has found himself weeping in movie theaters with no idea of what he was mourning," writes reviewer Jim Shepard, whose latest novel is "Nosferatu." He has felt certain he was surrounded by portents, though uncertain of their meaning. He has been involuntarily fixing on a bit of himself -- "a finger, a foot" -- and gaping at it in horror, "unable to understand how it made its movements." Banville's novel, however, is not free from "game playing" that "contributes, of course, to an atmosphere of overcontrivance." -----

"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America,"
by Angela D. Dillard
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now?" is more valuable for its information than for its arguments, writes reviewer Scott L. Malcomson, author of "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race." Dillard, who teaches history and politics at the Gallatin School at New York University, "writes within the style current among younger, left-liberal humanities scholars -- a timorous style that often sacrifices verve to caution, advancing gingerly toward rather legalistic formulations about human reality."
Dillard economically traces the roles of racial activism, feminism and gay liberation as "foils and inspirations for neoconservatism, the New Right, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. She meanwhile keeps an eye on the relations between these fired-up groups and the Republican Party, which they have sought to make their mainstream vehicle." http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/04/reviews/010304.04malcomt.html?0302bk

3. First Chapter: Nuala O'Faolain's "My Dream of You"
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"My Dream of You," by Nuala O'Faolain
Nuala O'Faolain is the author of the best-selling memoir, "Are You Somebody?" Her first novel, writes Catherine Lockerbie, the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, is "a big, generous, essentially old-fashioned novel, taking its unhurried time to tell a story and create a central character, to have a cool, long look at history and romance." There are "obvious resonances" between Kathleen de Burca, the novel's heroine and O'Faolain -- "Both are journalists. Both are Irish, well traveled, middle-aged, educated, alert, literary, single working women facing up to the remaining decades of their lives" -- and "one of the finest achievements of the book is its unflinching, empathetic depiction of just how it feels to be poised on that cusp, to experience the chill clutch of the thought that the rest of one's life might be empty of love, sex, intimate human contact."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/04/reviews/010304.04lockert.html?0302bk
First Chapter: "My Dream of You"
Read more about Nuala O'Faolain in a New York Times Magazine profile.
http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/20010218mag-faolain.html?0302bk

4. New in Stores: Douglas Galbraith's "The Rising Sun"
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"The Rising Sun," by Douglas Galbraith -- March
Based on Scotland's attempt to colonize the Isthmus of Panama in 1698, Douglas Galbraith's first novel is a "swashbuckling historical epic," according to Richard Bernstein's review in The Times on Feb. 26.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/26/arts/26BERN.html?0302bk

5. In the News: A. R. Ammons, Poet of Eclectic Tastes, Dies at 75
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A. R. Ammons, an award-winning poet who could turn any topic, even a heap of garbage, into poetry, died last Sunday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/arts/27AMMO.html?0302bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0302bk

6. New on the Best-Seller List: "The Bonesetter's Daughter"
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Hardcover Fiction
#2) "The Bonesetter's Daughter," by Amy Tan
A Chinese-American woman struggles to understand her family and herself.
A note on our best-seller policy: The Times on the Web publishes the New York Times best-seller lists a week in advance of the printed Sunday Book Review. The best-seller lists published this week on the Web will appear in the print edition dated March 11 and are based on sales through last weekend.

7. In the Forums: Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"
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The Reading Group has begun its discussion of the March book, Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," the classic study of the culture and institutions of the United States, the first volume of which was originally published in 1835.
Most readers are wary of current debates over whether Tocqueville can be considered an ancestor of the modern conservative movement. As one says, "We'll all have to exercise self-discipline in holding up the mirror of history to Tocqueville's exposition. In a mirror, the left is right and the right, left. Distortions abound."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0302bk