Seleções PenAzul
Books Update: Mail From the Harlem Renaissance
Date:
Fri, 20 Apr 2001 22:34:22 -0400
From:
The New York Times Direct
To:
medei@UOL.COM.BR
Books Update from NYTimes.com
Friday, April 20, 2001
------------------------------------------------------------
The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
1. In Sunday's Book Review: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
2. Also Reviewed This Week: A New Translation of Boccaccio's "Famous Women"
3. Featured Author: Mary Lee Settle
4. New in Stores: P. D. James's "Death in Holy Orders"
5. In the News: Pulitzer Prizes Awarded
6. New on the Best-Seller List: "A Common Life," by Jan Karon
7. In the Forums: "Anil's Ghost," by Michael Ondaatje
1. In Sunday's Book Review: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
==========================================================
1. "Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964"
Edited By Emily Bernard
Just Take the A Train
The letters between Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, lifelong
friends and founders of the Harlem Renaissance.
REMEMBER ME TO HARLEM
The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964.
Edited by Emily Bernard.
Illustrated. 356 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
"Remember Me to Harlem," a collection of letters between the
writer Hughes and the photographer Van Vechten, "serves up a
textured, ironic, ribald and frequently poignant interracial
friendship between two remarkable talents," writes David
Levering Lewis, the second volume of whose biography of W.
E. B. Du Bois won the Pulitzer Prize this week.
Their "intellectual relationship was vital to the success of
Hughes, who was to become one of the 20th century's most
gifted poets and interpreters of the black experience."
Bernard has meticulously annotated what she calls "a mere
fraction" of the nearly 1,500 letters the men exchanged
between 1925 and Van Vechten's death in 1964.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/22/reviews/010422.22lewist.html?0420bk
Featured Author: Langston Hughes
This retrospective features New York Times reviews of
Hughes's books, reviews of plays, operas and musicals based
on Hughes's texts, his obituary and other articles about his
career.
Audio
Hughes reads "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "One Way Ticket"and other poems.
First Chapter: 'Remember Me to Harlem'
2. Also Reviewed This Week: A New Translation of Boccaccio's
"Famous Women"
===========================================================
"Famous Women"
By Giovanni Boccaccio. Edited And Translated By Virginia Brown.
Career Women
Boccaccio's capsule biographies of the 106 most influential women.
FAMOUS WOMEN
By Giovanni Boccaccio.
Edited and
translated by Virginia Brown.
507 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press. $29.95.
We know Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) best today for the
"Decameron," a kind of diurnal Arabian Nights set just
outside Florence in 1348 as the Black Death ravages the
city. For 10 days, a group of 10 young aristocrats exchange
stories to distract them from the fear and misery around
them.
In 1362 Boccaccio again wrote specifically "for the ladies,"
this time in Latin, the language of high culture, diplomacy,
law and the liberal arts. Under the influence of his friend
Petrarch, Boccaccio had become increasingly convinced that
good citizenship among his own peers was best nurtured by
extensive reading of Roman classics and writing in classical
style, explains reviewer Ingrid D. Rowland.
"Because writing in Latin announced high moral purpose, the
former master of salacious tales about cuckolded husbands
and duplicitous wives, libidinous clerics and
pleasure-seeking nuns, lovestruck swains and gullible
maidens turned into a moralist, but as a moralist he was
always as flirtatious as the upright ladies who tell those
piquant tales in 'Decameron.'"
First Chapter: 'Famous Women'
-----
"Grant"
By Jean Edward Smith
Smith, a political scientist at Marshall University and
biographer of John Marshall, takes on what reviewer Richard
Brookhiser calls the "large and misshapen reputation" the
Civil War general and 18th president. Smith, he writes,
"argues that the 18th president was not only a great general
and a great writer but a decent chief executive as well."
Writing about the war, Smith "describes the familiar
campaigns with an admirable chastity of diction."
First Chapter: 'Grant'
On the Web only: Links to reviews of other recent Grant
books by Geoffrey Perret and William S. McFeely, and of new
editions of Grant's papers.
-----
"A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights"
By Mary Ann Glendon
Reviewer David Fromkin, professor of law, history and
international relations at Boston University," says that in
this book, Mary Ann Glendon "has supplied us with what
should become the definitive account of the creation of the
Universal Declaration, and of the role played in it by
Eleanor Roosevelt" and other key figures.
Glendon, he says, "has made good use of her exclusive access
to the unpublished papers of major participants in providing
a detailed history of the genesis of the declaration." The
book is "clearly and accurately written. Anybody concerned
with the question of human rights in today's world will need
to read it and refer to it."
First Chapter: 'A World Made New'
ALSO REVIEWED THIS WEEK
Micheline Aharonian Marcom's 'Three Apples Fell From Heaven'
Mary Lee Settle's 'I, Roger Williams: A Fragment of Autobiography'
Judith A. Carney's 'Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas'
Kevin Canty's 'Honeymoon: And Other Stories'
Michael Korda's 'Country Matters: The Pleasures and Tribulations of Moving From a Big City to an Old Country Farmhouse'
Joseph T. Hallinan's 'Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation'
Anita Shreve's 'The Last Time They Met'
THE CLOSE READER
Hobbits in Hollywood
3. Featured Author: Mary Lee Settle
==================================
"I, Roger Williams: A Fragment of Autobiography" By Mary Lee Settle
Settle, best known for her "Beulah Quintet," five historical
novels about three centuries of Virginians, is a writer who
"seems to love research," writes Caleb Crain, author of
"American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the
New Nation."
The subject of her new novel is Roger Williams, who helped
establish religious and political freedom in the New World.
In this first-person novel, "the showiest research is
linguistic. To write a whole book in a four-century-old
style is a bold experiment. Unfortunately, from time to time
one worries that the petri dishes are running the
laboratory. Are Settle's words serving her, or she them?"
Crain wonders.
Featured Author: Mary Lee Settle
This retrospective includes reviews of Settle's earlier
books and her articles written for The Times.
4. New in Stores: P. D. James's "Death in Holy Orders"
======================================================
"Death in Holy Orders," by P. D. James -- April
Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard is called to St.
Anselm's, a theological college on England's East Anglian
coast, when an archdeacon is murdered. Janet Maslin reviewed
the new mystery in The Times this week.
5. In the News: Pulitzer Prizes Awarded
=======================================
The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to Michael Chabon
for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." David
Levering Lewis, Joseph J. Ellis and Herbert P. Bix won
nonfiction awards. Stephen Dunn won the poetry award. This
collection of New York Times coverage of the winners in the
arts categories includes book reviews, excerpts and
interviews with the winners.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/daily/pulitzers.html?0420bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0420bk
6. New on the Best-Seller List
==============================
Hardcover Fiction
#1) "A Common Life," by Jan Karon
Celebrating the wedding of Father Tim Kavanagh and Cynthia
Coppersmith; the sixth book in the "Mitford Years" series.
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 April 29 and are based on sales through
last weekend.
7. In the Forums: "Anil's Ghost," by Michael Ondaatje
======================================================
Readers of Michael Ondaatje's "Anil's Ghost" have begun to
reconsider the character of Anil, a Westernized, expatriated
Sri Lankan who returns to her native land to investigate
human rights abuses. One reader says that "she is
self-centered, but in an odd way -- she seeks out evidence
of inhumanity, as if to reinforce her own segregation from
humanity."
For next month's book, readers have chosen "The Death and
Life of Great American Cities," the 1961 urban planning
classic by Jane Jacobs.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0420bk
In my appearance on WNBC's "Saturday Today in New York"
(Channel 4, 9-10:30 a.m.) this week, I'll talk about Stephen
Ambrose's history of World War II for children, a new novel
by John Lescroart, as well as Jean Edward Smith's "Grant."
Please let me know your reactions if you have a chance to
tune in. The videos of my last few television appearances
are now available on a Web site jointly created by The Times
and WNBC:
http://www.wnbc.com/bookreview/weekend.html
Thank you for taking the time to read this e-mail. Feel free
to forward it to a friend, and to drop me a note with your
feedback about the site. I enjoy hearing your opinions,
ideas and suggestions and I do try my best to respond
individually to each e-mail.
Bill Goldstein
Books Editor
The New York Times on the Web
bill@nytimes.com
About the Books Section
------------------------------
The Books site is much more than the highlights above. We
offer the Web's best access to authoritative book reviews,
the broadest array of first chapters, and exclusive audio
interviews you can't get anywhere else on the Web. From
historical features on the world's best authors to up to the
minute information on what's new in bookstores this week,
The New York Times on the Web tells you what you need to
know about Books.
http://www.nytimes.com/books?0420bk
