June 27, 2004
And Bear in Mind
HE MASTER, by Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $25.) A deeply considered, crisply delivered novel whose hero is Henry James, of all writers the most ambiguous about the issue of secret sexuality; Toibin, a gay Irishman, sees in James an opacity, a failure of passion, a coldness and evasiveness that may conflict with the apparent happiness and sociability recalled by many who knew the real James.
THE SECOND MARK: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold, by Joy Goodwin. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Goodwin, a skating producer for ABC, uses her insider's access to excellent purpose; her account of the scandal-tarnished pairs final at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City is knowledgeable and empathetic, and does not substitute moral posturing for analysis.
THE CREATION OF THE MEDIA: Political Origins of Modern Communications, by Paul Starr. (Basic Books, $27.50.) A scholar's cautious, detailed, convincing account of the deliberate framing of information carriers, from cheap postage to privatized electronics (telegraph, telephone, radio) to saturation by movies, networks and magazines.
THE SARI SHOP, by Rupa Bajwa. (Norton, $23.95.) Bajwa's first novel is a comedy of manners, in which Ramchand, a young shop assistant, discovers the neighborhoods where the upper classes in Amritsar really live; a darker tone infiltrates when he turns to the poorest sectors, where violence and madness are never far removed.
THE HOLLYWOOD DODO, by Geoff Nicholson. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) The author's highly professional 14th novel concerns an aspiring director who wants to make a dodo movie; a 17th-century scientist who tried to save the bird back in the 1660's; and well-handled cliches of popular culture (success and failure in movies are equally corrupting).
BEASTS OF EDEN: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution, by David Rains Wallace. (University of California, $24.95.) A lively and deeply researched history of the ''bone hunters'' who have scoured the earth since the 18th century to elucidate mammal development in geological time and work out theories to account for it, from catastrophism through transmutation to Darwinian evolution.
WHY WE DO IT: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene, by Niles Eldredge. (Norton, $24.95.) An eminent paleontologist takes on the adherents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology; he pursues a quasi-teleological investigation of the main objective of sex, which in his view is species stability and extinction resistance, not just gene multiplication.
DYLAN'S VISIONS OF SIN, by Christopher Ricks. (Ecco, $26.95.) Ricks, the notable critic who has been elected the next professor of poetry at Oxford University, brings close, intense, learned scrutiny of the text -- the basic tool of the New Criticism -- to the songs of Bob Dylan, unveiling allusions, teasing out recalcitrant intentions and otherwise treating Dylan as he has treated Housman and Tennyson.