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DANCING WITH EINSTEIN

Name: DANCING WITH EINSTEIN
Author: Kate Wenner
ISBN: 0-7432-5164-4

by Kate Wenner ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2004

The fallout of America’s atomic nightmare in a touching, humanistic story.

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A grimly fascinating tale set in New York City in summer 1975, when the daughter of a nuclear physicist faces—with the help of her four therapists—the psychological damage caused by her father’s early death.

After seven years of traveling the globe with little money and no intentions, 30-year-old Marea Hoffman returns to America to answer one nagging question: Was her father’s death by car accident when she was just 12 a suicide over his despair at working on the hydrogen bomb? Marea is rootless, possessing only what’s in her knapsack; she takes a “white room” in a transient hotel, gets a night job at Dawn’s Early Rising baking bread with a hippie gay baker, and spends her days riding the subway and paying visits to the four therapists she tries to please by presenting four distinct parts of herself. Marea (named for the seas on the dark side of the moon) has had nightmares about her father’s work since she was a child growing up with her parents in Princeton, where fellow scientist Albert Einstein used to come over for Sunday dinner. Marea’s father Jonas, an Austrian Jew who barely escaped the death camps, found his scientific work a way both to foil evil and help his adopted country. Yet his wife, Virginia, a Quaker, and Einstein, being pacifists, try vehemently to change his mind—with the result that Jonas is exiled from everyone’s good graces before his tragic early death in 1957. Former TV producer and second-novelist Wenner (Setting Fires, 2000) manages in a short space to create memorable characters in the four therapists (old world Dr. Angela Iris, uptight psychoanalyst Colin Ross, sexy Jungian Eric Silas, and politically defensive lesbian Nina Wolf) and in Marea’s sadly diminished mother, not to mention in Einstein himself, whom Marea called Grandpa and used to dance with around the living room to oompah music.

The fallout of America’s atomic nightmare in a touching, humanistic story.

Pub Date: March 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-7432-5164-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.