When war ravages the native people on a small fictitious tropical island, the even minimal infrastructure collapses, including the small school house, and all the teachers flee. Left to wander about aimlessly, when not running for their lives, the barefoot children flounder under gunfire mixed with boredom. The only white man on the island, labeled “Pop Eye” by the youngsters, but otherwise known as Mr. Watts, initiates a magical mental rescue by the daily out loud reading of Charles Dickens’ well known classic Great Expectations to the small gathering of students. The daily visit into Dickens’ London world of the young boy named Pip, gives the children, and later their parents, who hear second hand about the novel, an escape into a world of literature as their physical world collapses. Told from the point of view of a precocious thirteen-year-old young girl, as she matures, this novel transports the reader not only onto a remote lush island, but also into a world of a beautifully written story. Ironically clever, the author simultaneously lures the reader into this imaginative world as the native people are also being led into the world of Charles Dickens. Beautifully written, amazingly creative, and enticingly spellbinding, Mister Pip gives the lover of powerful, thoughtful literature a reason to fall in love once again with a story within a story.

-Nan

Reading Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain opened my eyes in a many ways. A pioneer in female Neuropsychiatry, Louann traces the organic changes of the female brain before birth toold age with insightful explanations of psychological changes.

Arranged in the sequence of the aging process, this study flows from stage to stage presenting a fluid study for the reader to grasp and understand with insight into the way females are and how they develop. If I had read this book ten years ago my relationships–with my then teenage daughter, my now ex-wife, and my aging mother who has since passed – could have been more insightful and more rewarding.
I hope, one day, to welcome Dr. Brizendine to Lemuria and have her personally share her knowledge.

Ian McEwan’s long awaited novel, On Chesil Beach, finally came out last week. The slight novel portrays two young newlyweds on the first course of their honeymoon. When we meet them, they are dining across from one another and in these moments, alone together for the first time, each recognizes in turn, the vast beach of unspoken words, emotions and desires that separates them. Set in 1962, on the brink of the sexual revolution, McEwan’s novel explores the culture of sexual repression, as it exists just before the world will explode into a new era of free love. True to form, McEwan manages to create protagonists so fully developed that their humanity evokes laughter one moment and sadness in the next. It is indicative of his literary prowess that he can write characters so endearing that the reader continues to engage and empathize with them throughout moments so unbearable that there is no option but to cringe with discomfort. Just when things seem to be heating up, zippers get stuck, emotions are misinterpreted and the honeymoon preemptively ends. As he is wont to do, McEwan leaves the reader contemplating things done and things left undone, and proves, once again, that ordinary actions and words can change the course of all that is left to come in the most extraordinary ways. – Caroline Morrison

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of  The Virgin Suicides—Middlesex is the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls’ school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them–along with Callie’s failure to develop–leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades–and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides’s long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America’s best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of themselves and their country, one so persuasive that by 1980 they had become important players in Ronald Reagan’s newly ascendant Republican Party.

In this ambitious reassessment of racial politics in the deep South, Joseph Crespino reveals how Mississippi leaders strategically accommodated themselves to the demands of civil-rights activists and the federal government seeking to end Jim Crow, and in so doing contributed to a vibrant conservative countermovement. Crespino explains how white Mississippians linked their fight to preserve Jim Crow with other conservative causes–with evangelical Christians worried about liberalism infecting their churches, with cold warriors concerned about the Communist threat, and with parents worried about where and with whom their children were schooled. Crespino reveals important divisions among Mississippi whites, offering the most nuanced portrayal yet of how conservative southerners bridged the gap between the politics of Jim Crow and that of the modern Republican South.

This book lends new insight into how white Mississippians gave rise to a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that recast American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century.