Wednesday, July 23rd   Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House Classic Journalism) by A. M. Rosenthal

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Thirty-Eight Witnesses: A Review A Review by Art Winslow When a 78-year-old pedestrian was downed by a hit-and-run driver in Hartford, Conn., in June, street surveillance video showed multiple cars passing by without stopping and fellow pedestrians staring at the victim without any visible move to aid him. This provoked public outrage and claims of a Kitty Genovese syndrome. Last year, a sexual assault in the hallway of an apartment building in St. Paul, in which surveillance video suggested there may have been up to 10 witnesses (the police were summoned only after a lapse of some 90 minutes), also resurrected comparisons to the Genovese murder and its mute onlookers. Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was 28 when she was stabbed to death in the New York City borough of Queens in 1964, but she and the circumstances surrounding her death remain alive in public reflexes every time we encounter what social psychologists often refer to as the bystander effect. A.M. Rosenthal, who was metropolitan editor of the New York Times when the murder...   Read the entire review More reviews from Chicago Tribune

Scenes of Clerical Life (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot Classic Review A Review by Unknown Author [Ed note: This review first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly May 1858]. Fiction represents the character of the age to which it belongs, not merely by actual delineations of its times, like those of Tom Jones and The Newcomes, but also in an indirect, though scarcely less positive manner, by its exhibition of the influence of the times upon its own form and general direction, whatever the scene or period it may have chosen for itself. The story of "Hypatia" is laid in Alexandria almost two thousand years ago, but the book reflects the crudities of modern English thought; and even Mr...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly				Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by J. H. Elliott A Tale of Two Empires A Review by Linda Colley The polymath and politician Francis Bacon wrote his "Short View to Be Taken of Great Britain and Spain" in 1619. At this point, Spain laid claim to the largest, most widely dispersed, and by far the richest empire in the world, but Bacon detected frailties in the giant. Philip III, king of Spain, might be "accounted the greatest Monarch of Christendom," he argued, "yet if his estate be enquired through, his roots will be found a great deal too narrow for his tops." As Spain's wealth and military power subsequently contracted over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this ...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books
Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg and Monica Scott Stuck in second A Review by Aisling Foster "Nobody wants to be a second wife . . . . It's like moving into a new house that still has half the previous owner's furniture in it. You'd like to get rid of the all-plaid living-room set, but somehow you're stuck with it, forever. "In my case, the plaid living-room set is called Theresa." Morality tales are never quite like this. This one is set in California, in "a country where a divorce occurs every thirty seconds"; each character is a blend of modern knowingness and storybook classic. The narrator is delightfully lacking in the preachy righteousness of the genre, describing the...   Read the entire review More reviews from Times Literary Supplement				Flicker (05 Edition) by Theodore Roszak Apocaflicks Now A Review by Gerry Donaghy Recently I was having a discussion with a publisher's sales rep about Steve Erickson's Zeroville, one of my favorite novels of 2007. The novel is set in the era of 1970s Hollywood, which produced films ranging from Bonnie and Clyde to The Godfather to Apocalypse Now. The rep is someone I often discuss films with, and he was mentioning that he had finally gotten around to reading Zeroville. Through the course of our conversation, I asked if he'd read another great novel centered on the movies, this one from 1991 and recently republished, called Flicker. He had never heard of it. A quick...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com
Intercourse: Stories by Robert Olen Butler Pillow Talk A Review by Jane Smiley Jack, 65, builder, often a Muse. Jane, 58, writer, often amused. In their bed in the house that Jack built. Jack: What are you reading? Jane: Intercourse. Jack: What is that? Is it a novel? Jane: I can't tell. It's cute: 50 short monologues, in pairs, from various couples while they're having sex. His previous book like this was about severed heads. You know, those alleged seconds between when the head is cut off and the brain dies. Jack: This must be more of a comedy. Jane: It has its ups and downs. There's a pair of newlyweds who are interrupted by the sinking of the Titanic. On ...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World				How Fiction Works by James Wood The Art of Noticing A Review by Frank Kermode This admirable book is, among other things, a successful attempt to replace E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel as an accessible guide to the mechanics of fiction. Without losing sight of its promise to address the common reader rather than the specialist, How Fiction Works is much more sophisticated than Forster's book, which is now eighty years old, but still, in a rather peculiar way, what James Wood says it is, namely "canonical." Some of its observations -- on the difference between story and plot, and between flat and round characters -- are still quoted even though more subtle...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online