Reviews

Like an amusement park, Believe It or Not was a cheap thrill but it also brought together a community of seekers who sought their faith through the excess of the unusual.

Friedman’s skill in populating her chapters with not only intriguing protagonists but a full cast of supporting characters results in an engrossingly textured account of the early Cold War. Freeing the era from the straightjacket of conformity to which it has been confined by hindsight and historiography, Citizenship in Cold War America reveals a society more fractious than anxious.

Rough Country clearly shows the sociological function of religion in Texas and, as a consequence, its political leanings and influence on the rest of the United States.

Lydia Denworth in her book I Can Hear You Whisper restores one’s awe at the amazing feat that is communication. As a scientific journalist, she dissects the process of language acquisition from auditory comprehension to speech production, but her quest for understanding is personal. Denworth’s third son, Alex, was born hearing-impaired.

Americans were more fully aware that modern life, urban life in the late 19th century, made heat more unbearable than ever. As Salvatore Basile writes in Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything: “America was realizing that a heat wave was much more unpleasant in cities than in rural areas: the larger the city, the more brick and stone and human bodies, the more hellishly hot it felt.” A man-made heat was being created that could only be controlled, ultimately, by man-made cooling. Slowly, inchoately, but tenaciously, the quest for coolth had begun.

Musolino delivers a compelling narrative, inherently polemical, based on historical facts, experimental data, theories in sociology and political science, findings in experimental psychology and neuroscience, philosophical principles, and theological beliefs. While this conglomerate is conveyed admirably in layman’s terms, avoiding disciplinary jargon for the most part, it sometimes feels dizzyingly kaleidoscopic with little attempt at layering or prioritizing the relative status of component parts.

Over the millennia, holy writings and wisdom become a guide to many of us as we search for the meaning that will shape us as individuals and as communities. There is no certainty here, and doubt and questions and reconsiderations will always accompany us, as it does many who practice science. There is no simple reading of Scripture here, either.

Sex and The City would add more sex, shoes, and cocktails; 30 Rock upped the neurosis and goofball antics; while Parks and Recreation added small-town government parody. But it all started with Mary.

The hysteria generated by War of the Worlds provides today’s Internet users with a cautionary tale when posting on social media networks: Be careful what you put out there—somebody might just believe you.

Lahr’s work is a unique amalgam of dramatic criticism and biography—one which results in a comprehensive and original re-assessment of the playwright.