Review by New York Times Review
THE UNMAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 2016 By Lanny J. Davis. (Scribner, $25.) Davis, the consummate Washington insider and former special counsel to Bill Clinton, offers his take on the 2016 election. In his view, the former F.B.I. director James Comey's announcement, 11 days before the vote, that Hillary Clinton's emails were under investigation again, dealt the fatal blow, making the monster By Kathryn Harkup. (Sigma, $27.) Could Victor Frankenstein actually have succeeded in 1818, building a man out of spare parts? That was the year that Mary Shelley published her classic novel, and Harkup looks at the science behind the 19th-century culture of experimentation with dead bodies to which it was responding, sister of darkness By R. H. Stavi with Sarah Durand. (Dey St., $26.99.) Yes, there are such things as "secular exorcists." Stavis is one (along with being, fittingly, a screenwriter of horror movies). After helping what she says are thousands of people expel their demons, she has decided here to speak of her unique power, chicago By David Mamet. (Custom House, $26.99.) The combustible playwright and screenwriter turns once again to fiction in his fourth novel, set in 1920s Chicago among small-time crooks and aspiring mobsters. It has all the trademarks of a Mamet production - electric dialogue and a hurtling pace, close encounters with humankind By Sang-??? Lee. (Norton, $26.95.) Lee, a paleoanthropologist, tells us much about our evolutionary origins by sorting through our ancestors' mortal remains. Examining wisdom teeth from various periods, for example, she was able to establish how long ago our life spans first allowed us to know our grandparents. It hasn't been that long: only 30,000 years. "The selection of Min Jin Lee's PACHENCO as one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017 made me turn to the novel about four generations of a Korean family. While epic in scope - and, at nearly 500 pages, in scale - the book also makes vivid the quotidian details of its characters' everyday lives, from Sunja's visits to the 'fish broker' in Japanese-occupied Korea to the indignities suffered by Solomon as an aspiring Korean banker in 1980s Japan. The novel expertly portrays the rituals and mores specific to ethnic Korean culture even as it also poignantly captures the universally complicated relationships between family members, lovers and friends. The writing is spare and evocative: 'She could feel Noa's small hand when he was a boy, and she would close her eyes and think of his sweet, grassy smell and remember that he had always tried his best.' " - ROBIN POGREBIN, CULTURE REPORTER, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
When Earl Bakken created medicine's first portable, battery-charged pacemaker, he drew his inspiration from an unlikely source: Victor Frankenstein. But the world's most famous monster-maker could inspire a medical breakthrough only because his creator, Mary Shelley, had herself absorbed a great deal of the pathbreaking science of her own era. In this fascinating investigation, Harkup illuminates the contemporary science that fed Shelley's potent imagination, giving readers interpretive insight into the creative metamorphosis that made Frankenstein a prototype of an entirely new genre: science fiction. Readers see, for instance, how the knowledge Shelley gleans from her study of anatomy and galvanism shapes her riveting account of how Frankenstein assembles and revivifies the human body parts of his Promethean creature. Complementing her account of the science that Frankenstein uses, Harkup surveys the real-world science including Bakken's pacemaker that Shelley's novel anticipates. The feat Frankenstein achieves in fiction harmonizes surprisingly well with the aspirations of medical pioneers who now contemplate transplanting human heads! An unexpected bridge between Romantic literature and modern science.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chemist Harkup follows A Is for Arsenic with this entertaining look at Mary Shelley's life and the science of her time. The work has a dual structure, following the life of Mary Shelley (1797-1851) chronologically while examining the elements of science in the narrative of the novel. Readers familiar with Shelley may recognize the famous origin story of Frankenstein in Lord Byron's 1816 challenge at Villa Diodati in Switzerland that he, Mary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others should each "write a ghost story." Throughout, Harkup highlights individuals that Shelley knew who may have inspired characters in the novel. She also dutifully details the 18th- and 19th-century rise of chemistry as a science and the final decline of alchemy. Electricity features prominently in Harkup's account, in particular "galvanism": the "electrical stimulation of muscles to produce movement after death." Harkup's discussion of how Victor Frankenstein might have acquired his "raw materials" includes information on anatomists of the day and their means of acquiring corpses. Her description of bodily putrefaction after death and means of staving that off are not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Harkup's fun potpourri of science and history should prove satisfying to both science readers and literary aficionados. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Chemist and author Harkup (A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie) draws on history, psychology, sociology, and literature to present a picture of the genesis of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. Harkup's analysis includes potential influences and cultural biases, and her picture contains numerous evocative details. Her loose chronology of the development of science is certainly informative, and her chronicling of Shelley's story is lively and stirring. Some readers may be transported. Some readers, looking for citations (for everything from assertions to direct quotes) and finding nothing but a bibliography, an index, and a time line, might wish for more scientific rigor. Although Harkup's work is ostensibly about making the monster, she also includes a wealth of material on how the content was received during Shelley's lifetime and how Shelley's life was affected. VERDICT Anyone interested in where Shelley's ideas may have come from will find a multitude of context in Harkup's volume. This is fascinating for those interested in the development of sf and in the difficult life of one of the genre's first authors.-Audrey Snowden, Milford Town Lib., MA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Examining the science of "a work of fiction that has enthralled, inspired and terrified for two centuries."In 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), an educated young woman, used the latest science to "create her masterpiece, Frankenstein." Gothic romances, featuring a wide array of grotesque backgrounds, were the rage of her era, but all relied on ghosts, magic, and other supernatural elements. By sticking to facts and accepted theory, Shelley produced the first science-fiction novel. It was a hit. "The terrifying spectacle of a creature brought to life from a collection of dead flesh, scavenged from dissection rooms and graveyards, was all the more terrifying because it felt all too possible," writes chemist and author Harkup (A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, 2015) in her second book. Much of Shelley's science was wrong, but the author keeps readers entertained with an expert mixture of biography and the scientific problems that webut not Victor Frankensteinwould face in reanimating a collection of body parts. Harkup breaks no new biographical ground, but few readers will object to another account of literature's most famous mnage quatre in which Mary and her stepsister matched wits with poets Byron and Shelley, leading to much immortal writing and many pregnancies. While Mary's Frankenstein discovers the essence of life, scientists no longer postulate such a substance, and Mary reveals few details. Rather than speculate, Harkup devotes the majority of her text to histories of the sciences that Victor purportedly mastered (electricity, chemistry) and the medical problems that should have defeated him (rejection, decay, infection).A lucid and entertaining book that is neither literary criticism nor a biography with serious ambitions but mostly a series of essays on science, history, and early-19th-century British society often only distantly related to building Frankenstein's monster. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
