This Week's Acquisitions

• Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). A woman's discovery about her father leads her to reexamine her own life.

• Dan Simmons, Ilium (Eos, 2003). It's the Trojan War! On Mars!

• George Macbeth, Dizzy's Woman (Jonathan Cape, 1986). A series of imaginary letters from Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, with some attention to the Eglinton Tournament.

• Michael Frayn, Spies (Metropolitan, 2002). During WWII, two boys play at espionage, only to discover (they think) a real spy in the family.

• Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (MIT, 1996). Argues for an eighteenth-century shift from visual to textual pedagogical practices.

• Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago, 1998). Scientific bodies (literally).

• Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford, 2000). Theorizes that the modern definition of "culture" emerged from conflicts over the role of Jews in nineteenth-century Anglo-American society and literary production.

• Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (California, 1998). Examines the implications of debates over sati for colonial historiography.

• Frederic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). General survey from the beginnings to the present day.

• Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane, eds., A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism (Cornell, 1996). Preaching, conversion, hymnody, activism, etc.

• Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (Columbia, 1999). Beckford, Coleridge, Damer, Bannerman, Cowper, etc.

• Jean Miller Schmidt, Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism 1760-1939 (Abingdon, 1999). Private lives, work in the church, missionary activities, etc.

• Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minnesota, 1994). Challenges of historical narrative, including the role of fiction.

• Stephen Coote, Royal Survivor: The Life of Charles II (St. Martin's, 2001). England's most entertaining king?

Comments

[Chun the Unavoidable]

Maybe I asked this before, but you include things you check from the library as "acquisitions," right?

[Miriam]

'Fraid not.