The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

(Despite the length of the list, nearly everything on it was either free, for review, or courtesy of an Amazon gift certificate [thanks, W. W. Norton!].) 

  • Joseph Hocking, "Lest We Forget" (Ward & Lock, c. 1901).  One of the last Victorian historical novels about the Marian persecutions, this one from a Methodist POV.  Some background & a bibliography here.  (AbeBooks)
  • Michael Pritchett, The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis (Unbridled, 2007).  Unhappy high school history teacher attempts to write a biography.  (Amazon [secondhand])
  • Geoff Ryman, Was (Penguin, 1993).  Triple plot: a dying man obsessed with The Wizard of Oz, the life of Judy Garland, and the "real" Dorothy Gale.  A reacquisition, really, as I got rid of a damaged copy a few years back.  (From a colleague)
  • W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 2000).  Meditations (in transit) on memory, featuring Sebald, Kafka, and Stendhal.  (From a colleague)
  • ---, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1997).  Entwined biographies of four Jews in exile.  (From a colleague)
  • ---, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1999).  Sebald treks across England.  (From a colleague)
  • Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (Vintage, 1999).  An adolescent boy makes a horrifying discovery about the woman with whom he is obsessed.  (From a colleague)
  • Graham Greene, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (Simon & Schuster, 1980).  Short satirical novel about a man who humiliates his greedy guests.  I have vague memories of the BBC adaptation.  (From a colleague)
  • Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves: A Novel (Harper, 2008).  The decades-long aftermath of a 1911 murder and its repercussions for the local Indian community.  (BOMC)
  • Kate Christensen, The Great Man (Anchor, 2008).  An artist's biographers reveal various unsavory truths.  (Lift Bridge)
  • Diane E. Boyd, ed., Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-century Women Transforming Public and Private (Delaware, 2008).  Essays on women's work, authorship, the gendered public sphere.  (To be reviewed for Choice)
  • Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, 2nd ed. (Wipf & Stock, 1999).  Revised edition of this controversial study.  (Amazon [secondhand])
  • James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Belknap, 2007).  Hermeneutics during the English Reformation.  (Amazon [secondhand])
this-weeks-acquisitions