Month: October 2008
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A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher BenfeyThe Penguin Press, 2008
The subtitle of this book—”Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade”—is more gossipy-seeming than the book itself is (though I think its gossipy bits, about Mabel Loomis Todd’s affair with Austin Dickinson, and Henry Ward Beecher’s possible affair with Elizabeth Tilton, are…
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The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha HuntHoughton Mifflin, 2008
It’s 1943 and Nicola Tesla is eighty-six and living in obscurity in the Hotel New Yorker: in this novel, a snooping chambermaid whose father’s best friend claims to have just built a time machine befriends him; he talks to the pigeons on his windowsill; the ghost of Sam Clemens writes Tesla’s biography. The New York…