First Lines from New Books Out Today: January 23, 2012
“More than forty years ago, a wave of popular fascination with a musical group distinguished by youth, charm, great talent, and exceptional hair was dubbed a form of ‘mania’ by the press. We have not seen such a case of mania again…until recently, with the emergence of ‘Dudamania,’ which concerns another musical phenomenon with ferocious talent, abundant charm, and—yes, exceptional hair.”
Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music by Tricia Tunstall
“Margaret Fuller was, in her time, the best-read woman in America and the one most renowned for her intelligence. She was the leading figure in the New England movement known as transcendentalism. She edited the first avant-garde intellectual magazine in America. She was the first regular foreign correspondent, male or female, for an American newspaper. As a literary critic, she was rivaled in her era only by Edgar Allan Poe. Three years before the convention that is usually regarded as the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States, she wrote a groundbreaking book demanding legal equality for women. And yet, if the ordinary person today knows only one thing about Margaret Fuller, that particle of knowledge is likely not to concern any of her achievements, but how her life came to an end.”
The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography by John Matteson
“My fascination with disgust was ignited in the spring of 1995 in a seminar led by Paul Rozin, ‘the father of disgust in psychology,’ at the University of Pennsylvania.”
That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion by Rachel Herz
“The first thing you must know about me is that I am colossally fat. When I knew you I was what one might call plump but I am no longer plump. I eat what I want and furthermore I eat whenever I want. For years I have made very little effort to reduce the amount that I eat for I have seen no cause to. Despite this I am neither immobile nor bedridden but I do feel winded when I walk more than six or seven steps, and I do feel very shy and sort of encased in something as if I were a cello or an expensive gun.”
Heft: A Novel by Liz Moore
“This book presents a strategy for restoring the greatness of the American economy. The strategy is based on nothing more than the principles of economic freedom upon which the country was founded.”
First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity by John B. Taylor
“In first grade, I won a dead frozen rabbit at school for making up the best poem for my teacher’s husband’s frozen foods packing company, Pel-Freez, up on Zero Mountain, where everybody says the Satan worshippers are supposed to be.”
Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacy Pershall
“For the past quarter century I have had the marvelous privilege of being able to work in the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience. This book is a distillation of a large chunk of my life’s work, which has been to unravel—strand by elusive strand—the mysterious connections between brain, mind, and body.”
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran
