Nonfiction
Net Chick:
A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World
By Carla Sinclair. Henry Holt/An Owl Book.
Choosing which sites to visit on that amorphous Internet entity, the World Wide Web, is surely a matter of taste and interest; the best guidebooks (such as the "NetGuide" series) tend to focus on a particular subject, ferreting out every related nook and cranny the Web contains. "Net Chick" targets a heretofore ignored audience: it is not only the first definitive net-guide geared toward women, but proves to be a sassy, supremely subjective and meticulously researched look at today's (and tomorrow's) techno-culture -- like Wired magazine, but for women.
Sinclair is, in fact, a regular contributor to Wired, as well as editor-in-chief and co-founder of bOING bOING, a West Coast technology-oriented 'zine. With her formidable on-line experience and energetic, girl-talk style, she shines a kind of power-feminist -- yet unabashedly feminine -- light on the Web. She's as enthusiastic with her on-line shopping tips as she is detailing feminist chat groups. Chapters titles range from "Sexy" (with humorous takes on cyberporn and "teledildonics") to "Media Freak" (with a list of e-mags and on-line books) to "Feelin' Groovy" (which includes sites devoted to yoga tips and herbal remedies). Each chapter contains blurb-like reviews of appropriate web sites and chat groups, along with intelligent (and often amusing) interviews with "cybergrrrls" like super-hacker St. Jude. Net novices will appreciate the overtly casual tone (the book opens with the line, "Loosen your bra straps and take a deep breath...") and lay-out (a magazine-like mix of text, pictures and side-bars). Odd finds like a list of "home pages" (personal, individually-built web-sites) should intrigue seasoned web-users. Overall, Sinclair succeeds in spinning the Web as the woman-friendly landscape it is.
-- Megan Harlan
All Rivers Run to the Sea:
MEMOIRS
By Elie Wiesel. Knopf.
In the late fifties, Elie Wiesel took a voyage to Brazil. By then his starving student days were behind him, and he had begun to have some success as a journalist in Paris. In fact, he was traveling on assignment to write about a group of Jews, unhappy with life in Israel, who had taken the Catholic Church's offer of free transatlantic passage plus two hundred dollars in return for a promise to convert.
Wiesel himself was fresh from a romantic triumph. A woman named Hanna, a teasing beauty whom he had adored for years, unexpectedly asked him to marry her. Wrestling nonetheless with his decision, he got on the boat. Then, at sea, Wiesel locked himself in his cabin and began to write, "feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading," composing an account of his concentration camp years.
It had been more than a decade since the Nazis rode into the Hungarian shtetl of Sighet, since Wiesel's family went in a sealed cattle car to Auschwitz, since he emerged, only sixteen and among the walking dead. In the intervening years, he and his surviving sisters hadn't talked about it at all. Then on this voyage, when his new life had undeniably taken hold, came this torrent, this testimony. The account would become "Night," Weisel's first book.
In this memoir, Wiesel recalls events spanning from his own birth to Israel's 1967 war. After his voyage to Brazil, he wrote many more books and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of Soviet Jews. But no event in "All Rivers Run to the Sea" was of more moment for Wiesel as a writer than this one, the instant in which the personal expressed the epochal, in which Wiesel began to reclaim his past and so could proceed.
-- Jim Paul
