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Margaria FichtnerGrowing up too quickly in small-town Florida
Growing up too quickly in small-town Florida
- Glory Marie is the saddest and most scary female character to inhabit Fowler's fiction. Entrapped by alcoholism and a violent past, she loves her daughters with a terrible fierceness. Before Women Had Wings. Connie May Fowler. Putnam. 272 pages. $22.95.
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COMMENT
Did publisher do the right thing in turning down Goebbels book?
- FRANCIS LOEWENHEIM Should a major U.S. publisher cancel publication of a biography of Joseph Goebbels, the top Nazi propagandist and virulent anti-Semite, because the book has been described by some advance reviewers as ``repellent'' and ``scurriously misleading,'' and because word of its forthcoming appearance aroused considerable political opposition?
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An on-the-skids adventurer among the mines and Rose beds
- Rose. Martin Cruz Smith. Doubleday. 368 pages. $25.95. By LES STANDIFORD ``The most beautiful women in the world were African,'' begins Martin Cruz Smith's new novel, Rose; it is the opening to a passage that illuminates the passions of Jonathan Blair, gold mining engineer, African explorer, iconoclast, soon-to-be amateur detective and the protagonist of this literate and engaging historical mystery set, not in Africa, as it turns out, but in the British coal fields of the 1870s.
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Preppie roomies and how they grew
- The Last of the Savages. Jay McInerney. Knopf. 320 pages. $24. By BETSY WILLEFORD Outside the world of TV sitcoms, it would be hard to imagine two more unlikely prep-school roommates than Patrick Kearne and Will Savage, one a working-class student from a nearby New England mill town, the other a Memphis renegade with patricide in his DNA. They meet in 1967, at the beginning of ``that psychedelic decade,'' and remain close while Patrick goes on to become a corporate lawyer and Will a kingmaker in the music business with an ego the size of a military transport and a body overripe as the mature Marlon Brando's.
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Balancing two lives in quest of a dream
- América's Dream. Esmeralda Santiago. HarperCollins. 325 pages. $23. By KATHLEEN KROG América Gonzalez, the heroine of Esmeralda Santiago's first novel, works as a maid in a small resort on a Puerto Rico out island. When the story begins, América hasn't yet articulated a dream to motivate her beyond her confined world.
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PAPERBACKS
News to use, Florence and lovers' tales
- By CHARLES SOLOMON Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News and Why: The 1996 Project Censored Yearbook. Edited by Carl Jensen & Project. Seven Stories. 352 pages. $14.95.
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MOTHER, MAY I?
- Would your mom permit you to hang her from the ceiling and dress her like an angel? Would she drag a large wooden cross down a supermarket aisle? Would she pose in a geisha girl's kimono? A treadbare fur coat? Prison stripes? Probably not. So, lucky Judy Olausen. The photographer's 74-year-old mother, Vivian, will do anything for a wacky picture, such as Mother as Enabler, above. Vivian explores parenthood's wild side in Mother (Penguin Studio, $24.95). We love the wooden clothespins, the poker chips and the I Like Ike button.
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