Sunday at Borders - 30 July

New and reviewed this week in History and Historical Fiction.

History
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum (reviewed by Dennis Drabelle in the Washinton Post) -- Drabelle makes Blum's book sound like just another delve into those wacky Victorians and their crazy sublimation of sex into the supernatural. But medium Euspasia Palladino, who "liked to take off her clothes during her spells and often woke up avid to make love," sounds like she could support a book of her own.

Archie and Amelie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age by Donna M. Lucey (reviewed by Francine Prose in the Washington Post) -- He was an Astor family scion who escaped from the Bloomingdale Asylum; she was a breathless novelist from a fading Southern family: together, they were a total disaster. Francince Prose makes this turn-of-the-last-century biography sound cheerfully lurid.

The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America by Rodney Bolt (reviewed by Megan Marshall in the New York Times) -- Da Ponte, a poet who slept his way through eighteenth-century Europe and wrote the libretto for La Nozze di Figaro, sounds interesting enough. But the insanely long subtitle and reviewer's tendency to focus on her own failed book pitches make me much less inclined to read about him.

Historical Fiction
Triangle by Katharine Weber (reviewed by Frances Itali in the Washington Post) -- Itani isn't entirely sure what she thinks of this novel about modern characters with unusual ties to New York's 1911 Triangle Fire, but she knows she loves the first person plural ("We feel we must grieve ..."). The novel could be intreresting, or it could just be a melange of postmodern metafictional techniques -- hard to say.

Brookland by Emily Barton (reviewed by Christopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books [subscription required]) -- The Brooklyn Bridge, designed by John Augustus Roebling, opened in 1883 -- but what if a woman had tried building it seventy years earlier? Barton's novel, which combines fictional letters with narration "reconstructed" from other letters, sounds oddly compelling.