Reviewed Elsewhere

Reviewed Elsewhere ABRAMS, CREIGHTON Thunderbolt: General Abrams and the Army of His Times. Lewis Sorley. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. $25.00. Reviewed by David Murray. The New York Times Book Review, December 20, 1992, p. 18. " Thunderbolt is a valuable addition to the Vietnam bookshelf and ably makes a case that, capping an honorable career, Creighton Abrams fought an honorable war in a questionable cause." ALEXANDERSON, ERNST Alexanderson: Pioneer in American Electrical Engineering. James E. Brittain. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, pp. xviii + 384. $45.00. Reviewed by W. Bernard Carlson. Science, vol. 259, no. 5096, February 5, 1993, pp. 841-43. "In this well-researched book James E. Brittain . . . demonstrate^] how one broadly creative individual helped develop radio and electronics while working primarily in an engineering and not a scientific tradition. . . . Brittain reminds us that innovation is not the result of specialization as much as it is the product of cross-fertilization. . . . Brittain demonstrates in this fine biography that individual engineers such as Alexanderson have indeed played a profound role in shaping both the technology and the culture of the 20th century." ALLANSON, PATRICIA Everything She Wanted: A True Story of Obsessive Love, Murder, and Betrayal. Ann Rule. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, pp. 527. $23.00. Reviewed by Florence King. The New York Times Book Review, January 3, 1993, p. 5. "Ms. Rule knows about psychopaths. The author of the best-selling biography of Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, Ms. Rule, a former Seattle police officer, now turns her devastatingly accurate insight to the twisted mind of a modern-day Southern belle. A measure of how well she succeeds is the feeling that came over me after reading just REVIEWED ELSEWHERE 291 a few paragraphs about Pat Allanson: I wanted to reach into the book and strangle her." ANGUISSOLA, SOFONISBA Sofonisba Anguissola: The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri. New York: Rizzoli, 1992, pp. 224. $50.00 hardcover. Reviewed by Ann Sutherland Harris. Women's Review of Books, vol. 10, November 1992, pp. 20-21. "A great deal of the book consists of shaky speculations that pad out the bare bones of fact. . . . The fanciful musings and fictionalized expansion of isolated facts that characterize the Milan and Michelangelo chapters recur throughout the book. Meanwhile the substantive issues have been ignored. ... In brief, this is a disappointingly amateurish effort masquerading as a piece of major research. It will confuse the general public and infuriate better-trained scholars who try to disentangle the few new facts from the verbal padding." BEARD, MARY RITTER A Woman Making History. Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters. Nancy F. Cott. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, pp. xii + 378. $25.00/$40.00. Reviewed by Margareth Walsh. Gender and History, vol. 4, no. 3, autumn 1992, pp. 429-31. "While Mary Beard remains a shadowy domestic person, her professional profile as an historian is visible through her books and articles and her letters to a variety of public figures. As an historian she is Janus-faced. As an author in her own right she is a women's historian of great creativity. As her husband's collaborator, she offered not only a cultural dimension, but a much broader human perspective to the volumes on American history which became mainline texts in universities and schools and useful reading for the intelligent lay person. . . . Nancy Cott has provided an historical audience with an informed and acute portrait of an intelligent woman endowed with historical vision." BEAUVOIR, SIMONE DE Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work. Margaret Crossland. North Pomfret, VT: Heineman/Trafalgar Square, pp. 467. Paper, $22.95. Reviewed by Linda Simon. The New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1992, p. 28. "... despite her anger, intelligence and strength, Beauvoir allowed herself to be dominated . Although Ms. Crossland concludes that Beauvoir was 'unique,' the trajectory of her life proves otherwise. Two decades ago, we looked to Beauvoir for a new narrative for women's lives. Here, though, we find the same old story." BEAVERBROOK, LORD Lord Beaverbrook: A Life. Ann Chisholm and Michael Davie. New York: Knopf, 1993, pp. 240. $30.00. Reviewed...