How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and: Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci, and: More Shapes Than One, and: Tall Stranger, and: Rising Sun, and: The Trail Home, and: After Henry, and: South America Mi Hija, and: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, and: The Readers' Companion to American History, and: Far From Any Coast, Pieces of America's Heartland, and: Cowboys Are My Weakness, and: Birds of Sorrow: Notes from a River Junction in Northern New Mexico, and: Immortality, and: The General in His Labyrinth, and: The Digs in Escondido Canyon, and: Writing for Love and Money, and: Let It Ride, and: A Thousand Acres, and: Maus II: A Survivor's Tale; And Here My Troubles Began, and: Maus, and: Where The Bluebird Sings To The Lemonade Springs, and: Outerbridge Reach, and: Life Force, and: Begin to Exit Here (review)

-mews^L mimi How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents By JuUa Alvarez Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 290 pp., $16.95 This is the story of four rollicking young sisters who are ready to embrace their new life in America with more gusto and abandon than their Old World parents can even begin to fathom. Political exiles from the Dominican Republic, the Garcia family are the protagonists in a story that unfolds in an eerie but often hilarious set of fifteen vignettes told in reverse chronological order. The years are 1989-1956 and the four sisters divorce, marry, struggle to remember Spanish, smoke pot, wear red high-top sneakers, attend boarding schools, hide their father from the secret police, and flee to the United States. They are raised by a hard-working Papi whose motto is "good bulls sire cows" and a Marni who insists on speaking English at home. After all, she says, "When in Rome, do unto the Romans!" The plot of this first novel is not straightforward but the stories pile up, points of view overlap, and the result is a sense of remarkable family history and mythology still in the making. Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci By Serge Bramly. Translated by Sian Reynolds. Edward Burlingame Books/HarperCollins , 1992, 492 pp., $35 This book may not solve the enigma of da Vinci, but it does present a reasonably coherent vision of the man many would call the most fascinating and complex figure in history. Bramly overcomes formidable obstacles (the diverse nature of Leonardo's pursuits, scant and scattered personal and firsthand information, a small body of artistic work, of which a sizeable portion has been lost or damaged) to present Leonardo as a living, breathing man. The book scores particularly high points for its vivid recreation of the cultural, political, and artistic milieu of Renaissance Italy. In warm, lucid language, Bramly takes us from Leonardo's illegitimate birth in the tiny village of Vinci, to his apprenticeship in Florence , to his rise to maturity and fame in Milan, and to his death in the royal court of France (was it really in the arms of Francois I?). Along the way, we investigate his apparent homosexuality, his tangle with Michelangelo, his friendship with Machiavelli, his vegetarianism, and his penchant for practical jokes. Bramly's Leonardo is a genius at once supremely confident and tragically insecure, haunted by his illeThe Missouri Review · 209 gitimacy and chronic inability to complete his work. Though somewhat speculative at times, Bramly refrains from the hyperbole of Vasari 's Lives, or the stiff authoritative tone of Clark's study, which focuses mainly on da Vinci as artist. Leonardo is fascinating stuff. More Shapes Than One By Fred Chappell St. Martin's Press, 1991, 197 pp., $17.95 Although Chappell's twentieth book is only his second collection of short fiction, it reflects his remarkable versatility within this genre. Here are elaborate parables, eerie folktales, and quirky historical portraits, each of which exhibits the distinctive blend of technical mastery and imaginative vigor that characterizes all of Chappell's writing . As in his previous collection, Moments Of Light, the stories in More Shapes Than One are vehicles for Chappell's now customary concerns: man's heroic quest for justice, meaning, and happiness in a heedless and chaotic world, and the transcendent role of art as an antidote to the mundane . Sometimes bizarre, frequently exotic, these newest tales are variously funny and profound, whimsical and wicked. Tall Stranger By Gillian Conoley Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991, 66 pp., $15.95 settle in with her quirks of voice and style. She is at once controlled but eccentric, lyric yet hard-edged. In the later sections, she expands her subjects, investigating risky matters like skinheads and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, and her style becomes even more amibitious. Conoley succeeds with a disturbing grace which is equally at home investigating love, the body, or "Walt Whitman in the Car Lot, Repo or Used." This volume captures America's peculiar beauty, its odd rhythms and contradictions . Rising Sun By Michael Crichton Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, 356 pp., $22 Crichton's latest techno-thriller...