From Book News, Inc.
We all liked the idea of cheap, clean, unlimited power. Oh well. A co-chairman of the US Department of Energy's Cold Fusion Panel (now disbanded) chronicles the experimental uncertainties, inadequate controls, and improper assessment of errors behind the 1989 announcement of tabletop cold fusion, the millions of dollars sunk in trying to reproduce the effect elsewhere, and the ruined careers. He warns against going public before a lot of scientists agree. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
Review
'(A) timely survey of critical readings of Charles Lamb.' YEAR'S WORK IN ENGLISH STUDIES
Book Description
The English poet Charles Lamb (1775-1834) stimulates reactions that often lie outside the boundaries of literary criticism, reactions that are often motivated by ideological, cultural or political concerns. He poses particularly difficult, even unanswerable, questions that often provoke intemperate anger or great affection in readers. Historically, the first critical misunderstanding of Lamb is to see him as a radical; later he is canonized a domestic saint; in the 1930s he is a reactionary bourgeois. More recently, he is understood as a conscious artist; first, by New Critics as a transcendent optimist, then, in the post-structuralist version, as a tormented soul creating his artifice out of the limitations of human life. This study, a comprehensive history of reactions to Lamb, proposes that perhaps Lamb is a literary 'trickster' who delights in raising just those contradictions of modern life which those who attempt a systematic style of criticism would like to ignore.
That Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics FROM THE PUBLISHER
Lamb stimulates reactions that often lie outside the boundaries of literary criticism, motivated by ideological, cultural or political concerns, so he is in turn seen as a radical, a domestic saint, and, in the 1930, as a reactionary bourgeois. More recently, he is understood as a conscious artist; first, by New Critics as a transcendent optimist, then, in the post-structuralist era, as a tormented soul creating his artifice out of the limitations of human life. This study offers a comprehensive history of reactions of Lamb.
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