"First Thoughts": Life and Letters of Abigail Adams, Edith B. Gelles, senior scholar at the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender, Twayne Publishers, 1998; $28.95 (history).
Her husband, John Adams, was the second U.S. president. Her son, John Quincy Adams, was the sixth. Abigail Adams had a unique perch from which to survey and influence postcolonial America–and was a prodigious writer of letters whose words now fill 608 reels of microfilm. Gelles treats this correspondence as both biography and literature, using Adams’s observations to illuminate events in the half-century from 1765 to 1815. A noted Adams expert, Gelles adopts a thematic approach, offering chapters on the confidential letter, the travel letter and the historic letter. She highlights Adams’s support for revolution and women’s education. And she reveals Adams’s reaction toany suggestion her missives be preserved: "pray, burn this letter." Luckily for historians, those instructions were not followed.
12 Drummers Drumming, Diana Deverell, ’70, Avon Books, 1998; $23 (fiction).
Like a chef whipping up new dishes from ingredients close at hand, Deverell uses her former State Department career to concoct a thriller. Casey Collins is a U.S. foreign service officer whose lover is a Polish operative working for Danish intelligence. When he disappears, presumably killed in an air disaster dubbed Lockerbie Two, Collins finds herself up against international terrorists, secret agents and the FBI as she tries to unravel the case. The author’s experience, including a stint at the U.S. embassy in 1980s Warsaw, was far tamer than her heroine’s. But life behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War–and her husband’s work in Danish army intelligence–inspired Deverell’s bent for fictional espionage and terrorism. A second Casey Collins novel is due in 1999.
Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Hans Moravec, PhD ’80, Oxford University Press, 1998; $25 (artificial intelligence).
Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence has surpassed human intelligence, factories have no people working in them and robots leave humanity behind as they venture out to colonize space. Moravec, the founder of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, envisions such a reality by the middle of the next century. In this often disturbing book, he chronicles the accelerating pace of technological change and points out that integrated circuits, the brains of electronics, are already designed by computers. In other words, intelligent machines are now creating their own offspring. Although Moravec predicts unprecedented social upheaval, he still embraces this robotic future. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values," he writes, "can be viewed as children of our minds."
A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, Shelby Steele, Hoover Institution research fellow, HarperCollins, 1998; $24 (race relations).
After publication of his first book, The Content of Our Character, Steele toured the country, visiting universities and giving readings. Wherever he went, he writes in this new collection of essays, black students sought to embarrass him by denouncing his controversial argument–that black leaders stifle racial progress by pushing AfricanAmericans into the role of victim. "It is never fun to be called ‘an opportunist,’ ‘a house slave,’ " he observes. In these four essays, Steele develops and deepens his thinking about racial politics, liberal guilt and civil rights. His overarching point: the liberalism that grew out of the ’60s "was the expiation of American shame rather than the careful and true development of equality between the races." Real equality, he argues, can only come by separating race from public entitlement.
