Book reviews roundup: West of Eden; Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs; Shylock Is My Name

What the critics thought of West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall and Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson

Jean Stein’s oral history West of Eden: An American Place is “one of the best books ever written about Hollywood”, declared Gaby Wood in the Telegraph. Stein grew up in Hollywood, the daughter of a talent mogul, and “for years she has interviewed people, famous and not – Arthur Miller, Lauren Bacall, Gore Vidal, Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, former secretaries, butlers, security guards … sewing together their testimonies to compose an orchestral account of the magical, hubristic, sparkling and murky place”. Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times identified a “haunted tone”, with “stories full of lost boys and girls” and “tragedy lurk[ing] around each gilded corner”. “Wealth, fame, beauty and status are a heady mix,” admitted Fiona Wilson in the Times, but the book’s structure “means you’re essentially reading large chunks of interview transcript … Hollywood aficionados may enjoy the minutiae of famous people’s lives; others, I suspect, will tire of looking for gems among the banal recollections.”

“The title makes it sound like a low-budget afternoon B-movie,” wrote Tara Shears in the Mail on Sunday. But American theoretical physicist Lisa Randall’s Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is “a serious book” about how the matter that holds the universe together might have launched the comet that killed off the dinosaurs. “Your inner five-year-old and inner geek are going to be thrilled.” “Dark matter may have made the universe suitable for life on Earth,” mused Lewis Dartnell in The Daily Telegraph. “But did it kill the dinosaurs? The answer is: probably not.” However, “in exploring the chain of steps in the argument … Randall has woven a beautiful account of how life on Earth is intimately connected to the cosmos.” “Dark Matter and the Theory-Based-On-Some-Interesting-Speculation-And-Data-That-Doesn’t-Reach-Statistical-Significance doesn’t quite do it, title-wise”, Tom Whipple in the Times pointed out. And as Randall sets out her “speculative scenario” in just a few dozen pages, one gets the impression that most of this book “just provides bulk to the interesting bit. A little like dark matter itself.”

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