Open Letters Monthly: Salman Rushdie, Katharine Hepburn, and the British Poet Laureate

The July Open Letters Monthly has been posted, and as usual it's full of good stuff:

Irma Heldman calls Stieg Larsson's protagonist in The Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbest Salander, "one of the most intriguing, mesmerizing, addictive, original female characters ever created." (I still haven't gotten around to Larsson's first book involving Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But it's on my Kindle.)

Bryn Haworth writes about Carol Ann Duffy, the new British poet laurate, and argues that "if what the job really entails is “giving Britannia a poetic voice,” no one is better qualified than Duffy."

John G. Rodwan, Jr., compares Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence to Herman Melville's Moby Dick and finds that in both books, "the two writers enthusiastically pursue the wily, loose fish of truth even as they admire its elusiveness."

Sarah Hudson claims that the films of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy hold up "because their films tended to be about the clash between personal ambition and personal relationships, something that men and women haven’t really been able to reconcile in the sixty-five years since Woman of the Year premiered." I admit I'm a little skeptical of this--I had a Katharine Hepburn marathon after her death a few years back, and thought that the implicit argument in these films was both sexist and outdated. Maybe I'll rewatch.

Thomas J. Daly reviews Richard Beeman's new book about the making of the Constitution, Plain, Honest Men, and finds that "Beeman’s gift for subtlety, inquisitiveness, judicious judgments and dispassionate objectivity that makes his book to stand out."