Publishers Weekly articles from October 1992

Publishers Weekly archives from October 1992

Petersen resigns at Ballantine; Grey from Bantam to succeed her. (Susan Petersen, Linda Grey; Ballantine Books Inc., Bantam Books Inc.)
October 26, 1992... Susan Petersen has resigned as president and publisher of the Ballantine Publishing Group and will be suceeded by the former president and publisher of Bantam Books, Linda Grey. Alberto Vitale, chairman president and CEO of Random...

Farrar, Straus & Giroux buys North Point backlist. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc. is buying the backlist books from North Point Press, which stopped frontlist publishing in 1990) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Farrar, Straus & Giroux has acquired all publishing assets of North Point Press, which ceased frontlist publishing two years ago. Financial terms were not disclosed. North Point Press ceased activity in 1990 after its founder and...

As superstores expand, independents seek advocate.
October 26, 1992... Faced with the prospect of a retail world increasingly dominated by chain superstores, many independent booksellers are fearing for nothing less than their livelihoods. Now some New England booksellers are asking who will serve as their...

Porn victim's compensation bill dead for now; will it resurface? (Congress adjourns without acting on the Pornography Victims' Compensation Act) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The media industry's nearly two-year struggle to defeat the Pornography Victims' Compensation Act ended in victory earlier this month when Congress adjourned for the year without acting on the bill, thus effectively killing it. Critics said...

Electronic networking seen as next publishing stage. (book fair in Frankfurt, Germany)
October 26, 1992... Most book publishers would consider electronic networking, the business of passing information from computer to computer through modems and telephone lines, beyond their scope; but according to a panel of experts at the Electronic...

Lannan Foundation awards $360,000 to nine writers. (Gilbert Sorrentino, A.R. Ammons, Noam Chomsky, Frank Chin, Thomas Centolella, Killarney Clary, Suzanne Gardinier, Susan Mitchell, Luis J. Rodriguez) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The literary program of the Lannan Foundation has announced the recipients of its 1992 literary awards and fellowships. The nine authors honored will receive $40,000 each. Described as awards and fellowships, the foundation recognizes...

Laughlin awarded $10,000 National Book Foundation Medal. (James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, will receive the 1992 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions, has been named the recipient of the 1992 National Book Foundation Medal for a distinguished contribution to American letters. The $10,000 award will be presented at the...

French may urge limits on U.S. A-V products in Europe. (the French would use the Maastricht Treaty as a basis for limiting the imports on various audiovisual products from the United States) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... If the Europe-Firsters have their way, U.S. media exports will be an early target of the new Community as redefined by the Maastricht Treaty. The French have been the most militant advocates of placing limits on American audiovisual...

Dorling Kindersley plans public offering in U.K. (stock offering, with prices to be announced in late October 1992) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... London-based Dorling Kindersley has issued a prospectus for its planned flotation, or public offering, with the offer price to be announced in late October. The offering is expected to raise [British pound]25 million ($42.5 million). The...

Nicholson to head HarperTrophy line. (George Nicholson will become vice president at HarperCollins Publishers) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... George Nicholson will join HarperCollins as v-p and publisher of HarperTrophy, the paperback imprint of HarperCollins Children's Books, effective today. Nicholson, formerly v-p and publisher of Dell/Delacorte Books for Young Readers, left...

Behind the bestsellers. (includes related tabular information on hardcover and paperback best-selling books for Oct 26, 1992) (Column)
October 26, 1992... BEHIND THE NUMBERS Here's a bit of arithmetic to show the varying levels of unit sales between the top books on PW's hardcover lists and the titles farther down. We took a small sample (two national chains, two regional chains and six...

Bay Area rumblings: the recession and superstores. (San Francisco Bay Area)
October 26, 1992... "The arrival of Barnes & Noble has triggered a level of introspection and conversation that I haven't seen for a long time," said Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heydey Books, referring to the new Berkeley superstore near Cody's books--one of...

Mid-South: relief, goodwill. (Mid-South Booksellers Association)
October 26, 1992... The fifth annual regional meeting and trade show hosted by the Mid-South Booksellers Association, held Sept. 11-13 in New Orleans, was relatively small--compared to more established regional meetings--and was marked by a strong sense of...

Sidelines this season off to strong start. (bookstores)
October 26, 1992... With Christmas two months away, the season of boxed cards and calendars is upon us. These two stalwart sidelines, however, are just a few of the many and varied categories booksellers are stocking and promoting as the holidays approach....

Title production for '91 rebounds. (includes related tabular information on 1991 book production)
October 26, 1992... American book title output in 1991, as recorded by R.R. Bowker data services (Reed Reference), came to 48,146, a 3% upturn from the 46,743 recorded for 1990. The latter total marked a sharp drop from the 53,446 of 1989, which in turn...

Patrick O'Brian: full speed ahead at Norton. (W.W. Norton and Company Inc.)
October 26, 1992... In 1989, after more than 40 years of writing fiction, Patrick O'Brian had only three books in print in the U.S., and all of them were translations from the French that he had undertaken of books by others. But as of April 1993, with the...

Dead wrong: errors in capital punishment from Northeastern Univ. Press.
October 26, 1992... "There are many people who are uneasy about rising crime," says Constance E. Putnam, "and they have a gut feeling that capital punishment might do something about it." But because Putnam and her co-authors, University of Florida sociology...

Young movers and shakers: two new books show that kids are taking action, whether it be improving the world or earning some spending money.
October 26, 1992... Despite theories that the MTV and Nintendo generation is largely lazy and apathetic, two recent books present evidence to the contrary: today's youth are ambitious, energetic and motivated. A wave of junior-level activism that echoes the...

Arthur on the campaign trail. (children's literature )
October 26, 1992... The bouquet of red, white and blue balloons is impressively patriotic. "ARTHUR IN '92" they proclaim, the slogan emblazoned boldly above the smiling, bespectacled, bow-tie-sporting candidate. Bill for sure, George of course, and even...

James Marshall: 1942-1992. (children's literature author/illustrator)(obituary) (Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Author-illustrator James Marshall died in Manhattan on October 13 following a long illness. He was 50 years old. Marshall was born in San Antonio, Tex. From an early age he showed talent as a musician, and following high school he...

Figuring out Frankfurt. (book fair in Frankfurt, Germany)(includes related articles on international rights and on publishers from the Far East and Latin America)
October 26, 1992... There had never been a Frankfurt Book Fair as inscrutable, not in the quarter-century PW has been covering it, and book traders spent many hours at this 44th postwar fair (Sept. 30-Oct. 5) asking one another what it all meant. The bottom line...

Maeve Binchy: Ireland's bestselling author is refreshingly modest about herself and her characters. (PW Interviews)
October 26, 1992... "Maeve's already here," says the desk clerk at Arbutus Lodge in Cork City, where PW is meeting Ireland's bestselling and most beloved living author. Maeve Binchy has driven down from Dublin this morning, and as we introduce ourselves she...

When Parents Kidnap: The Families Behind the Headlines.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The authors, both faculty members of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland, have written a comprehensive analysis of the burgeoning problem of parental abduction, of which it is estimated there may be as many as 350,000...

Tall Tales: The Glory Years of the NBA, in the Words of the Men Who Played, Coached and Built Pro Basketball.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal sportswriter Pluto has been steadily building a reputation as one of the nation's top basketball writers with books like Forty-Eight Minutes and Loose Balls; this fine oral history will surely enhance that...

Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe: Political Extremism in America.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... In four essays followed by short but detailed profiles of more than 35 extremist groups on the left and right, the authors survey the history of extremism in America. Extremism, they argue in bland but clear prese, is less a matter of...

Conjuring.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Drawing on histories, documents and his own contacts, "The Amazing Randy,'' a magician also known for his work unmasking fraudulent psychics, here provides a bread but ultimately unsatisfying history of magic and its performers. Beginning...

When the Game Was Black and White: The Illustrated History of Baseball's Negro Leagues.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... A connoisseur of diamond memorabilia, New York Daily News sportswriter Chadwick here does for black baseball what he has done for major league baseball in general: encourage its enthusiasts to appreciate its nuances. Because the so-called...

The Iron Gates of Santo Tomas: Interned by the Japanese, Manila, 1942-1945.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Van Sickle describes a twilight world in her memoir of her WW II experiences in the Japanese internment camp of Santo Tomas in the Philippines. Internees were not prisoners of war, but civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time....

Notes from a Sealed Room: An Israeli View of the Gulf War.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... During the six-week Gulf war in 1991, Wennan, an American-born Israeli physician, lived through the threat and the reality of Scud attacks, and sent daily reports to electronic pen pals over a computer network that extended as far as the U.S....

At Your Service: Memoirs of a Majordomo.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The sequel to the coauthors' upstairsdownstairs account of the Marlo Thomas and Phil Donshue household (That Girl and Phil) tells tales about other former employers of superbutler Atholl, such as New York's Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg. Others...

What Every Woman Should Know About Her Husband's Money.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Charging that despite changes in marriage, divorce and inheritance laws, the U.S. legal system still favors men, and that many divorcees and widows are largely unprepared to manage legal and money matters, freelance financial journalist White...

The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... With a poet's ear and a scientist's eye, biologist Campbell brings the Antarctic to vivid, teeming life in this eloquent, comprehensive natural and social history of the ice-clad continent below the Southern Ocean. Over the course of three...

With Friends Like You: What Israelis Really Think About American Jews.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Israeli journalist Golan asserts that American Jews have no right to criticize Israel, for it is the Israelis, and not the Americans, who face destruction every day. American Jews, he charges, are in danger of total assimilation and are...

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... For English poet Hughes, Shakespeare was "a prophetic shaman of the Puritan revolution," his plays mythic reenactments of the holy war between Catholic and Puritan fanaticism. This arcane, often fadetched study maintains that the Bard tapped...

I Promised My Dad.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... After actor, director and scriptwriter Michael Landon became incurably ill with cancer, his stepdaughter Cheryl Wilson determined "te honor and protect his name" following his death. This balanced portrait, written with freelancer Scovell,...

Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Eclipsed by the Impressionists, Naturalist painters are restored to their rightful place in the history of art in this remarkable, lavishly illustrated study. Influenced by Emile Zola's writings, French Naturalist artists documented...

Seeking the Path to Life: Theological Meditations on God and the Nature of People, Love, Life and Death.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... In 45 intense meditations, each a page or two in length, Stone, a Philadelphia rabbi, brings a humanistic perspective to such topics as marriage, divorce, holiness, atonement, prophecy, miracles, Israel, the Holocaust and God's healing power....

Family Healing: Tales of Renewal from Family Therapy.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Salvador Minuchin and Michael P. Nichols. Free Press, $22.95 (300p) ISBN 0-02-921295-2 Minuchin, family therapy pioneer and author of the classic text Families and Family Therapy, and Nichols (No Place to Hide), professor of psychiatry at...

Taking the Waters: Spirit / Art / Sensuality.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Croutier (Harem) visited many of the world's famed spas, including Evian in France and Baden-Baden in Germany. Her tour of watering places from California to Switzerland is the core of this charming, copiously illustrated volume, which...

The Genius of Sitting Bull: 13 Heroic Strategies for Today's Business Leaders.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Stretching a simile, this alarmist book about current American economic problems charges that for lack of "heroic leadership," we face a social and economic disaster comparable to that suffered at Little Bighorn in 1876 by Custer against...

Gift of Power: The Life and Teachings of a Lakota Medicine Man.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Lame Deer here recreates his transformation from born hell-raiser to born-again "holy man" of his Lakota Indian tribe in South Dakota. Writing with longtime family friend Erdoes (Living on the Brink of Apocalypse), Lame Deer exposes his life...

The Art of Growing Older: Writers on Living and Aging.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Culled chiefly from great literary works, this unusual compendium of prose and poetry excerpts highlights the physical and emotional aspects of aging. Although Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction), age 71, includes such cheery banal verse as "I...

Doing Best By Doing Good: How to Use Public-Purpose Partnerships to Boost Corporate Profits and Benefit Your Community.
October 26, 1992... 50 Aimed more at businesses than at nonprofit organizations, this anecdote-filled primer suggests, a bit over-optimistically, that alignments of the two can bring mutual success. Steckel and Simons, the coauthors of Filthy Rich and Other...

Brice Marden: Paintings and Drawings.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Brice Marden's art is deceptively austere. Within the seemingly narrow color range of his paintings and drawings, he orchestrates remarkable thematic variations of color, light, scale and mood. His monochromatic gray palette of the 1960s,...

Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... In this deeply textured philosophical analysis, Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite), a sociologist in Morocco, argues cogently that Islam has been perverted by Arab leaders who want to deny their people democracy. Mixing personal...

Desert Time: The Spirit of the American Southwest.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... A self-confessed interloper from Connecticut, Kappel-Smith (Wintering) attempts to interpret the Southwest by examining its geology and the people, plants and animals that dot its unique landforms. Here, she extends the region from its normal...

Memory's Voice: Deciphering the Mind-Brain Code.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... In his 25-year search for memory sites in the brain, Alkon has been driven by a personal motive. His friend Michelle, brutally beaten by her father as a child, succumbed to schizophrcnia and then committed suicide. How, Aikon wondered, does...

Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... In his outstanding institutional and doctrinal history of the Russian army from the military reforms following the Crimean War to the outbreak of war in 1914, Menning, a U.S. Army analyst, discusses how the army prepared itself to fight in an...

Music and the Mind.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Rejecting the Freudian notion that music is a form of infantile escapism, British psychologist Storr (Solitude) argues that music originates from the human brain, promotes order within the mind, exalts life and gives it meaning. In an...

Beyond the Hype: Rediscovering the Essence of Management.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Countering established business planning and design approaches, the authors, faculty members of the Harvard Business School, propose a more "robust," action-oriented manager, characterized as flexible, pragmatic and skilled in the use of...

When Is It Right to Die? Suicide, Euthanasia, Suffering, Mercy.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Tada (Joni) frames her view of the "right to die" issue in the context of personal growth through tragedy-- her own as teenage victim of an accident that left her a quadriplegic and other episodes involving those close to her--into an...

The Wind Won't Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Emily Benedek. Knopf, $25 (480p) ISBN 0-894-55429-9 Public Law 93-531, the Navajo-Hopi Settlement Act passed by Congress in 1974, set off a chain of events that has brought misery and uncertainty to thousands of Native Americans, has thus far...

Voices that Care: Stories and Encouragements for People with AIDS/HIV and Those Who Love Them.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... "I am now able to hear a concert or see a fireworks display and appreciate the beauty... I know this may sound odd, but I would never have wanted to miss all of that." So wrote AIDS victim Mark Gifford shortly before he succumbed to the...

Broadway Day and Night: Backstage and Behind the Scenes.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Along with a broken heart for every light on Broadway (as an old tune has it), there's also a story. Producer Marsolias and AIDS activists McFarlane and Viola here collect tales from those who work in the contemporary New York City theater....

The Civil War: A Treasury of Art and Literature.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Splicing exceptional artworks with letters, extracts from diaries, journalistic dispatches, memoirs, poems and historical writings, this mosaic succeeds admirably in conveying a vivid firsthand impression of the Civil War as both sides...

Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Shot John Lennon.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... From the title's tasteless allusion to the Lennon song "Strawberry Fields Forever" to the excusing treatment of a psychopath, this sensationalistic biography proves repugnant. Jones, noted for being the first reporter to interview "Son of...

The Invisible Epidemic: The Story of Women and AIDS.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The World Health Organization, reports journalist Corea (The Mother Machine), estimates that by the year 2000, HIV-positive women will outnumber similarly infected men. In this eye-opening account of women's struggle to be counted as...

The Grand Canyon.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... In 1871, on his second expedition to the Grand Canyon, American explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell brought along an artist and a photographer. Since that time, visitors have continued to try to capture its visual grandeur on film and...

Kitchen.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Yoshimoto, the young Japanese author of the two novellas in this volume, brings to her work an indisputably fresh and original imagination. The welcome surprise of the novella Kitchen is somewhat muted by its pairing with Moonlight Shadows,...

The Mystery Roast.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... During a visit to New York's most prestigious museum, Eric Auden slips into a wing under renovation and impulsively pockets an ancient idol of the Goddess of Desire. As the city speculates about the bold thief's identity, Eric begins a new...

The Czar's Madman.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The plot of Kross's first novel to appear in English may indeed "most resemble the quick scene changes of Italian operas," as the narrator says, but this Estonian author's approach is provocative, original and highly political. Timo von Bock,...

Wonders of the West.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The accomplished Braverman's (Palm Latitudes) latest work seems destined to draw unfavorable comparisons with Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here. Like Simpson's novel, it concerns a girl whose reckless young mother uproots them both to...

Peachy.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Not much time passes in this short but zany novel: Peachy Marvel (nee Patricia Fish) installs her only surviving daughter in first-year student housing at Harvard, meditates in a Cambridge bookstore for an hour and a half, gets picked up by a...

Degree of Guilt.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... This big courtroom thriller, which comes garlanded with hefty foreign sales and a huge first printing, is being touted as the best of its kind since Scott Turow's fiction debut. It does not survive such a comparison well, having none of the...

The Living One.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... This well-intentioned but vastly overdone first novel adds Big Brother to the cast of Dark Shadows, then throws in coming-out-of-the-closet angst. Rich kid Torrance Spoor is transplanted from California to coastal Massachusetts by his wacko...

Mixed Blessings.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The prolific Steel (No Greater Love) turns her attentions to a contemporary topic: infertility, and the desperate measures that couples resort to in the hope of biological parenthood. Steel's approach, however, is often maudlin and...

Ruin.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Congratulations are due the publisher for bringing out the first English'language edition of this seminal work of Italian neorealism. Widely considered one of the most influential Italian writers of the 20th century, Fenoglio (1922-1963)...

The Big Lonely.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Brown (The Crime of Coy Bell) once again makes good use of his extensive experience as a working cowboy in this elegiac novel of the late-l9th-century American West. Casey Wills, the narrator, and Josh Smith are two hardworking cowboys at the...

Nouvelle Soul: Short Stories.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... A simplistic prose style and weak structure hamper many of the 24 stories in one of the first offerings from this new press, Summers's fiction debut. Set in various American cities and in Paris, the entries center on modern African Americans,...

Laszlo's Millions.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Elkon's sly, riotous romp is so busy being a farce, a political thriller, a coming-of-age novel and a satire of the '60s counterculture that it runs out of steam about halfway through. Tom Bloch, a South African hippie, student activist and...

The Singing Tree.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Set in Brazil's Amazon basin, this short, powerful first novel takes the form of a journal kept by aged rubber planter Kurt Hellmann, aka Kristian Hardy, who conceals his sordid past in Nazi Germany. As a young Bavarian railway stationmaster,...

Century 21.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Imagine Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, but then make it literary, make it coed and make many of the guests fictional, and one begins to get an idea of this provocative and moving first novel by the Polish artist, art historian and poet....

The 64-Square Looking Glass: The Great Game of Chess in World Literature.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Even a quick look at the table of contents reveals the breadth and vigor of this anthology. Entries progress with ease from the reverent (Charles Krauthammer's) to the eelebratory (Ezra Pound's), the nonsensical (Lewis Carroll's) to the...

Lost Boys.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Accomplished fantasy/SF writer Card (The Memory of Earth) has turned his autobiographical short story "Lost Boys" into an intriguing demi-mainstream novel. Here the Card family has been transmuted into the Fletchers, devout Mormons with three...

A Christmas Sampler: Classic Stories of the Season from Twain to Cheever.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... These diverse, inviting American tales and sketches range from Washington Irving's cozy "Christmas Thoughts" (in which "heart calleth unto hear") to Bobbie Ann Mason's bittersweet "Drawing Names," in which a lover fails to keep a date. The...

Inadmissible Evidence.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... The author of Reasonable Doubt returns with another unusually convincing courtroom procedural. When an appeals court sets aside a verdict declaring real estate developer Roberto Morales guilty of raping and murdering his girlfriend, the...

The Iron Glove.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Set in Indianapolis and featuring a PI who's almost 70, Tierney's "Deets" Shanahan series offers characters of depth and sensuality and well-placed swipes of razor-sharp humor. After the body of Senator Holland's wife is fished from a river,...

Fatal Opinions.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... In the fifth Chief Inspector Alec Stainton mystery, Murray (Fetch Out No Shroud) marshals a cast of wretched, unsympathetic characters and moves them along at a lackluster pace. Members of CAMEX (Campaign Against Medical Experimentation) are...

Bloodlines.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Conant (Gone to the Dogs) turns crusader in her energetic sixth dog-lover's mystery. Dog expert Holly Winter, the winsome narrator, can't resist passing along advice to dog lovers, whether on choosing an appropriate breed or on purchasing L.L....

Hotel Morgue.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... British food writer Laurence introduced caterer/sleuth Darina Lisle in A Deepe Coffyn. In this, her third appearance, the 28-year-old heroine attempts a career move after her earnest beau, Der. Sgt. William Pigram, introduces her to the Hotel...

Diamond Head.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Written in stilted prose reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century setting, this fourth in a series (following Arabian Pearl) is the hardcover debut of consulting detective Abigail Danforth. Miss Abigail has traveled to the Hawaiian islands...

Murder in the West Wing.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Roosevelt's posthumously published 11th mystery starring his mother Eleanor relies on name recognition and behind-the-scenes tattling to sustain interest in its mediocre plot. In March 1936, White House staffer Paul Duroc dies of cyanide...

The Noel Coward Murder Case.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... "Fame is so exhausting," laments this mystery's eponymous hero--as enervating, unfortunately, as reading this latest offering frem Baxt (A Queer Kind of Death). From the discovery of a corpse in a Shanghai river to a (surprisingly tame)...

Criminal Damage.(Brief Article)
October 26, 1992... Mrs. Newton, a widow, enjoys a quiet and determinedly tidy life in the picturesque English village of Middle Bardolph, but storms are brewing that seem likely to unsettle it. Geoffrey, her boring and not very pleasant son, thinks his mother...