Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy L. Etcoff

But Blanchard, a trumpet player and film composer himself, finds new beauty and wit in the originals, fashioning mini-suites from the above-mentioned scores (and others) that shift between cinematic lushness and small-group drive. Today the sound of a saxophone wailing in the night is as tired a film noir cliche as the battered fedora-the stuff of Carol Burnett sketches.

JAZZ IN FILM Terence Blanchard Once upon a time, the jazz or jazz-inflected scores for movies like A Streetcar Named Desire and The Man with the Golden Arm were breakthroughs. The film pushes them into mud, and they get up smelling sweet. What's left? Fine turns by Courtney Love, Angela Featherstone, Dave Chapelle and Martha Plimpton. Shana Larsen's script has the feel of a sitcom pilot, with the actors urged to make a quick impression. In between there is a void-feeble jokes, a lot of falling down and foolish declarations. BY ANITA HAMILTONĢ00 CIGARETTES Directed by Risa Bramon Garcia In this comedy about a dozen or so young'uns on New Year's Eve 1981, the first few minutes have promise (with an all-star list of Gen-X actors), and the last few minutes provide fun (with snapshots of lovers and losers).

Avoiding ideological rant, Etcoff employs rigorous scientific research and amusing detail to create a great read, albeit one that won't become Naomi Wolf's favorite. But is it the fault of Vogue editors and Aaron Spelling that we do so? Skewering the popular wisdom that beauty is a social construct, this Harvard psychologist argues that we ogle such features because they radiate the health and fertility our species needs to survive. SURVIVAL OF THE PRETTIEST By Nancy Etcoff As a culture, we venerate symmetrical faces, women with perky breasts, men with V-shaped torsos.

But that is more than offset by his emotional fine tuning and pitch-perfect prose. Hijuelos' episodic format doesn't quite gel. Yet as a character endowed with romantic yearnings, she is hard to ignore. That she had been a head-turning beauty and proud daughter of a mayor in pre-Castro Cuba would not occur to someone sitting opposite her on the subway. His Lydia moves with stoic grace through decades of caring for a sickly husband, guiding her children to successful adulthoods and straightening up other people's digs. EMPRESS OF THE SPLENDID SEASON By Oscar Hijuelos Unlike his bouncy The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos' latest novel is a slow dance, an elegy to a cleaning woman, that continues the author's celebration of his Cuban roots.

Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy L. Etcoff