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The article presents information about art in the form of exhibitions. Traditionally there have been a few other reasons for curators to mount exhibitions. Until a few season's back, the curator's priviledged and discerning eye appeared relatively immune to alterations in the museum environment. The need to follow money cannot wholly account for the growing disposition among curators to appropriate the apparatus of fiction and dramaturgy: character, narrative, action, emotion, conflict, drama.

The article discusses two books "Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull," by Barbara Goldsmith and "Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored," by Mary Gabriel. In Other Powers, Barbara Goldsmith tells the story of Woodhull and her idealistic and corrupt times through a prism of the Beecher affair and trials that radiated from it. The another book by Gabriel, is an old-fashioned biography of Woodhull. It is simply the story of an extraordinary, maddening and paradoxical woman which is presented in a comprehensive manner.

The article focuses on the book, "Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America," by Ursula Hegi. A disproportionate number of the German-born baby boomers and their older siblings whom Ursula Hegi interviewed for her oral history see themselves as yet another species of hyphenated American "others," of the pink-cheeked, blue-eyed variety. They're sick of being called Nazis. Hegi's way of dealing with the dilemma is to expose the biographical viscera of the people she interviewed. Exorcism and forgiveness are Hegi's prescriptions for shame.