In a year in which audiences have been captivated by Mad Men's exploration of the early 1960s and Julia Child's foray into the male-dominated world of Le Cordon Bleu, it seems Americans can't get enough of postwar culture and its constraints, especially as they apply to gender. What better time, then, to look at American women's progress since the '60s, now that the dust has settled on the 2008 presidential election when so much was won (and lost) by women?

Shields recounts an anecdote he heard about a film director who happened to sit next to George W. Bush on a flight from Seoul. During the flight, a Korean dentist took out his camcorder and panned from Bush to the famous director to the in-flight showing of "King Kong." It's a humorous, plausibly peculiar moment that, in the ubiquity of the camera, the filming of the film, and the odd juxtaposition of people on the plane, encapsulates postmodernity.

Beryl Markham isn't a household name today, but she was once renowned as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic solo, and the first pilot to cross it from east to west (harder because it's against the wind)as well as for her scandal-inducing love life, including three marriages and a probable affair with Prince Harry, Duke of Gloucester. She's a fascinating figure, a woman out of step with her times, alternately celebrated and reviled, who lived in relative poverty later in life until her 1942 memoir "West With the Night" was reissued, becoming a surprise bestseller in 1983.

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Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart By Claire Harman Knopf Doubleday 480 pp. This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients, or customers. Visit www.csmonitorreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.

Her Again' tells how Meryl Streep became a star -CSMonitor.com http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/Books/Book-Reviews/2016/0428/Her-Again-tells-how-Meryl-Streep-became-a-star 1/2 Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep By Michael Schulman HarperCollins 304 pp.

New York, as a capital of finance and culture, has been one of Hollywood’s favorite settings, often functioning as a glamorous character itself.  Yet in the wake of 9/11, escalating government surveillance prompted filmmakers to call this image into question.  Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film "The Visitor" marks a turning point.  Set in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse, support-the-troops signs and flags haunt the city, saturating it with reminders of 9/11’s political repercussions.  In this article, I explore McCarthy’s portrayal of New York and its Muslim immigrants, who overturn stereotypes of (male) terrorists or (female) victims.  Their displacement instead creates an “unhomely fiction” (to draw on Homi Bhaba’s term) signaling a threat to the city by the state.  Their fate, and that of the protagonist--an economist who studies capital but knows little of its human face--suggests the problem of the post-9/11 U.S., rather than terrorism, is American exceptionalism, which expels certain bodies as dangerous because they lack cultural and political capital.