FROM WOMANHOOD TO ADAMS AND THE AURORA

Author: Date: SUNDAY, July 6, 1997

Page: F15

Section: Books

``It is not a primer for adjusting to aging,'' Borysenko writes, ``or a treatise on how to bring our daughters through adolescence, or an attempt to prove that women have characteristics that make us superior to men. Instead, I have tried to present a rich and provocative understanding of the unique biology, psychology, and the spirituality of women -- a bio-psycho-spiritual feedback loop that confers specific gifts upon our gender that continue to unfold throughout the life span.''

Borysenko, author of the popular ``Minding the Body, Mending the Mind,'' is cofounder and former director of the Mind/Body Clinic at the former New England Deaconess Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The last two years of John Adams's administration saw a constitutional and political crisis matched only by the final years of Richard Nixon's. And as was the case during the Watergate crisis, the press played a key role, raising the issues and fueling the debate. And if a newsroom full of reporters and columnists was on Nixon's ``enemies list,'' the number one enemy for Adams was the Aurora, a daily paper published in Philadelphia -- which was, until the closing months of Adams's presidency, the national capital.

Richard N. Rosenfeld, an independent scholar who lives in Chestnut Hill, has brought this dimly-remembered chapter of American history alive in ``American Aurora'' (St. Martin's, $39.95) through excerpts from the Aurora's coverage, interwoven with useful comments by the Aurora's editors and others.

The hands of Jewish women have rocked many a cradle -- that much they get credit for -- but they have received less attention for their achievements in politics, literature, popular culture, and social advocacy. In ``The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century'' (Free Press, $27.50), historian Joyce Antler, in her words, ``recounts the stories of more than fifty American Jewish women whose lives throw the larger movements of twentieth-century history in bold relief.''

Antler's subjects include Emma Lazarus, Sophie Tucker, Gertrude Stein, Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Antler is chair of the department of American studies at Brandeis University.

Composer Robert Schumann has long been considered the quintessential romantic composer, whose mental illness and death at 46 ended tragically a career that began brilliantly. In ``Robert Schumann: Herald of a `New Poetic Age,' '' (Oxford University Press, $45), Boston University musicologist John Daverio reassesses Schumann's work, maintaining that it and the man were far more complex than surviving myths: Among other things, his art was saturated with a literary sensibility.

``The Schumann I love,'' Daverio writes, ``is the whole Schumann -- not the one known to most everyone, the dreamy composer of quirky piano pieces and gorgeous songs who met a tragic end -- and this Schumann, like caviar, is something of an acquired taste.''