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Exiles in the Garden by Ward S. Just
Honor on the Sidelines
A review by Jonathan Yardley
For nearly a century the received wisdom in political Washington has been drawn from the famous speech Theodore Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better," he said. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of his achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall...
Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California by Jonah Raskin
'Field Days,' by Jonah Raskin
A review by Regan McMahon
At the end of the fall semester of 2006, Sonoma State University communications Professor and author Jonah Raskin, about to turn 65, decided he needed to get in touch with the earth and explore his rural surroundings. "Before it was too late," he writes in Field Days, the account of his yearlong journey among the organic farmers, farmworkers and winemakers of Sonoma County. "Before life passed me by....I wanted to regain something I had lost, and to work alongside men and women who were cultivating the earth. I wanted to eat as though for the first time, with a sense of newness." Part...
Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (UK Edition) by Patricia Fortini Brown
Venice: The Masters in Boston
A review by Andrew Butterfield
On view now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the first group show ever organized in America about Venetian painting of the late sixteenth century. Moderate in scale, the exhibition does not attempt a comprehensive survey of the period. Rather, it pre-sents only the three most important Venetian painters of the time -- Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese -- and it focuses on a selection of their works that is meant to reveal their mutual influence and competition. The exhibition seeks to demonstrate that the rivalry of the three artists was a major force in the growth of Venetian art. As ...
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Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson
Isaac Newton to the rescue
A review by Paul Collins
There are any number of settings where we might imagine Isaac Newton holding forth in February of 1699 -- under his famed apple tree, say, or before an august assembly of the Royal Society. Draining drams with counterfeiters in a lowlife London pub called the Dogg, though, seems less likely. But that's just what Britain's greatest scientist was doing -- and in Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist, Thomas Levenson has done an admirable job of explaining how that odd scene came about. Although Newton's fame comes from physics, Levenson...
Bonsai (Contemporary Art of the Novella) by Alejandro Zambra
Seed Projects
A review by Marcela Valdes
When it was published in Spanish in 2006, Alejandro Zambra's novel Bonsai filled just ninety-four generously spaced pages, and its recent English translation by Carolina De Robertis stretches only to eighty-three. Still, each of these volumes should be considered a marvel of book design and production since in interviews the author has let slip that his original text ran only to forty sheets. Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra's text has swelled -- and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size....
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
With a Little Help from My Friends
A review by William McGrew
Broad-brush theories that explain the evolutionary origins of distinctively human attributes are perennial favorites in anthropology. Whatever the nominated unifying factor -- language, technology, culture -- the challenge is to persuade a usually skeptical audience that a single phenomenon might encompass the immensity of the human condition. This is hard enough to do, given the rich tapestry of current human diversity, but it is even more difficult to plumb a factor's origins in the prehistoric past. In Mothers and Others, the hypothesis is that the key development in the transformation...
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