The New Republic

  The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 By Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins, 870 pp., $39.95) READ MORE >>

Abbey Sings Abbey Abbey Lincoln Love Is What Stays Mark Murphy READ MORE >>

teaches classics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her new book, The Death of Socrates, will be published by Harvard University Press this fall. Hesiod: Volume I: Theogony, works and days, testimonia Translated and edited by Glenn W. Most (Harvard University Press, 308 pp., $24) hesiod: Volume II: the shield, catalogue of women, other fragments Translated and edited by Glenn W. Most (Harvard University Press, 434 pp., $24) READ MORE >>

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years Museum of Modern Art Neo Rauch at the Met: para Metropolitan Museum of Art READ MORE >>

The way on green alluvial islands where the Zambezi meets the Cuando the lions (cubs scanning smudged horizons as the father drops his snout in gore) shake out a clump of vertebra and sinews in their teeth to extract the sweetest meat so we might call it "merciless": like that we rip reality from all the surfaces that flow around us. And live in the amnesia of our doing it (I know I do) and so no end to war. And hate it in ourselves and colonize our drives and swallow them and so we eat. By Peter Campion READ MORE >>

Primo Levi's Journey Cinema Guild Blame It on Fidel Koch Lorber Dans Paris IFC First Take The very name of Primo Levi stops the heart. Affection then floods in, because, of all Holocaust survivors, he is among the closest--through his books, his darkly humane books. When Irving Howe reviewed one of Levi's books, the last line of that review was "What is the Italian for mensch?" Many of us shared the question. READ MORE >>

Christine Stansell is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. She is writing a history of feminism. The Diana Chronicles By Tina Brown (Doubleday, 560 pp., $27.) READ MORE >>

Within fourteen days of each other, two rush-hour calamities: a bridge collapse and a steam-pipe explosion. In Minneapolis, a forty-year-old bridge along highway I-35W suddenly dropped sixty feet into the Mississippi River, killing at least five people and injuring approximately one hundred more. The federal government had deemed the bridge structurally deficient in 1990, which the Minnesota Department of Transportation acknowledged in separate reports issued in 2005, 2006, and 2007, after inspecting the bridge. READ MORE >>

Alexander Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and the author, most recently, of The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Silvio Berlusconi (Penguin). Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero By Lucy Riall (Yale University Press, 496 pp., $35) READ MORE >>

David Novak is the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Jesus in the Talmud By Peter Schafer (Princeton University Press, 210 pp., $24.95) READ MORE >>