The New Republic

The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War By Halik Kochanski (Harvard University Press, 734 pp., $35) The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery By Witold Pilecki translated by Jarek Garliński (Aquila Polonica, 460 pp., $34.95)   READ MORE >>

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. 2: 1941-1956Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge University Press, 791 pp., $50) In February 1950, David Greene, who was then a professor of English at New York University, asked a twenty-three-year-old protégé on a Fulbright year in Paris to track down Samuel Beckett.  READ MORE >>

de Kooning: A Retrospective Museum of Modern Art READ MORE >>

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Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic By Michael Scammell (Random House, 689 pp., $40) I. READ MORE >>

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone By Stanislao Pugliese (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 426 pp., $35) READ MORE >>

The German Mujahid By Boualem Sansal Translated by Frank Wynne (Europa Editions, 240 pp., $15) I. READ MORE >>

All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims.­ --Gabriel García Márquez I. Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied. READ MORE >>

Not being a military expert, I will abstain from judging whether the Israeli bombardments of Gaza could be better directed, less intense. Not being able for decades to distinguish between the good dead and the evil dead or, like Camus used to say, between "suspect victims" and "privileged executioners," I'm also deeply disturbed by the images of the Palestinian children who have been killed. READ MORE >>

Fitzgerald, eager to draw the shy, Yale-educated prep-school French teacher into his dashing retinue, arranged to have Wilder and Wilson picked up at the train station, but it was Marcel Proust who helped to smooth the way between them. "I had just read the final installment of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which had reached New York not long before, and was about to describe it to Wilder," Wilson recalled. READ MORE >>