• Philipp Meyer’s engrossing first novel, “American Rust.”

• The History and Present State of Electricity by Joseph Priestley (out of print)
• A World on Fire by Joe Jackson
• The Scientists by John Gribbin (Random House, $18). A sprawling, delightful history of science, from the Renaissance on, that emphasizes the people, not the paradigm shifts. Gribbin is most illuminating in the book’s first half, which explores the emergence of the scientific method itself.
• Leviathan and the Air Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer (Princeton, $38). A look at the philosophical and scientific changes that rippled out from the invention of the air pump in the 1600s, including the crucial invention of the modern notion of an experiment. It’s an academic book, but the prose is largely jargon-free, and the ideas consistently ingenious.
• The First Word by Christine Kenneally (Penguin, $16). Kenneally’s 2007 book is the story of modern linguistics. Its account of Noam Chomsky’s breakthrough work on generative grammar—and the controversy it sparked—is ­riveting intellectual history, as is the explanation of Chomsky’s strange resistance to Darwinian explanations of our “language instinct.”

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• seems a somewhat flippant account of Agamemnon’s tragedy, as immortalized by Aeschylus in his “Oresteia” trilogy (458 B.C.), it is in keeping with the tone of Anne Carson’s new translation. Her Agamemnon is brash and slangy. When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, the standard translation was Richmond Lattimore’s, published in 1953. Lattimore had labored mightily — perhaps too mightily — in pursuit of grandeur, achieved chiefly through high diction and a studious English reconstitution of Greek meters. Here, in a typical passage, the Chorus asks Clytemnestra about her husband’s possible return:
• I ask the gods some respite from the weariness
   of this watchtime measured by years I lie awake
   elbowed upon the Atreidae’s roof dogwise to mark
    the grand processionals of all the stars of night. . . .
• Gods! Free me from this grind!
   It’s one long year I’m lying here watching waiting watching waiting —
   propped on the roof of Atreus, chin on my paws like a dog.
   I’ve peered at the congregation of the nightly stars. . . .
• Any attempt, like Lattimore’s, at steadily elevated diction runs the risk of windy bombast. But there’s a hazard, too, to what Carson is doing: the possibility of a fatal diminishment. As soon as characters in a Greek tragedy look merely life-size, any distinction between the soaring and the sordid tends to collapse. Agamemnon is a principal in the larger tale of the House of Atreus, which encompasses adultery, boastful murder, madness, cannibalized children, matricide — mere grisly grist for the tabloids, if it isn’t the stuff of immortal literature
• Confronting these two polar versions of Agamemnon, a reader may search out a middle terrain, like that presented by Robert Lowell, whose respectful streamlining of Lattimore appeared in 1978. Here is Lowell’s opening of Aeschylus’ trilogy:
• I’ve lain here a year,
   crouching like a dog on one elbow,
   and begged the gods to end my watch.
   I’ve watched the stars. . . .
• Have you heard good news, or is it only
   hope that makes you light the altars?
   We would gladly hear you, but accept your silence
• Lowell’s vision of Agamemnon the man (described in a stage note as “kindly yet terrifying, a natural ruler, very practiced and alert at it, yet invincibly and almost willfully blinded to his danger”) feels consistent with the clipped yet graceful, brisk cadences of his translation. Each character is doubly enclosed, within a web of words and the larger web of fate, and yet language and destiny feel like complementary aspects of a single reality.
• This was what I failed to find, to my frustration, in Carson’s translations: a feeling of a composite whole. There are moments when her diction stoops so low I had trouble remembering I was dealing with men godlike in their splendor
• Carson calls her book “An Oresteia” — as opposed to the “Oresteia.” This isn’t the trilogy of Aeschylus. Rather, the book consists of plays by three different authors: Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon,” Sophocles’ “Electra,” Euripides’ “Orestes.” Each takes up some aspect of the House of Atreus, whose members, relations and dependents included not only Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Helen, but Orestes, Electra, Menelaus, Cassandra. . . . Many of them, predictably, came to a bad end.

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• Tate (1899-1979) was one of the founding members of The Fugitive, a literary journal begun in 1922 at Vanderbilt University. Devoted to modernist poetry and criticism, it had a short but brilliant life, as it helped spark the Southern literary renaissance and began the careers of several Southern writers, including John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and Robert Penn Warren. The Fugitive group also created a critical method called the New Criticism, which held that poems are independent units of meaning that require no historical or biographical context for understanding.
• The Agrarians published a collection of their essays as a manifesto, ''I'll Take My Stand,'' in 1930. It described a distinctly Southern and grossly sentimental vision of the United States, mixing radical conservatism, anti-Communism and strident anticapitalism, with overtones of fascism. Tate's ideal South was a society based on tradition and myth rather than science and commercialism.
• Underwood quotes one of Tate's biographers: ''The difficulty, after all the literary feuds are ironed out, is how we will deal with Allen's erotic life. . . . The tales are infinite, all of them true, most of them scandalous. Many of the ladies with whom Allen slept are alive . . . and some of them are 'celebrities.' . . . I must find a way to deal with this erotic 'element' and to do it with charity -- but unless it is dealt with there is no biography.'
• Underwood tells us that Tate's father would, each night after dinner, make young Allen ''come shake his hand in gratitude for the evening meal,''

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• The experience of empire seems to leave a people with at least a taste, if not a particular talent, for conspiracy. Certainly, that's true of the Russians for whom the one place at which the history of czarism and Bolshevism most clearly conjoins is in a lasting predilection for plots and plotting. It's true as well for the British, who transmuted the gifted amateurism of Kipling's "great game" into the modern world's first recognizable professional intelligence agencies.
• In fact, as Gordon Thomas points out in his rollicking, readable new history of Britain's famous spy organizations -- "Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6" -- when the future head of OSS, William Donovan, sought to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt that America required equivalent services, he argued, "These are organizations that helped rule an empire."
• Allen Dulles, who ran the OSS' European operations for Donovan out of a base in Switzerland, was, unlike his overwhelmingly Anglophilic Ivy League colleagues in the early CIA, profoundly anti-English. He'd acquired an antipathy for imperialism and the English class system while working as a schoolteacher in India before beginning his celebrated career as a Wall Street lawyer. (He also was carefully monitored and manipulated by Philby during those early days with OSS.)
• The author's anecdotal account of Philby's ultimate unmasking by Dulles and other CIA officials is quite good, as is his rendering of the class system's role in the failure of MI6 and MI5 to uncover not only their deep penetration by the Soviets' KGB but also by atomic spies -- Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn and Bruno Pontecorvo -- all of whom were vetted into the Manhattan Project by British intelligence. Thomas is equally strong on American double agents, particularly Aldrich H. Ames, who betrayed for money rather than ideology and, ultimately, did even more damage than Philby, virtually closing down U.S. human intelligence in the Eastern Bloc.

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•  

   

   

      Il tempio di Giove e le origini del Colle Capitolino 
• Il tempio di Giove

•  

   

   

      Museo dei Fori Imperiali. Mercati di Traiano. Guida. Ediz. italiana e inglese

•  

  Mother of the gods

   

  from Cybele to the Virgin Mary
•    

  An itinerant mother -- In the Athenian Agora -- The invention of a mythology -- The mother's entrance into the Roman Republic -- The origin of the Mater Magna -- Attis in the Imperial period -- From mother of the gods to Mother of God.
• Borgeaud (history of religion, U. of Geneva) traces the image of the mother goddess in its various forms and uses across ten centuries, and discusses how the goddess simultaneously served as both nurturer and "other" in many cultures. According to Borgeaud, by the time Christianity became widespread in the Roman world, expectations were already established about the nature of the mother of God, and the ways in which women, whether mere mortals or divine, should receive the Christ. This is a reprint in English of the original edition of 1996 entitled La Mere des dieux: De Cybele a la Vierge Marie. Annotation #169;2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
• Borgeaud (Univ. of Geneva) has written an important study on a topic that has garnered much interest, engendered far-ranging theoretical constructs, and ignited considerable controversy, especially in recent decades. Borgeaud wisely eschews the broad stroke, choosing instead to concentrate on specific actions and actors as the "mother of the gods" passes from Asia Minor to Rome, from Phrygian religious sensibilities to Christianity. Borgeaud has read widely and chooses judiciously from among an array of pictorial and written remains to construct a series of striking images that reveal and unravel the amazingly complex paths taken by the goddess and her companions during a millennium of antiquity. Even well-known events, such as the arrival of the goddess in Rome (in the form of a stone), derive an unexpected freshness from Borgeaud's fine narrative. Borgeaud's readers are well served by his updated preface to this English-language edition, which is the result of a sensitive rendering by Lysa Hochroth. This monograph should have a wide appeal for those with the requisite background in classical or religious studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Libraries supporting classical and religious studies at the upper undergraduate level and above. Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by L. J. Greenspoon.

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• Toolbox for Sustainable City Living

   

  A Do-It-Ourselves Guide

   

  Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew
• When people envision food production or toxic cleanups, the last setting most likely imagine is New York City. But with more than half the world’s population now residing—and struggling to survive—in cities, we can no longer afford to think of sustainability as something that applies only to forests and fields. We need sustainable living right where so many of us are: in urban neighborhoods. But how do we do it?
  
• When people envision food production or toxic cleanups, the last setting most likely imagine is New York City. But with more than half the world’s population now residing—and struggling to survive—in cities, we can no longer afford to think of sustainability as something that applies only to forests and fields. We need sustainable living right where so many of us are: in urban neighborhoods. But how do we do it?
  
   That’s where this guide comes in. Seven years ago, the Rhizome Collective transformed an abandoned Austin, Texas, warehouse into a sustainability training center. Here, with their first book, two of Rhizome’s founders provide step-by-step instructions for city dwellers—those who have never foraged or gardened along with those who have done dumpster-diving and CSAs—with directions for producing our own food, collecting water, managing waste, reclaiming land, and generating energy.
  
   With vibrant illustrations created by a member of the Beehive Collective and descriptive text based on years of experimentation, Stacy and Scott explain how to build and grow with cheap, salvaged, and recycled materials, making the Guide an accessible and relevant tool for all members of the community. This manual enables us to move from envisioning a future with resources for all to living it.
  
   Stacy Pettigrew and Scott Kellogg are part of the Rhizome Collective, an educational and activist organization based in Austin, Texas. Its members recently received a $200,000 brownfield cleanup grant from the EPA, which they're using to turn a 10-acre dump into an ecological justice park. The bioremediation techniques they developed are being used to remove toxins deposited by the waters of Hurricane Katrina.
• 
   That’s where this guide comes in. Seven years ago, the Rhizome Collective transformed an abandoned Austin, Texas, warehouse into a sustainability training center. Here, with their first book, two of Rhizome’s founders provide step-by-step instructions for city dwellers—those who have never foraged or gardened along with those who have done dumpster-diving and CSAs—with directions for producing our own food, collecting water, managing waste, reclaiming land, and generating energy.
• With vibrant illustrations created by a member of the Beehive Collective and descriptive text based on years of experimentation, Stacy and Scott explain how to build and grow with cheap, salvaged, and recycled materials, making the Guide an accessible and relevant tool for all members of the community. This manual enables us to move from envisioning a future with resources for all to living it.
• 
   Stacy Pettigrew and Scott Kellogg are part of the Rhizome Collective, an educational and activist organization based in Austin, Texas. Its members recently received a $200,000 brownfield cleanup grant from the EPA, which they're using to turn a 10-acre dump into an ecological justice park. The bioremediation techniques they developed are being used to remove toxins deposited by the waters of Hurricane Katrina.

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• Robert Jensen

• What Lies Beneath

   

  Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation

   

  South End Press Collective (editors); Afterword by Joy James
• In August 2005, thousands of New Orleans residents—overwhelmingly poor, largely people of color, the majority black—were left to face one of the worst “natural” disasters in US history on their own. They were left to die in prisons, in nursing homes, and on the street. Survivors were criminalized as “looters” for struggling to obtain food, water, diapers, medicine, and other essentials of life that no one else could or would provide. As Katrina’s waters receded and the body count soared, an ugly truth (re)surfaced: The lives of those who are poor, who are vulnerable, and who are not white are not valued by the US government.
• While commentators across the political spectrum, celebrities, and other observers expressed outrage that the US government would let this happen to Americans—even “those Americans”—millions outside of New Orleans live without adequate health insurance; clean air and water; decent education, housing, nutrition, health care, and work; and freedom from police brutality and state repression. And thousands are deported, displaced, and dying in prisons and illegal wars from coast to coast, gulf to gulf.
• Short and accessible, this anthology, featuring such voices as Common Ground, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Suheir Hammad, Jordan Flaherty, and Ross Gelbspan, takes readers beyond the Superdome. It explores the complexity of this turning point in US history as representative of the nation’s direction and priorities.

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• American Methods

   

  Torture and the Logic of Domination

   

  Kristian Williams

• Whether or not it makes front-page news, make no mistake: Torture is an everyday   tool of dominance and terror in the United States. On the heels of Our Enemies   in Blue, his controversial chronicle of policing, Kristian Williams once again   upsets the notion that “excessive force” by the state is anything   but altogether American.

    

  American Methods is a damning audit of the US record in underwriting   human rights violations around the globe. In the last 25 years alone and under   several administrations, we confront death squads in El Salvador, genocidal   campaigns in Turkey, brutal interrogations done on our dime, even in our name   by various “friendly governments,” and more. Returning to our shores,   Williams observes the banality of violence at home—on both sides of the   prison wall. What emerges is the distinct character of American torture, particularly   its emphasis on sexual violence, misogyny, and racialized spectacle.

• Blood on the Border

   

  A Memoir of the Contra War

   

  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• With Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz  presents the third volume in her critically-acclaimed memoir. In this long-awaited  book, she vividly recounts on-the-ground memories of the contra war in Nicaragua,  chronicling the US-sponsored terror inflicted on the people of Nicaragua following  their 1979 election of the Socialist Sandinistas that ousted Reagan darling and  vicious dictator Somoza.
• The war's opening salvo was the bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City   by US-backed contras, the plane Dunbar-Ortiz would have been on were it not   for a delay. This disarming closeness to the fraught history of the US/Nicaraguan   relationship shapes Dunbar-Ortiz's narrative, bringing uncomfortably present   the decade-long dirty war that the Reagan administration pursued in Nicaragua   against civilian and soldier alike.
• As with her first two memoirs, in Blood on the Border, Dunbar-Ortiz   seamlessly connects the dots not only between the personal and the political,   but between recent history and our present moment. Unlike the many commentators   who view the September 11, 2001 attacks as the start of the so-called War on   Terror, Dunbar-Ortiz offers firsthand testimony on battles waged much earlier.   While her rich political analysis of this history bears the mark of a trained   historian, she also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who   spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially   in the remote Mosquitia region where the indigenous Miskitu people were viciously   assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained contra mercenaries. She makes painfully   clear the connections between what many US Americans only remember vaguely as   the Iran-Contra "affair" and current US aggression in the Americas,   the Middle East, and around the world. Clearly this will be a book valuable   not only for students of Latin American history, but also for anyone who is   interested in better understanding the violent turmoil of our world today

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