Additionally Noted
Jill Lepore,"Preëxisting Condition," New Yorker, 7 December, looks at 20th century American health care reform. Here, she responds to readers' questions about it.
Jody Rosen,"Vanishing Act," Slate, 1 December, rediscovers Eva Tanguay, America's first"rock star" and the model for Sunset Boulevard's Nora Desmond. Here she sings her theme song,"I Don't Care".
Ian Buruma,"Occupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel," NYRB, 17 December, reviews Claude Arnaud's Jean Cocteau, Jean Baronnet's Les Parisiens sous l'Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d'André Zucca, David Bellos, trans., The Journal of Hélène Berr, Patrick Buisson's 1940–1945 Années érotiques: De la Grande Prostituée à la revanche des mâles, Olivier Corpet's and Claire Paulhan's Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under the Nazi Occupation, Agnès Humbert's Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, trans. by Barbara Mellor, and Philippe Jullian's Occupied Paris: The Sweet and the Cruel.
Maurice Isserman,"Reds, Menaced," bookforum, December/ January, reviews Constantine Pleshakov's There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism, David Priestland's The Red Flag: A History of Communism, and Victor Sebestyen's Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.
Malise Ruthven,"The Big Muslim Problem!" NYRB, 17 December, reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West and Tariq Ramadan's What I Believe.