Things Noted Here & There

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is both forthright and coy about her relationship with Niall Ferguson in Tony Allen-Mills,"In love ... and on an Islamist death list," London's Sunday Times, 9 May.

Brian O'Neill,"Yemen, a prisoner of its own history," The National, 7 May, reviews Victoria Clark's Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes.

John Demos reviews Nick Bunker's Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World, A New History for the Washington Post, 9 May.

William Dalrymple,"The Ghosts of Gandamak," NYT, 8 May, recalls the disastrous end of the disastrous retreat of British and Indian soldiers in Victorian Afghanistan.

Elaine Showalter reviews Allan T. Duffin's History in Blue: 160 Years of Women Police, Sheriffs, Detectives, and State Troopers and Evelyn M. Monahan's and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee's A Few Good Women: America's Military Women from World War I to the War in Iraq and Afghanistan for the Washington Post, 9 May.

Elaine Tyler May,"The pill: Making motherhood better for 50 years," Washington Post, 9 May, celebrates the contraception pill's changes to the lives of married women.

Philip Caputo reviews Sebastian Junger's War for the Washington Post, 9 May.

Over the weekend, Claudia Wright, the great-great-grandaughter of Brigham Young, a lesbian and retired history teacher, forced Utah's only Democratic congressman, Jim Matheson, to compete with her for nomination to the congressional seat he currently holds. Had he won 60% of the delegates voting in convention, Matheson would have won renomination outright. With only 55%, he fell short and faces a runoff Democratic primary on 22 June.