Friday Notes

Culled from the NYT's"100 Notable Books of 2007," is the NYT's"The 10 Best Books of 2007." It includes Linda Colley's The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Mildred Armstrong Kalish's Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone.

Military.com has a Gettysburg Game Simulation that asks"Could you have won the Battle of Gettysburg?" Hat tip to Brandon Watson.

Janet Maslin,"A Scramble for Power and Treasure in South Africa," NYT, 29 November, reviews Martin Meredith's Diamonds, Gold and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa.

Paul Merkley,"‘Hanging Gardens and Shimmering Oases'," Books and Culture, November/December, reviews Amy Dockser's Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Michael B. Oren's Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, and Michael Makovsky's Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft.

Matthew Fleischer,"Bukowski's Ruin?" LA Weekly, 20 November, considers whether the poet, Charles Bukowski, was a Nazi, Jewish by matrilineal descent – one or the other, both or neither. Hat tip.

Lawrence Velvel,"Read ‘Em And Weep For Harvard," OpEdNews.com, 29 November, reprints Jacob Hale Russell's"A Million Little Writers," 01238, November/ December. In its new glossy magazine for alumni, the University showcases elite faculty members' dependence on ghost-writing grad students who serve up plagiarized work for professors to publish. Hat tip to Margaret Soltan.