Sunday's Notes

Michael Dirda reviews Renee Winegarten's Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography for the Washington Post, 8 June.

Brian Selznick and David Serlin,"A Buried History of Paleontology," Cabinet, Winter, revisits the 19th century paleontologists who had no complete fossilized skeletons, but worked from teeth and ribs to build"dinosaurs" of brick and mortar.

David Greenberg's"The Other Woman," NYT, 8 June, argues that Joseph Persico's Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life offers little insight into Roosevelt's life and times, other than personal information.

George Loomis,"State of the Art," Moscow Times, 6 June, reviews Solomon Volkov's The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn.