Sunday's Notes

Ruth Rosen,"Soap to Ploughshares," Slate, 8 May, looks at returning Mother's Day to something closer to what Anna Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe had in mind.

Richard C. Lewontin,"Why Darwin?" NYRB, 28 May, reviews Janet Browne's Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography, The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, annotated by James T. Costa, Jerry A. Coyne's Why Evolution Is True, and Greg Gibson's It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick.

Benjamin Carter Hett,"Brutally Violent and Destined for Defeat," Washington Post, 10 May, reviews Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich at War.

Dorothy Gallagher,"A Clash of Symbols," NYT, 7 May, reviews Susan Jacoby's Alger Hiss and the Battle for History.

Charles Hawley,"How the End of East Germany Began," Der Spiegel, previews"How the Berlin Wall Fell," an open air exhibit on Berlin's Alexanderplatz.

Azadeh Moaveni,"Most Fundamentalist," NYT, 7 May, reviews Con Coughlin's Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam.

David E. Sanger,"Islamophobia," NYT, 7 May, reviews Juan Cole's Engaging the Muslim World.

Elaine Showalter,"The female frontier," Guardian, 9 May, identifies her list of the leading contemporary American female novelists.