Baum on Books

Though Amagansett-based author Ellen Feldman’s compelling new novel The Living and the Lost is set in Berlin shortly after World War II, with flashbacks to 1938, it resonates today with disturbing themes about the heritage of hatred, and suggests that the title “The Living AND the Lost” may well have been “the Living ARE the Lost.”

A new and expanded edition of a book first published 58 years ago about a man said to have been the world’s greatest conductor shows why the myth took hold and why it remains unchallenged.

Arturo Toscanini was unique. A musician of genius, including a photographic memory, Toscanini could boast – but never did – of having a repertoire of 120 operas and 400 symphonic works he could conduct by heart. God help the musicians trying to follow him.

You know how writers are sometimes asked whom they would like to have over for a small dinner party? Well, historian, biographer and academic Walter Isaacson, out now with another magnificent tome, The Code Breaker, says – with nods to other innovators he’s written about, including Einstein, Steve Jobs and his favorite genius, Leonardo Da Vinci – that his guests would be Benjamin Franklin and Jennifer Doudna.

Franklin, whom Isaacson wrote about in 2003, was a prime exemplar of “curiosity,” the driving force behind inquiries and inventions.

What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway with its, aristocratic title character Clarissa Dalloway consumed with giving an elegant party, and its author’s long periodic sentences, full of metaphors, allusions, parentheses and interior hesitations? And yet, in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review Yale University senior lecturer in creative writing, Michael Cunningham provides an introduction to a new issue of Woolf’s book that is so compelling it commands attention.

101 Arabian Tales: How We All  Persevered in Peace Corps Libya should be required reading for all Peace Corps volunteers and administrators once the 60-year-old federal agency resumes activity — it shut down because of COVID. Meanwhile, the book should also be recommended reading for everyone for what it says about an increasingly important and volatile region of the world.