In Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg uses a hand-sign system for teaching music to deaf children—devised by Zoltán Kodály in the early part of the twentieth century—as an analogy for the way in which man might communicate with a superior alien intelligence. In the visually stunning color-music sequence at the film’s climax, Lacombe (played by the French director François Truffaut) uses a large electric color synthesizer to play Kodály’s code to the visiting spaceship that hovers over him. For Spielberg, we are the deaf children who need to be tutored by a higher power. As one of the actors says when the first contact with aliens occurs: “It’s the first day of school, guys!”

Initially the communication between man and alien is tentative and awkward, and at one point a deep bass note from the alien ship blasts out the window of a control tower. However, in a short while the color-music dialogue has developed into a wonderful symphony of light and sound; the colored patterns flash rhythmically from the spaceship and are answered by a large multi-panelled screen behind the synthesizer.

more from Cabinet here.

In the New Scientist blog:

While one wiki has become a major feature of modern life, experiments with the medium are still continuing.

One is the “wiki novel” started by established, conventional book publisher Penguin. Amillionpenguins is fascinating, chaotic and often perplexing for the editor appointed to oversee it. Here’s a recent extract from the editors blog:

I, your miserable and long suffering editor, admit to feeling completely at odds with the novel as it stands…I’ve found the best way to approach amillionpenguins is to sample it basically at random.

Other people seem to love it. One participant contends that it is already better than On The Road or Lord of the Rings. This academic blogger is also a fan, although this one is less keen.

In Inside Higher Ed:

[Former Middlebury College president John M.] McCardell is about to try. With backing from the Robertson Foundation, he has created a nonprofit group, Choose Responsibility, that will seek to promote a national discussion of alternatives to the 21-year-old drinking age. The group is preparing a Web site with studies that challenge conventional wisdom about the advantages of the law, while explaining its flaws. The group will also push an idea — floated without success in the 1990s by Roderic Park, then chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder — to allow 18-20-year-olds who complete an alcohol education program to obtain “drinking licenses.” And McCardell and others plan to start speaking out, writing more op-eds, and trying to redefine the issue.

The current law, McCardell said in an interview Thursday, is a failure that forces college freshmen to hide their drinking — while colleges must simultaneously pretend that they have fixed students’ drinking problems and that students aren’t drinking. McCardell also argued that the law, by making it impossible for a 19-year-old to enjoy two beers over pizza in a restaurant, leads those 19-year-olds to consume instead in closed dorm rooms and fraternity basements where 2 beers are more likely to turn into 10, and no responsible person may be around to offer help or to stop someone from drinking too much.

Any college president who thinks his or her campus has drinking under control is “delusional,” McCardell said, although he acknowledged the political pressures that prevent most sitting presidents from providing an honest assessment of what’s going on on their campuses. But he said that the dangers to students and institutions are great enough that it’s time for someone to start speaking out. While he was president at Middlebury, one of his students died, a 21-year-old who was driving after drinking way too much.

Joshua Green in The Atlantic:

Tim Gill is best known as the founder of the publishing-software giant Quark Inc., and for a long time was one of the few openly gay members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. He was born in 1953 to one of Colorado’s well-known Republican political families. (The town of Gill in the north-central part of the state is named after them.) After earning a degree in applied mathematics and computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Gill founded Quark in his apartment in 1981, in the manner of other self-made computer magnates like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, with a $2,000 loan from his parents.

While Gill participated in gay activism in college, his passions ran more toward differential calculus, and he didn’t feel particularly beset by his homosexuality. He had come out to his parents when he was a teenager and been accepted. It was the very ordinariness of his upper-middle-class upbringing, in fact, that made his political awakening such a shock. In 1992, a ballot initiative approved by Colorado voters altered the state constitution to prohibit laws aimed at protecting gays and lesbians (it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court). Gill noticed bumper stickers supporting the measure on the desks of some Quark employees. Not long afterward, he set up the Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, through which he donates to “mainstream” charities—libraries, symphonies, vaccination clinics, even a Star Trek exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science—to spread the message that gays and lesbians care about the same things as everyone else. In 2000, he sold his interest in Quark for a reported half-billion dollars in order to focus full-time on his philanthropy.

Even as he has shied from the spotlight, Gill has become one of the most generous and widest-reaching political benefactors in the country, and emblematic of a new breed of business-minded donor that is rapidly changing American politics.

More here.

In the LRB, M.F. Burnyeat reviews at two new biographies of Pythagoras.

It is hard to let go of Pythagoras. He has meant so much to so many for so long. I can with confidence say to readers of this essay: most of what you believe, or think you know, about Pythagoras is fiction, much of it deliberately contrived. Did he discover the geometrical theorem that bears his name? No. Did he ponder the harmony of the spheres? Certainly not: celestial spheres were first excogitated decades or more after Pythagoras’ death. Does he even deserve credit for his most famous accomplishment, analysing the mathematical ratios that structure musical concordances? Possibly, but there is little reason to believe the stories about his being the first to discover them, and compelling reason not to believe the oft-told story about how he did it. Allegedly, as he was passing a smithy, he heard that the sounds made by the hammers exemplified the intervals of fourth, fifth and octave, so he measured their weights and found their ratios to be respectively 4:3, 3:2, 2:1. Unfortunately for this anecdote, recently rehashed in the article on Pythagoras in Grove Music Online, the sounds made by a blow do not vary proportionately with the weight of the instrument used.

My problem is that to convince you of such deflationary truths I have to give an account which inevitably is less exciting than, for example, the following extract from Bertrand Russell’s well-known History of Western Philosophy (1946):

Pythagoras . . . was intellectually one of the most important men that ever lived, both when he was wise and when he was unwise. Mathematics, in the sense of demonstrative deductive argument, begins with him, and in him is intimately connected with a peculiar form of mysticism. The influence of mathematics on philosophy, partly owing to him, has, ever since his time, been both profound and unfortunate.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews looks at The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by our friend Justin Smith.

The puzzle of organic generation and the attendant issues of ensoulment, vitality, organization, and material reductionism, is a long-standing one. Related to this is the explanation of identity between parent and offspring. The opening chapter by James Lennox provides a perceptive overview of the importance of this issue for Aristotle and its relation to his dual project of narrative description (historia) and causal explanation in natural philosophy more generally. Aristotle had himself devoted such considerable space to the issue because it involved in some important respects the question of the origins of sensible substance, and this required some rationalization of organic generation within his larger metaphysical program. Lennox also shows in his analysis that Harvey’s insights, both empirically and methodologically, were deeply indebted to Aristotle, and his influence pervades Harvey’s own creative investigations of this problem in his Exercitationes de generatione animalium of 1651, the most extended text on this topic to emerge from the seventeenth century.

As discussed in the opening chapters of this collection, the pressing need for early modern natural philosophers to engage these questions was a direct result of the efforts to overthrow Aristotelian metaphysics and natural philosophy in the variegated way these were encountered in early modernity. Rejection of Aristotelianism and its conceptions of natural teleology, formal and final causation, and hylomorphic substance theory was central to the project of the new mathematical physics of Galileo and Descartes. Unfortunately for the ambitions of the “new philosophy,” this rejection of tradition simply did not work in the “vital” sciences, setting up a dialectic between the physical and biological sciences that has persisted to the present. Jacques Roger’s 1963 study highlighted the crisis that organic generation posed for this pan-mechanistic program. Further aspects of Descartes’s response to this problem are dealt with in considerable detail by Vincent Aucante through a perceptive discussion of Descartes’s struggle in his unpublished manuscripts to find some rational explanation of embryological development in accord with the laws of motion and his own methodological canons.

From The National Geographic:

Domesticated chili peppers started to spice up dishes across the Americas at least 6,000 years ago, according to new research tracing the early spread of the crop. Peppers quickly spread around the world after Christopher Columbus brought them back to Europe at the end of the 15th century, but their ancient history had been poorly known until now. “We’re excited to be able to finally trace this spice,” said Linda Perry, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. The researchers were intrigued by starch grains they found on artifacts collected at seven sites ranging from the Bahamas to southern Peru. The grains look like tiny jelly doughnuts squished in their middles and didn’t match those from obvious starchy foods such as potatoes, cassava, and other roots.

“It was only by accident that I figured out their source,” Perry said. The earliest chili pepper starch grains were found at two sites in southwestern Ecuador that are dated to about 6,100 years ago.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Child molestation and rape top the social taboo list, according to a survey of 186 people between the ages of 18 and 47, and smoking marijuana ranks lowest among the 19 choices of forbidden behavior. In the middle—worse than robbing a bank but better than spousal murder—lies incest between brothers and sisters. Given the deleterious genetic impacts of offspring from such mating, some researchers have suggested that there may be an evolved mechanism designed to prevent that from occurring. And now evolutionary psychologist Debra Lieberman of the University of Hawaii–Honolulu believes she may have elicited some of its functions from this simple questionnaire.

Many animals show such “kin radar.” By mixing siblings in a litter, for example, scientists have shown that animals that grow up together appear to avoid mating, whether genetically related or not, largely based on recognizing specific smells. The evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that some form of mental mechanism assesses various cues to come up with an estimate of how related two people are. “The real question is: What are these cues?”

More here.

Janet Maslin reviews One in Three: A Son’s Journey into the History and Science of Cancer by Adam Wishart, in the New York Times Book Review:

For Adam Wishart’s father, it began as back pain. X-rays revealed a crumbling of neck vertebrae. Surgery repaired the vertebrae but uncovered a tumor, a byproduct of cancer that had originated elsewhere in his body. Doctors could not pinpoint its source.

Mr. Wishart’s father was a vigorous 72 when his illness was first diagnosed. But he began to look markedly older. He walked with a shuffle and developed difficulty in handling simple tasks. His skin grew pallid, his brain sluggish. Even as his decline became inevitable, his family vacillated between hope and fear.

The son’s way of dealing with his father’s death was to become as knowledgeable as he could, and to pass that knowledge on to readers. As the title of “One in Three” makes clear, he has a captive audience. “One in three of us,” he writes, “will develop the disease in our lifetimes.” And many of us will struggle to grasp the science, history and physiology of what happens.

More here.

Adrian Higgins reviews Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart, in the Washington Post:

In an ideal world, we would buy cut flowers for a sweetheart’s birthday from Teresa Sabankaya. From her green kiosk in Santa Cruz, Calif., she sells blooms that she has raised lovingly on her flower farm. Her flowers, held in buckets that crowd her stall, are “all interesting, unusual, old-fashioned, ephemeral, perfumy,” Amy Stewart writes in her eye-opening new Flower Confidential. In summer, Sabankaya’s customers grab larkspur and poppies; in winter, heathers and berried plants.

But this isn’t how most American consumers get their flowers. Instead, our blooms are more likely to have been raised in high-altitude flower factories in Ecuador or Colombia, dunked in chemicals, flown to Miami and distributed to wholesale markets around the country. A rose cut on a Monday morning in the shadow of a snow-capped volcano might find its way to a Manhattan florist the following Friday, and then be good for a week or more with a little care. In your local supermarket, you will find roses completely devoid of fragrance — pretty in a stiff and uniform sort of way, but not the earthy roses of the garden or Sabankaya’s stall.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:

There is little about the Montreal band Arcade Fire that is not big. The group has seven core members, including its founders, a married couple named Win Butler (who is six feet three) and Régine Chassagne. Onstage, Arcade Fire expands to nine musicians, or more. The band’s unusually polished début, “Funeral,” which was recorded for less than ten thousand dollars and released in 2004, has sold more than three hundred thousand copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This is a robust number for an independent band, especially one whose fans append free MP3s of the songs to their gushing Web posts. (An entry on a blog called “Blinding Light of Reason” commands, “If you are a human being, you owe it to your eternal soul to love the Arcade Fire and see them play live.”) David Bowie has performed live with the band, and, on a recent tour, U2 chose “Wake Up,” Arcade Fire’s apocalyptic sing-along about lightning bolts, to play over the sound system before its performances. (“Wake Up” is also played during pre-game ceremonies at Rangers games at Madison Square Garden.)

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Richard Feynman, one of the most celebrated and revered physicists of modern times, died 19 years ago today. Here is a really charming video interview of his:

A little over a year ago I had posted videos of Feynman’s Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures here.

… that dost almost persuade Justice to break her sword! One more, one more. Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, And love thee after. Othello, 5.2.16-19.[1]

Now, when the torrent of eulogies for Hrant Dink, the late editor-in-chief of Istanbul’s Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos, has almost subsided, the barbarity of Turkish nationalism has become even more horrifying. Fronts have formed in Turkey after Dink’s funeral, attended by over a hundred thousand mourners carrying identical black and white signs proclaiming “We are all Armenians”. Immediately, surveys were conducted testing public feeling about the slogan.[2] Then, images were released of Ogun Samast, the 17-year-old who confessed to Dink’s murder, posing proudly with a Turkish flag between security officials; behind them could be seen a poster bearing the words of Ataturk: “The nation’s land is sacred, it cannot be left to fate”. These images followed fast on news of crazed masses chanting in football stadiums: “We are all Ogun Samast”.

more from Eurozine here.

The cultural stock of John Brown and the Redeemers has fluctuated across time. After inspiring Yankees during the Civil War, Brown passed through the end of the century as an ambiguous figure in American letters. In 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois resurrected him in a sympathetic biography. At the same time, Thomas Dixon finished a trilogy of novels, adapted by D. W. Griffith into his film The Birth of a Nation in 1915. In Dixon’s and Griffith’s revisionist histories, the Redeemers fought for glory, while abolitionists and carpetbaggers sullied feminine virtue and stole the South’s honour. More recently, activists in the civil-rights movement reversed the trend, elevating Brown and vilifying the Redeemers.

Today, things are more complicated. The politics of the present have muddied our perspective on the past. We know all too well that faith, unfettered by doubt, can be deadly. So when Reynolds writes of Brown, “he was willing to die for his utter belief in the word of the bible”, it is hard not to ask: but what of his willingness to kill? The Redeemers, beloved by neo-Confederates and white supremacists, are seemingly more easily cast into history’s dustbin. But, as Nicholas Lemann insists, they won. And in the ongoing debate over limited voting rights (whether through faulty technology or the inadequate provision of polling stations), we see their legacy. So in a world in which pro-life terrorists invoke John Brown’s example, and Senate candidates wrap themselves in the Confederate flag, it may be that Adelbert Ames is the best model for the present US condition. Ames, bumbling and naive, lived in complex times and was swamped by uncertainty. He tried to find the righteous path. But he kept tripping along the way.

more from the TLS here.

This is a characteristically great short talk by Marko Ahtisaari, at whose encouragement and with whose support, I started 3 Quarks Daily. Says Marko:

Vpod.tv has posted the video of my 10-minute talk on the future of mobility at LeWeb3.

The funny thing about this talk was that I was asked on short notice to be the opening-act for Sarkozy. It reminded me of the times when I was playing with Skizm on the New York rock scene.

Sometimes knowing that everyone is waiting for the main act makes you play harder.

Marko’s own blog is here.

Elizabeth Cohen at CNN:

Close your eyes for a minute and envision all the romantic parts of the human body.

Her beautiful eyes. His strong shoulders. We’ll stop there, but you go right ahead and think about all the body parts you want.

Bet you didn’t think about the caudate and the ventral tegmental areas, did you?

These areas of the brain, while little known to most people, are helping scientists explain the physiological reasons behind why we feel what we feel when we fall in love.

By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: Why love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful.

In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.

While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain — which is involved in cravings — became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation.

More here.

Last month, H. Allen Orr wrote a critical review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the New York Review of Books:

The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins’s cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.

The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?).

Instead, Dawkins has written a book that’s distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow…

Rest of the review here.  Dan Dennett then wrote a letter to the NYRB defending Dawkins:

H. Allen Orr, in “A Mission to Convert” [NYR, January 11], his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and other recent books on science and religion, says that Dawkins is an amateur, not professional, atheist, and has failed to come to grips with “religious thought” with its “meticulous reasoning” in any serious way. He notes that the book is “defiantly middlebrow,” and I wonder just which highbrow thinkers about religion Orr believes Dawkins should have grappled with. I myself have looked over large piles of recent religious thought in the last few years in the course of researching my own book on these topics, and I have found almost all of it to be so dreadful that ignoring it entirely seemed both the most charitable and most constructive policy. (I devote a scant six pages of Breaking the Spell to the arguments for and against the existence of God, while Dawkins devotes roughly a hundred, laying out the standard arguments with admirable clarity and fairness, and skewering them efficiently.) There are indeed recherché versions of these traditional arguments that perhaps have not yet been exhaustively eviscerated by scholars, but Dawkins ignores them (as do I) and says why: his book is a consciousness-raiser aimed at the general religious public, not an attempt to contribute to the academic microdiscipline of philosophical theology. The arguments Dawkins exposes and rebuts are the arguments that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day, and neither the televangelists nor the authors of best-selling spiritual books pay the slightest heed to the subtleties of the theologians either.

Who does Orr favor? Polkinghorne, Peacocke, Plantinga, or some more recondite thinkers? Orr brandishes the names of two philosophers, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and cites C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, a fairly nauseating example of middle-brow homiletic in roughly the same league on the undergraduate hit parade as Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (1998) and transparently evasive when it comes to “meticulous reasoning.” If it were a book in biology—Orr’s discipline—I daresay he’d pounce on it like a pit bull, but like many others he adopts a double standard when the topic is religion…

H. Allen Orr replied in the NYRB:

Daniel Dennett’s main complaint about my review is that I held Dawkins’s book to too high a standard. The God Delusion was, he says, a popular work and, as such, one can’t expect it to grapple seriously with religious thought. There are two things wrong with this objection. The first is that the mere fact that a book is intended for a broad audience doesn’t mean its author can ignore the best thinking on a subject. Indeed it’s precisely the task of the popularizer to take this best thinking and present it in a form that can be understood by intelligent laymen. This task is certainly feasible. Ironically, the clearest evidence comes from Dawkins himself. In his popular works on evolution, and especially in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrestled with the best evolutionary thinkers —Darwin, Hamilton, and Trivers—and presented their ideas in a way that could be appreciated by a broad audience. This is what made The Selfish Gene brilliant; the absence of any analogous treatment of religion in Dawkins’s new book is what makes it considerably less than brilliant.

The second thing wrong with Dennett’s objection is that it’s simply not true that The God Delusion was merely a popular survey and “not an attempt to contribute to …philosophical theology.” Dennett has apparently forgotten that the heart of Dawkins’s book was his philosophical argument for the near impossibility of God. Dawkins presented his so-called Ultimate Boeing 747 argument in a chapter entitled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” branded his argument “unanswerable,” and boasted that it had stumped all theologians who had met it. I can see why Dennett would like to forget about Dawkins’s attempt at philosophy—the Ultimate 747 argument was shredded by reviewers—but it’s absurd to pretend now that The God Delusion had no philosophical ambitions. It also won’t do to claim, as Dennett does, that Dawkins’s book was concerned only with arguments “that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day.” Dawkins explicitly stated that he was targeting all forms of the God Hypothesis, including deism, and insisted that all were victims of his arguments…

Full text of both letters to the NYRB here.  Now, Dan Dennett has written a fairly heated open letter to H. Allen Orr at Edge.org in which after rebutting several of Orr’s points, Dennett throws down a challenge for another response from Orr:

As I write this message, I am reminded of your earlier trashing, more than ten years ago, of my book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, first in Evolution, which does not permit rebuttals from authors, and then, slightly enlarged, in the Boston Review, which does. You leveled very serious charges of error and incomprehension in that review, and when I challenged them, you responded with a haughty dismissal of my objections (in an exchange in the Boston Review). Quoting an example, dealing with the speed of evolution: “Now I’ve been in the population genetics business for some time and, frankly, I have no idea what Dennett is talking about. And-I can find no polite way of putting this-it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Dennett has no idea what he’s talking about either.” (1996, p37) Now that was rude-even ruder than your reply this time. When I explained then in a private letter to you what I had meant, you conceded to me in your private response that you had not seen my point in the light I intended, and that my claim was not in fact the blunder you had said it was-but of course you never chose to recant your criticism in print, so your uncorrected accusation stands to this day. Such a gentleman and a scholar you are! But times have changed. We now have blogs, so this time you can readily respond in public to my open letter…

Full text of Dennett’s letter here.

Cynthia Haven in Stanford Magazine:

In the early 1990s, Robert Vitalis was on a fellowship at Princeton preparing a book about the Arabian American Oil Company. One day in a seminar room, he overheard two young history professors discussing Wallace Stegner.

Was this the same Stegner who had written a book about American oil interests in Saudi Arabia? Vitalis asked. Nope, the professors assured him. The Stegner they were talking about was a Pulitzer-winning novelist and a pioneering voice in the fight to save our natural environment. He never wrote a book about Saudi Arabia.

They were wrong. Vitalis, now an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually learned that the Stegner who founded Stanford’s creative writing program was indeed the author of Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, a tormented work-for-hire project about the early days of Saudi oil exploration in the 1930s and 1940s. Discovery! was serialized in 14 issues of the Arabian American Oil Company magazine Aramco World, beginning in 1968, 12 years after Stegner had turned in his manuscript to Aramco’s public relations department. Although eventually published as a book by Beirut’s Middle East Export Press in 1971, it has never been widely available.

More here.

Raj Persaud in The Telegraph:

The findings of one of the largest experiments in the science of attractiveness shown here challenge current thinking about the differences between men and women.

Around four thousand people took part in the web experiment, launched two weeks ago on this page, to provide new insights in time for Valentine’s Day tomorrow.

Some revelations are obvious – in the case of men, being rich, powerful, smart and funny helps, and the more attractive the woman you are pursuing, the more these factors matter to her. Some are less obvious: women rate being good in bed as more desirable in a possible partner than men do.

The woman’s face deemed the most beautiful – by just over half of the men rating the five photographs – was that of the youngest, B, aged 19. Women, however, plumped for the second oldest man, A, aged 29, as the most attractive.

More here.

Frank Wilson in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Last year, the New York Times came up with a list of the best works of American fiction of the previous 25 years. This ignited much controversy. Which was to be expected, since a good deal of the fun of lists comes from disagreeing with them.

J. Peder Zane, book review editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, has outdone the Times considerably in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books (Norton, $14.95): From the 10 favorites proffered by 125 noted writers, he has culled the all-time Top 10. The winners (in order, from top to bottom) are: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Shakespeare’s Hamlet; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; the stories of Anton Chekhov; and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

An unexceptionable list, right? Well, only until you start thinking about it. Critic Sven Birkerts, in his introductory essay, picks up on two oddities: first, only one of the works is by a woman (and she, Mary Ann Evans, used the male pen name of George Eliot); second, only one was written before the 19th century. No Homer, no Dante, no Chaucer.

More here.  [Tolstoy in photo.]