The Lives of Margaret Fuller -- A Biography by John Matteson, Norton '12, $32.95, 510 pages, ASIN #0393068056. Index, additional sources, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.
In 1848, a group of protofeminists led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened in Seneca Falls, N.Y. to, in effect, inaugurate the women's rights movement in America. Had she not been in Italy at the time, Margaret Fuller would likely have been an active participant. Had she not died in a shipwreck two years later, she would have likely been remembered along with Stanton, Mott, and Susan B. Anthony as among those who laid the groundwork for women's suffrage. Now, Pulitzer-Prize winner John Matteson recounts the life of this multi-talented woman whose life was snuffed out at age 40 in 1850. "At a time when higher education was denied to almost all women," Matteson writes, "Fuller answered her father's challenge to become arguabaly the most learned person, male or female, in America. Brilliant and brash, idealistic and adventurous, she rose to prominence as the leading woman in the transcendentalist movement." John Matteson teaches English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.
The Lost Michelangelos by Antonio Forcellino, Polity '11, 181 pages, ASIN #0745652034. Grouping of color glossy images.
From the dust jacket:
"Like many stories of artistic loss, this one begins in a library in Italy, where Antonio Forcellino, a distinguished Michelangelo scholar and restorer, stumbled across some unpublished letters among the papers of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, son of Isabella d'Este and an extremely important figure in the Italian Reformation. These letters comment on the paintings of Michelangelo in a way that is completely at odds with what was to become the dominant critical tradition of Michelangelo scholarship, an inconsistency that set Forcellino off on a journey that took him to Dubrovnik, Oxford, New York, and Niagara Falls and culminated in the discovery of two magnificent paiintings: Pieta for Vittoria Colonna, now in a private collection in America, and the Cavalieri Crucifixion, now held by an educational institution in England, Through a combination of careful historical research, extensive restoration and meticulous radiographic analysis, Forcellino shows convincingly that these paintings can be traced back to the studio of Michelangelo and to the group of Catholic reformers known as the spirituali."
Antonio Forcellino is an art historian and restorer.
Pricing the Future -- Finance, Physics, and the 300-year Journey to the Black-Scholes Equation, a Story of Genius and Discovery by George G. Szpiro, Basic Books '11, $28, 298 pages, ASIN #0465022480. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.
You're not aware of the options pricing formula? Mon dieu! According to mathematician-turned-journalist George Szpiro, it's "the key to the modern financial market and the lynchpin of today's economy. Yet the search for the solution to pricing options proved to be one of the greatest challenges of modern finance -- an international journey that spanned three centuries, enlisting personalities both famous and unknown, and forever changing Wall Street upon the discovery of the Black-Scholes Equation in 1973." Options, lest you wonder, are a good thing, says the author: "Traders and farmers -- not bankers and investors -- originally inspired the need for financial derivatives, to transfer the risk inherent in daily activities to those more able to carry it." George Szpiro Ph.D. is currently the Israel correspondent of the Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung, one of the oldest newspapers in the world, has authored several books, and lives in Jerusalem.
Justice and the Enemy -- Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by William Shawcross. PublicAffairs '11, $26.99, 257 pages, ASIN #1586489755. Index, notes, no bibliography or illustrations.
In this thought-provoking new work, journalist William Shawcross draws on post-World War II Allied decisions on just punishment for Nazi leaders to create a framework for how to treat today's Al Queda terrorist suspects. In the 1940s, Churchill favored summary execution of about a dozen Nazi leaders, Stalin "proposed a cull" of as many as 50,000 Germans, and FDR set up the military tribunal at Nuremberg. Today, policymakers are asking "What courts are most appropriate for them (Al Qaeda terrorist suspects) and particularly for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Of equal importance is the question of how best to ensure that justice is delivered to the families of all those murdered in the attacks." William Shawcross has written many books about foreign affairs, and he appears regularly on TV and radio. His articles have appeared in leading publications. His father, Hartley Shawcross, was Britain's lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
