I have in recent years been receiving vast quantities of jokes but hearing fewer of them: The Internet, which has become as common a vehicle for purveying jokes as bland fish is for purveying sauce, may be slowly killing the oral transmission of humor. Granted, this is not a problem up there in significance with world-wide terrorism and global warming, but for those of us with a taste for good jokes it represents a genuinely sad subtraction from the richness of everyday life.

Old-fashioned joke-telling, done face to face, is a species of performance art, in which intonation, timing and often the use of foreign accents are decisive. You can't do a parrot with a Yiddish accent joke via email. Nor can you gage the response of your audience and know when to speed up or slow down the pace of a longish joke. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com
Jokes on the Internet too easily achieve overkill, so that one is sent 11 jokes about proctologists in a swoop when just one proctological joke every third decade will do nicely, thank you.

Jim Holt, who takes in so much about the history and philosophy of joke-telling in his concise and amiable conspectus of the subject, "Stop Me If You've Heard This," does not mention the effect of the Internet on joke-telling, but that's about his only omission. He recounts the careers of the odd men through history who have taken upon themselves the job of collecting and classifying jokes. He discusses why we laugh at what we do. He sets out competing theories about the motivation behind joke-telling: the superiority theory, rooted in mockery and derision; the incongruity theory, in which whimsicality disrupts logic; and the relief theory, holding jokes to be a way of breaking down inhibitions. Freud thought most jokes were acts of aggression. Some are, but many more aren't. Most people who tell jokes do so in the hope that they will bring their recipients pleasure, a brief escape from the tediousness of the day.

"It is an oft-registered complaint that philosophers do not devote enough attention to laughter," Mr. Holt notes. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com
This is not a complaint you will hear registered chez Epstein. The most famous philosophic treatise on the subject is Henri Bergson's "On Laughter," which is two stages beyond dull and three beyond helpful. As a younger man, I used occasionally to use M. Bergson's lucubrations on laughter as an aid to increased amorous endurance but could never think of any other profitable purpose for it. As Max Beerbohm wrote, anyone attempting "to determine from what inner sources mankind derives the greatest pleasure in life would agree with me that only the emotion of love takes higher rank than that of laughter."

Laughter is not a gift given evenly to everyone, and some people have been able to dispense with it nearly altogether. Among famous non-laughers, Mr. Holt cites Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift (though the cause of laughter in others), Josef Stalin, William Gladstone, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Margaret Thatcher. I don't know if this fair to Ms. Thatcher and Justice Ginsberg -- though, true enough, one does not easily imagine approaching either woman by saying: "I wonder if you've heard the one about the two nuns, the Rumanian barber and the Pekinese?"

A book about jokes is made or broken by the quality of jokes its author uses by way of illustration. "Stop Me If You've Heard This" passes this test -- it contains many delightful jokes, even if connoisseurs are likely to have heard several of them before. One I hadn't heard is about the cabdriver who takes a man from Manhattan to the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, with the route described in intricate detail; as the man emerges from the cab in front of the hotel in Chicago, two women get in and one of them gives the cab driver an address on Flatbush Avenue, to which the cabbie replies: "Uh-uh, lady, I don't go to Brooklyn."

I did not fall from my couch at this joke but chortled agreeably. ("No printed page, alas," Beerbohm writes, "can thrill us to extremities of laughter.") Mr. Holt's taste in jokes runs to the subtle, not the raucous. None of his book's jokes caused what Mel Brooks has referred to as "dangerous laughter," by which he meant laughter so intense that it might just end in heart attack. Some jokes -- often, I regret to report, coarse and adolescent ones -- have caused dangerous laughter in me: "Tonto, you idiot, I said posse!" is the punch line of one. Other jokes earn not a shock but a sweet nod of recognition: "Oy, was I thoisty!" is the punch line of a joke in this line.

This last example is a reminder that, just as there is dangerous laughter, so there are there dangerous jokes. Ethnic lines, for example, are usually crossed only at the joke teller's peril. Mr. Holt, owing to a deficiency of personal ethnicity that is beyond his control, includes only a small number of Jewish jokes. He does provide a few American Jewish Princess jokes that could get him a stern letter from the women's division of the Anti-Defamation League. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com
The comedian Sarah Silverman, hiding behind the mask of a faux naïve Jewish American Princess, specializes in telling dangerous jokes -- about black teenage pregnancy, the Holocaust, the crucifixion -- and has lived not only to go on telling them but to collect handsome fees for doing so.

Bordering on the dangerous are nationality jokes, those mini-sociologies of customs and mores. An example of the genre is: What is an Irish homosexual? To which the answer is: "A man who prefers women over whiskey." One of the best such jokes, if not the gentlest, asks what the difference is between a Hungarian and a Rumanian. Each, of course, will sell you his grandmother, but the Rumanian won't deliver.

Jokes often serve as political commentary. All that is left of decades of murder and misery in the Soviet Union are a small number of jokes about the envy, anti-Semitism and inefficiency in the Russia of commissars and comrades. An example is the joke about the Soviet citizen who buys an ill-designed gray car with no extras and, when told that the wait for delivery is 10 years, asks whether the dealer could deliver the car in the afternoon 10 years hence -- because he has the plumber is coming that morning.

Well-told jokes are works of art, as Mr. Holt rightly suggests, most of them by anonymous authors. They are short stories in miniature, with subjects and themes, often an epiphany, and occasionally a useful moral. They can be charming, offensive or sweet, and sometimes comforting in the face the world's abundant injustices. And funny -- did I neglect to mention funny?

People often compare dating to interviewing for a job. In the Orthodox Jewish world, this notion is taken almost literally.

Upon returning from post-high-school studies in Israel, young Orthodox women (such as myself) meet with recruiters, commonly known as shadchanim (matchmakers). After determining whether the young woman wishes to marry a "learner" (a man studying full time in yeshiva), an "earner" (a professional) or a combination of the two, the shadchan collects the prospective bride's "shidduch résumé," detailing everything from education and career plans to dress size, height, parents' occupations and synagogue memberships. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com
The shadchan then approaches a suitable single man or, most likely, his parents -- who add the woman to their son's typically lengthy "list."

Before agreeing to a noncommittal first date, the man's parents begin a thorough background check that puts government security clearance to shame. Phoning references isn't enough -- of course they'll say good things -- so they cold-call other acquaintances of the potential bride, from camp counselors to college roommates. The questions they ask often border on the superficial: "Does she own a Netflix account?"; "Does she wear open-toed shoes?" (The correct response may vary depending on how Orthodox a woman the man is looking for.)

Just as the economy is headed to recession, the shidduch system is in crisis mode. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com
Or so the rabbis moan, noting the surplus of women eager to marry and the corresponding shortfall in the quality and quantity of available Jewish men. It's not that there are more Orthodox women than men out there; experts instead attribute the shortage to the broader sociological trend of postponing marriage, which works to the disadvantage of women looking for spouses their own age or just a few years older. Men who are 30 will date women as young as 18 and may turn their noses up at dating any woman past the age of 25. The 20% or 30% of women who don't get hitched right away begin to worry they'll be left out in the cold for good.

Sensing this shift of power, mothers of sons who remain in the matchmaking system increase their demands: Any prospective daughter-in-law must be a size two, or a "learner" son must be supported indefinitely by the girl's parents. For men, "it's a buyer's market," says Michael Salamon, a psychologist and author of "The Shidduch Crisis: Causes and Cures" (2008). "And the pressures of dating are creating all kinds of social problems, such as eating disorders and anxiety disorders. It's frightening."

I used to shrug off this talk. Genocide in Darfur is a crisis; being single at 23 is not. But the communal pressure is hard to ignore. Orthodox Judaism, like most traditional faiths, is geared to families; singles lack a definitive role.

Then there's what social worker Shaya Ostrov calls the "popcorn effect." During the first two to three years following high-school graduation, 70% to 80% of Orthodox women get married; weddings then peter off. "The system works for a very limited period of time," says Mr. Ostrov, the author of "The Inner Circle: Seven Gates to Marriage." Friends of mine compare dating to musical chairs; nobody wants to end up an "old maid," and so they get engaged, hoping doubts will prove unfounded. "Young women," notes Sylvia Barack Fishman, professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University, "are often made to feel that they are damaged goods if they have not married -- and married well -- by their early 20s."

Part of the problem is the increased number of "serial daters" who, as Ms. Fishman says, are "shopping for perfection." When Mr. Ostrov runs workshops, he asks male participants in their early 30s how many girls they have dated. "One hundred seventy-five is not an unusual number," he says. "Dating" in these cases usually ends after just one or two meetings with each girl.

Many men admit that their refusal to commit themselves to a woman stems from fear of making a mistake. The only thing worse than being an "older single" male, it seems, is being a 25-year-old divorcé with two children. It is women, though, who are usually more stigmatized by a split. Indeed, one big problem in the Orthodox community is the "Post-Shidduch Crisis."

"We're seeing more and more recently married, young Orthodox Jews getting divorced," says Mr. Salamon, who estimates that the divorce rate among the Orthodox has risen to an alarming 30% in the past five to 10 years. (Hard data are difficult to come by, Mr. Salamon says, because the Orthodox shun research studies for fear of harming their own or their children's shidduchim.)

The core of the problem is that young marrieds don't know how to accommodate each other, says Mr. Salamon. And singles need to start asking the right questions. "Family history has nothing to do with whether you'll make a good husband or wife," he says. The rigid, interview-style questioning is only wreaking havoc: "They're looking for some sort of guarantee. But who can guarantee happiness?" http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com

At first, some neighbors thought the wooden boxes tucked into the bushes behind Omid Ghayebi's house were rabbit hutches.

That was just fine with Mr. Ghayebi, a fledgling beekeeper who didn't intend to advertise the pastime he took up in 2006. "I didn't want anyone getting all worked up," he says.
As honeybees mysteriously abandon commercial hives, nature lovers around America are trying to replenish the bee population with backyard hives, stirring up trouble with their neighbors. WSJ's Rob Tomsho reports.

In a neighborhood of closely built homes and tiny backyards, the 31-year-old engineer's hobby didn't stay a secret. Soon, he was caught up in a far-reaching debate over where beekeepers are meant to be and not to be.

Honeybees add an estimated $15 billion annually to the value of the nation's agricultural production. Every year hundreds of thousands of colonies are trucked around the country to pollinate everything from apples to almonds.

But these are tumultuous times in beekeeping. Rural areas that once served as home base have been gobbled up by development. For the past two years, a mysterious syndrome dubbed "colony collapse disorder" has led honeybees to abandon commercial hives in droves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that beekeepers lost about 35% of their managed hives in 2007, up from 31% in 2006. Scientists still don't know the cause of CCD but suspect it may be due to some combination of factors, including pathogens, parasites and pesticides.

As experts work to solve that mystery, more nature lovers have taken up backyard beekeeping in hopes of bolstering the ranks of European bees, the breed used commercially to make honey and pollinate crops. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com
Bee Culture magazine estimates the number of beekeeping hobbyists has risen by about 10% to 100,000 in the past year or so.

The boom hasn't been without mishaps. Last month , a number of residents of Marblehead, Mass., were stung by bees that swarmed out of a hobbyist's hive as it was being moved from a backyard to a farm.

Fears of raging bees and bumbling hobbyists have helped prompt dozens of communities to put the clamps on beekeeping. The city of Rancho Mirage, Calif., bans it outright and Garden City, Mich., now requires beekeepers to live on at least a quarter acre. Bill Lewis, president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, says restrictions throughout the L.A. region have become so tight that some beekeepers have gone underground. "Many actually keep bees in the cities and just don't tell," he says.

Omid Ghayebi (pronounced: oh-MEED goy-e-BEE) isn't the first to raise bees in South Portland, a coastal community of 24,000. Fred Hale, reputed to be the world's oldest man at the time of his 2004 death at age 113, was a well-known local beekeeper who sometimes attributed his longevity to a daily dose of honey. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com

But through the years, the city has also struggled with its agricultural roots. Although its shopping mall is built on the site of a former pig farm, the city bans all farm animals from residential neighborhoods. Or at least it did until last year when a 10-year-old gained overwhelming public support for her successful campaign to win the right to raise chickens.

Mr. Ghayebi didn't think his buzzing pets would get the same reception. After determining that South Portland had no ordinance that mentioned beekeeping, in the spring of 2006 he put two hives with about 24,000 bees in his backyard without telling a soul.

"I was kind of trying to live a quiet life with the bees," says Mr. Ghayebi, who has been enthralled with them since childhood, when his parents kept hives on their farm in Iran.

A wiry man with a ready smile, Mr. Ghayebi and others like him strictly breed bees as a hobby. They think doing so is good for the insects, but most don't have the resources to travel around the country pollinating crops. When farmers hire beekeepers for pollination purposes, they typically "rent" hundreds or thousands of hives.

In the spring of 2007, Mr. Ghayebi's bees began familiarizing themselves with a neighbor's backyard. One day, a half dozen of them landed and began drinking rainwater from the track of Mark Tinkham's sliding glass door. After they flew away, other bees took their places. No one was stung, and for a time, the Tinkham family got a kick out of the little flying parades. But soon there were bees in the puddles, bees in the birdbath and bees in the kiddie pool.

Mr. Tinkham couldn't figure it out until one day, from his deck, he noticed Mr. Ghayebi in his own backyard wearing a net-covered beekeepers' helmet. "I said, 'You got to be kidding me,'" recalls Mr. Tinkham, who contacted City Hall.

Pat Doucette, the city's code-enforcement officer, told Mr. Ghayebi that his beekeeping amounted to farming in a residential area and asked him to move the hives. He said she had no legal basis to make such a request. Ms. Doucette recalls that she "tried to get some kind of compromise, but there wasn't any."

While the bees were dormant last winter, Ms. Doucette reviewed other cities' beekeeping ordinances and began drafting one for South Portland. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com
The proposal that evolved called for $25 annual registration permits, hive limits based on acreage and tall barriers to dissuade bees from flying into neighbors' yards. Violators could be fined up to $1,000 a day.

Mr. Ghayebi sought backup from the Maine State Beekeepers Association, which had gone to bat for a similarly besieged beekeeper in a neighboring town a year earlier. Erin Forbes, the group's newsletter editor, says most of its 300 members are still so leery of attention that she advises them to paint their hives to look like compost bins.

When the city council debated the bee ordinance in public hearings, Mr. Ghayebi was usually joined by at least a half-dozen beekeeping brethren. City officials say few local residents spoke up in favor of the ordinance.

In March, Ms. Forbes drafted a letter to city officials and posted it on BeeSource.com, a beekeeping Web site. She said the proposed ordinance "sends a message to potential beekeepers and the public that beekeeping is something to be feared and regulated."

Beekeepers from around New England and beyond took up the cause. "Make South Portland a city that can say 'We are Honey Bee Friendly' and 'We Support Pollination,'" wrote one Massachusetts beekeeper. City officials "were inundated with emails" against the ordinance, recalls Ms. Doucette. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com

Even so, on May 19, the City Council adopted the ordinance by a vote of 5-to-2. Not that they've used it so far.

These days, there is only one registered beekeeper in South Portland and it is not Mr. Ghayebi. By the time the ordinance finally passed, he'd mended fences with his neighbor and moved his hives to a friend's farm in a rural area outside of town.

The half-hour drive has become a chore and, after all the aggravation, Mr. Ghayebi says he has grown tired of the taste of his own honey. But the beekeeper says he is still committed to his hives. "I'm not going to take up golfing instead," he vows. "We need more bees." http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

It was midnight in the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio here, and scientists were stalking the cold ghost of a vanished masterpiece. Armed with an infrared reflectometer, they searched for hidden traces of a mural by Leonardo da Vinci that helped change the course of Western art. The fabled artwork may be concealed within the walls, masked for centuries by overlays of paint, plaster, brick -- and a thick patina of misinformation.

For 30 years, Maurizio Seracini, a pioneer in forensic art analysis, has been experimenting with noninvasive imaging techniques to find the da Vinci mural -- should it still exist -- without touching or disturbing the equally priceless frescoes painted over it. Dr. Seracini's fascination with da Vinci's missing masterwork -- The Battle of Anghiari -- spurred a revolution in the science of art diagnostics, harnessing an array of medical and military technologies, ranging from radar mapping and X-ray fluorescence to ultrasound probes and ultraviolet scans.

"If we succeed, we will not only have a way to find the Leonardo," Dr. Seracini says, "but we will have a technology that could detect murals world-wide."

The search is expected to climax next year when, with support of the Italian government, Dr. Seracini and his colleagues plan to radiate one wall with a high-energy neutron beam that may reveal the mural for the first time in 450 years.

It is hard to imagine a more public experiment. The building itself is the ancient heart of the city. "You are working in the symbol of the Renaissance in Florence, in a monument that is in use practically every day," Dr. Seracini says. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com
"It is like working on a stage."

In preparation, Dr. Seracini and his colleagues at Editech, the art- and architectural-diagnostics firm he founded in Florence, have been analyzing the building inch by inch. Their pace quickened when a radar scan revealed a gap between the fresco-covered bricks and the original stone wall -- one large enough to preserve anything painted on the older hidden surface.

To better analyze paintings and sculptures, art conservation experts are adopting non-invasive imaging and testing techniques originally developed for medical and military purposes. Some examples:
• In the journal NDT&E International4, UC-San Diego art expert Maurizio Seracini5 and his colleagues report on efforts to find Leonardo da Vinci's "The Battle of Anghiari"6 using ground-penetrating radar to look inside the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
• In Leonardo da Vinci: Studio per I"Adorazione dei Magi, Dr. Seracini describes how ultra-violet fluorescence and infrared scans reveal that much of da Vinci's famous painting "The Adoration of the Magi" had been heavily retouched by another artist.
• The search for the da Vinci mural has been aided by new documentary evidence reported by Syracuse University art historian Rab Hatfield in Finding Leonardo: The Case for Recovering 'The Battle of Anghiari.'

On this night, art diagnostician Letizia Guffi and architectural historian Stefano Corazzini worked in the cool darkness with an infrared camera, seeking structural features that might have framed the mural. No one actually knows where in the main hall it was located.

The cavernous ceiling loomed like the night sky. Here and there, marble statues cast moon shadows. With their sensors, the scientists looked beyond the present onto an earlier era. "We can see the textures of the old walls, arches and windows under the plaster. We can see if they are bricks or stone because one is cooler than the other," Dr. Guffi says.

The tourists and city functionaries have vanished for the day. The two researchers work in complete darkness. The warmth of even a flashlight beam could wash out the heat-sensitive infrared traces.

Until recently, art scholars were confident they knew the fate of da Vinci's mural of war. The painting, so tradition says, had been botched by Leonardo's own hand, abandoned in shame and then obliterated by an imperious Medici duke.

In 1977, however, Dr. Seracini, then a young apprentice to noted UCLA art scholar Carlo Pedretti, noticed a curious thing. He was inspecting the vast battle fresco by Giorgio Vasari that since 1563 has covered the long wall once occupied by da Vinci's work. There, in the clash of armies depicted near the ceiling, he was startled to discover that Vasari had painted two words in white on a tiny green banner all but invisible to view from below: "cerca trova."
• The search for the lost masterpiece raises the question of what the scientists ought to do if they actually find the Leonardo under the equally priceless frescos painted over it. Should they rip out the frescos that cover the Leonardo? Leave the whole thing alone? What do you think? http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com

Skeptical colleagues discounted the discovery. Yet they were the only words on the six enormous frescoes that cover the walls today. To Dr. Seracini, it could mean only one thing: The da Vinci mural must still be there, concealed behind Vasari's paintings. "We are talking about the masterpiece of the masterpieces of the Renaissance," says Dr. Seracini, "way more important than The Last Supper or the Mona Lisa."

Da Vinci and those who commissioned the work left no direct account as to why the master gave up on the mural. Whatever its technical flaws, the painting's inventiveness and savage passion dazzled artists throughout Europe for a half century before it disappeared from view. "One writer at the time says it is the most beautiful thing in existence, twice as beautiful as the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel," says Syracuse University art historian Rab Hatfield, a member of the Italian commission overseeing the project.

Dr. Seracini, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, wasn't the first art scholar to be seduced by the mystery of Leonardo's missing mural. No one, however, has pursued it with such technical acumen.

Not long ago, art conservationists had only a trained eye to guide their work. Today, sophisticated scientific techniques are becoming part of every art expert's tool kit. This spring in Vienna, for instance, restorers relied on X-ray fluorescence to analyze the solid gold of a priceless 16th Century sculpture. In France, University of Michigan physicists probed the walls of a 12th Century chapel with nondestructive terahertz beams. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com
In Pittsburgh, NASA scientists used molecules of atomic oxygen to wipe a Warhol painting clean of the lipstick smear left by a vandal's kiss.

Before he turned to art, Dr. Seracini trained in bioengineering at UC San Diego and became expert in medical imaging during postgraduate work in electrical engineering at Padua University. He has used the tools of science to diagnose thousands of major paintings and sculptures -- from Botticelli and Caravaggio to Giotto and Raphael. With ultraviolet imaging, he proved in 2002 that much of a celebrated da Vinci masterwork -- The Adoration of the Magi -- had been painted over by someone else. "For me a work of art is like a patient," Dr. Seracini says.

For the past eight years, private philanthropist Loell Guinness, an heir to the Guinness brewing and banking interests, has underwritten Dr. Seracini's studies through his Swiss-based foundation, the Kalpa Group. "I was fascinated by the use of technology to find and preserve a masterpiece," says Mr. Guinness.

The portable neutron-beam scanner that Dr. Seracini and his team plan to use in the main hall next year is still in development. Months of technical trials are ahead of them. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com

As they prepare, the scientists take heart from what they know of the artist who covered da Vinci's mural so long ago. A master artist and architect himself, Vasari was loath to destroy the work of another.

Called upon to make major structural changes to the nearby church of Santa Maria Novella, Vasari took pains to preserve its frescoes behind a stone façade, even though he had no reason to expect they would ever again see light of day. Almost 300 years later, they were found by accident during routine church renovations -- in almost pristine condition. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com

Would Vasari have done any less for a painter he so admired? "We think he would have done the same for the masterpiece of Leonardo," says Dr. Corazzini.

A century before the Mayflower, a single man settled the destiny of the Americas far more momentously than the Puritans ever could. Hernán Cortés's blitzkrieg-like conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1519-21 laid the foundation of a Spanish empire that would eventually stretch from California to the pampas of Argentina. Along the way, he sealed the doom of the native cultures of the Americas, both North and South, and set the pattern of global history right down to the present -- as a series of fateful encounters between, on the one hand, Western ideas, technologies and institutions and, on the other, non-Western cultures, peoples and terrains.

In "Conquistador," Buddy Levy offers a fascinating account of the first and most decisive of those encounters: the one between the impetuous Spanish adventurer Cortés and Montezuma, the ill-starred emperor of the Aztecs -- clearly the wrong emperor at the wrong place at the wrong time. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com
Mr. Levy has an eye for vivid detail and manages to build a compelling narrative out of this almost unbelievable story of missionary zeal, greed, cruelty and courage. By avoiding the kind of ideological posturing that usually distorts re-tellings of the conquest of the New World, Mr. Levy rightly focuses his reader's attention on the story's antagonists.

Cortés's early life in Castile, before he headed off to the New World, was spent unpromisingly as a rogue and a wastrel. And in an era when most men were past their prime at age 40, he was already 34 when he left his farm on the island of Cuba to try to make direct contact with the native tribes on the Yucatan mainland. His hope was to trade for the one commodity that the Spanish in the New World could never get enough of: gold.

Others had tried what Cortés wanted to do, and failed. They died in shipwrecks or were captured and sold into slavery by the Indians. Cortés, though, had the advantage of iron resolve, a good mind and an instinct for seizing the initiative in a crisis. With his handful of men, three cannon and 15 horses, he overawed the first tribes he encountered. Realizing that the gold trinkets they offered him were only a hint of the wealth lying further west, he began his drive into the interior of Mexico, fighting and marching through scorching deserts and over ice-bound mountain passes. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com
He did not stop until he reached the capital of the most feared people of the central Mexican valley, the Aztecs.

Cortés was a man of deep contradictions. A devout Catholic, he was horrified by the sights and sounds of Aztec worship: its human sacrifices and cannibalism, its skull racks, its idols draped with human body parts, its priests with their blood-clotted hair. But he was not above massacring his enemies or burning them at the stake. He was genuinely dazzled by his first sight of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, with its tidy fields and gleaming stone causeways, a city of nearly a quarter-million people that was, he wrote in a letter to the Spanish king, more beautiful than any in Europe. Even so, he was ready to destroy it all to feed his desire for gold and to bend the Aztecs to his will.

If Cortés was a man of contradictions, Montezuma was not. Studious and conscientious, he had been trained for Aztec priesthood before becoming emperor in 1503 -- the same year that Cortes set out from Spain for America. Montezuma believed in the rightness of his own convictions but also, it appears, in the importance of an open mind. As Mr. Levy shows, he always looked for ways to dispel a crisis by placating the feelings of all concerned. He would have made a fine college president.
http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com
From his first meeting with Cortés in November 1519, though, he was desperately overmatched.

Montezuma hoped that, by giving Cortés magnificent gifts of gold and silver, he could make him go away. He made him want to stay instead. The Aztec ruler never quite shook off the suspicion that Cortés might be the Aztec god Quetzelcoatl returning home according to ancient prophesy -- a suspicion that led Montezuma to want to treat the intrusive Spaniards as guests rather than a threat.

Cortés exploited Montezuma's weakness without scruple, squeezing one concession after another out of him until, though outnumbered by more than 1,000-to-1, Cortés made him a hostage. When Montezuma had lost all credibility with his people and was no longer useful, Cortés cast him aside.
http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com
Montezuma died a broken man -- although probably not, Mr. Levy argues, at Cortes's order. It is more likely that Montezuma died from wounds inflicted by his own subjects. When they saw him appear in chains and appeal for calm, they had bombarded him with stones and arrows. His weakness, they understood, had betrayed them to the Spanish.

Cortés wound up besieging Tenochtitlán, in alliance with Indian tribes who had cursed their lot under Aztec rule. By Aug. 31, 1521, the city was a smoldering ruin. Nearly 100,000 people died in the siege; another 100,000 died of smallpox -- the disease that eventually tipped the demographic balance in favor of the Spaniards in the New World.

The Spanish would spend the next three centuries rebuilding and exploiting the lands they had devastated. Cortés got the wealth he wanted. By the time he died in 1547 he was a rich man, and America's gold and silver had made Spain the world's first superpower. Such riches would soon tempt others to devote men and resources to competing in the Western Hemisphere: Portugal, France, Holland, England. The history of Europe, and the world, would never be the same.

"It was Cortés, the consummate gambler," Mr. Levy writes, "who staked high wagers and won." Montezuma was the more lovable man. But his world has vanished into dust. The world Cortés made is still around us.

Ruth Greenglass, whose damning testimony in the Rosenberg atomic-bomb spy case of the early 1950s helped lead to the execution of her sister-in-law Ethel Rosenberg, died on April 7. She was 84.

Mrs. Greenglass’s testimony was later called into question.

Along with her husband, David Greenglass — Ethel’s brother and a central figure in the case — Mrs. Greenglass had lived in the New York metropolitan area under an assumed name for more than four decades. Her death was revealed in court papers on June 23.

That day, in an unexpected response to a suit by historians, the federal government agreed to release secret grand jury testimony, 57 years after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. The government, however, consented to release the testimony of only 35 of the 45 witnesses; those who are dead or have consented to the release. Mrs. Greenglass was listed as one of the deceased; her death was confirmed by the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and through Social Security records. Mr. Greenglass survives her.

The Rosenberg investigation can be traced to 1945, when a Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected to the West and stunned intelligence officials by revealing that the Russians were engaged in extensive spying against their wartime allies.
http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com At the time, David Greenglass was an Army sergeant assigned as a machinist to the Manhattan Project, the program to develop the atomic bomb, at Los Alamos, N.M.

When Mr. Rosenberg, an avowed Communist, found out about his brother-in-law’s assignment, he recruited Mr. Greenglass to gather information about the Manhattan Project, including documents, handwritten notes, sketches of the bomb and the names of scientists.

One afternoon in September 1945, in the Rosenberg apartment in Knickerbocker Village on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Mr. Greenglass dictated his notes to someone sitting before a Remington typewriter. Who was sitting at that typewriter, Ethel Rosenberg or Ruth Greenglass? Fifty-seven years after the Rosenberg trial the question remains.

In 1950, after confessing to his role as a spy, Mr. Greenglass agreed to testify against the Rosenbergs. At the time, he had not yet been sentenced.

A main element in the prosecution was the threat of indictment, conviction and possible execution of Ethel Rosenberg as leverage to persuade Julius Rosenberg to confess and to implicate other collaborators. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com

Those collaborators had already been identified, largely from what became known as the Venona transcripts, a trove of intercepted Soviet cables.

But with little more than a week before the trial was to start, on March 6, 1951, the government’s case against Mrs. Rosenberg remained flimsy, lacking evidence of an overt act to justify her conviction, much less her execution.

Prosecutors had been interrogating Mrs. Greenglass since June 1950. In February 1951, she was interviewed again. After reminding her that she was still subject to indictment and that her husband had yet to be sentenced, the prosecutors extracted a recollection from her: that in the fall of 1945, Ethel Rosenberg had typed her brother’s handwritten notes.

Soon after, confronted with his wife’s account, Mr. Greenglass told prosecutors that Mrs. Greenglass had a very good memory and that if that was what she recalled of events six years earlier, she was probably right.

The transcripts of those two crucial interviews have never been released or even located in government files. But at the trial, Mr. Greenglass testified that his sister had done the typing. Called to the stand, Mrs. Greenglass corroborated her husband’s testimony.

In his summation, the chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, declared: “This description of the atom bomb, destined for delivery to the Soviet Union, was typed up by the defendant Ethel Rosenberg that afternoon at her apartment at 10 Monroe Street. Just so had she, on countless other occasions, sat at that typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.”

On June 19, 1953, the Rosenbergs were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing.

It may never be determined who actually took that dictation. But in the late 1990s, Sam Roberts, a reporter for The New York Times, interviewed Mr. Greenglass for more than 50 hours while doing research for a book, “The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case” (Random House, 2003).

In the book, Mr. Roberts recounts how Mr. Greenglass acknowledged for the first time that he had lied on the stand and that he had no recollection that his sister had typed his notes.

“I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember,” Mr. Greenglass told Mr. Roberts.

“You know, I seldom use the word ‘sister’ anymore; I’ve just wiped it out of my mind,” Mr. Greenglass continued, adding: “My wife put her in it. So what am I going to do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife.”

Ruth Leah Printz was born on either April 30 or May 1, 1924 (official records differ), the eldest of four children of Max and Tillie Leiter Printz. Growing up on the Lower East Side, she and David Greenglass were neighbors and childhood sweethearts. After graduating with honors from Seward Park High School at 16, she was ready to go to college. But her mother insisted that she learn how to type.

At the time of the Rosenberg trial, Mrs. Greenglass was working as a legal stenographer for Louis J. Lefkowitz, a Republican assemblyman from the Lower East Side, who later became the New York State attorney general. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com
She was fired.

After serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence, Mr. Greenglass was released from federal prison in 1960. In return for her and her husband’s cooperation in the Rosenberg case, Mrs. Greenglass was not indicted.



A 43-year-old man is weary of teaching high school but has no clue how else to make a living. A 67-year-old man wants to leave banking but does not want to retire before leaving a more positive mark on the world. A 52-year-old woman is an emergency room doctor who loves her work but pines for more downtime.

All of them took part in a workshop in Boulder recently that was led by a career “intuitive” named Sue Frederick — a former career counselor who draws upon her dreams, ancient numerology and conversations with spirits to “see your dream job.”

As the economic slump continues, many workers, even those who hate their jobs, are reluctant to look for more satisfying work. But others are turning to nontraditional career counselors and coaches to help them navigate transitions in their lives and careers.

These workers have read the umpteenth edition of “What Color Is Your Parachute?” by Richard Nelson Bolles and have mastered the Myers-Briggs personality test. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.blogspot.com
Now they crave something more offbeat and probing.

Lucky for them, there are as many flavors of career counselors — and more recently coaches, including “psychic” and “intuitive” ones — as there are careers. Career counselors tend to explore psychological undercurrents with clients, and they often have a master’s degree in counseling. Coaches typically come from the corporate world and focus on goal-setting.

It is not just residents of Boulder, a mecca for all things organic and spiritual, who flock to Ms. Frederick’s “career intuition boot camp” and individual sessions in person or over the phone.

“I don’t want to come across as a new age-y kind of guy with my head in the stars, because as a New Yorker type that’s the last thing I am,” said Gary Purnhagen, 55, who started his own management consulting business in Manhattan a few months ago after spending 20 years working for companies. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com
“But going to Sue was probably the best decision I’ve ever made in terms of reaching out.”

Several months ago Mr. Purnhagen left a financial printing company that was laying people off. He trolled the Internet for counselors and coaches. When he saw Ms. Frederick’s Web site he was drawn to her big smile and her message that your dream job should make you giggle when you speak of it.

Then, call it coincidence or destiny, a consultant friend of his in New York suggested that he check out a career coach named Sue Frederick, and Mr. Purnhagen tossed his skepticism aside. Four one-hour phone sessions and $500 later, he said he is more focused, confident and trusting in his ability to build a lucrative clientele.

Ms. Frederick, 58, trained as a career counselor in the 1970s at the University of Missouri. She worked at the university and later in the private sector. But she yearned to add to her repertoire her self-described clairvoyance, which she says she discovered when she was a child who would dream about things that would often happen later that day.

Her husband warned that she would lose corporate clients if she called herself a career intuitive, but she did anyway. “Soon I had more clients than I knew what to do with,” Ms. Frederick told the 29 people at a recent workshop.

When career coaches jumped onto the scene two decades ago they were looked upon suspiciously by career counselors as inexperienced, brash interlopers. But since 1999, when the International Coach Federation began offering certification training for coaches, their reputation has risen steadily.

Today, roughly 3,700 people in the United States are certified by the federation. But anyone can call herself a coach; in fact, roughly 30,000 people do just that, estimates Diane Brennan, president of the federation. Hundreds of organizations offer some form of coaching certifications.

“A lot of people call themselves coaches because it’s the hot thing to do,” Ms. Brennan said.

This factor is reflected in the rates coaches charge — up to $400 an hour. For many clients, seeing a coach feels far more upbeat, even more upscale, than working with a counselor. This makes some traditional career counselors fear they may become obsolete.

“A lot of people see having a coach as a prestigious thing, whereas going to a career counselor is often associated with having a problem,” said Maria Greco, a licensed professional counselor in Boulder with a Ph.D. in university administration.

A coach is more like a personal trainer, who coaxes clients to set and meet their job or career goals. A sure sign that you are talking to a coach is “five steps to” or “seven rules for.” The cover of Ms. Frederick’s 2004 book, “Dancing at Your Desk: A Metaphysical Guide to Job Happiness,” promises “The 7 Secret Steps to Finding Work You Love.”

Joel Garfinkle, a career coach in Oakland, Calif., said his seven-step formula to finding a dream job sets him apart.

“It’s all about aligning your natural gifts and talent to your passions that will equal a career that is 100 percent about fulfillment,” said Mr. Garfinkle, with the turbo-charged delivery of a football coach.

What draws people to a career counselor or coach depends on their age, their location and the industry they work in. For instance, even though Silicon Valley has averted the worst of the economic slowdown, some people who have lost their job are asking whether the long commute and the grueling workdays are worth it before they start interviewing for a new job. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com

“I’m seeing more people looking for quality of life, balance and a change that will give them something that’ll be more enduring and more of a natural expression of who they are,” said Norm Meshriy, a career counselor in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Career counselors and coaches also say they are seeing more college students and recent graduates.

“Students are very concerned about the amount of debt they are graduating with, the sluggish economy, loss of jobs in numerous areas due to the housing bust, skilled jobs going overseas and fewer opportunities outside the service industries,” Linda Bates Parker, president of Black Career Women, a nonprofit devoted to the career development of black women, wrote in an e-mail. She is also director of career development at the University of Cincinnati.

At the other end of the career lifeline, a small but growing number of baby boomers are summoning career counselors and coaches.

Keyren H. Cotter, 67, is a loan officer at a bank in Denver. With a Ph.D. in materials science, Mr. Cotter, known as Casey, worked for years in engineering before moving into mortgage banking. But it was not the mortgage crisis that recently sent him to Ms. Frederick’s career workshop.

“I ask myself, ‘What’s my legacy? Why am I here?’ ” Mr. Cotter said. “I’m at a period where I’m no longer motivated by money. I’m looking for something with more substance and more meaning.”

In the weeks since the workshop, Mr. Cotter saw Ms. Frederick for a one-hour session. He recalled that when he walked into her office she said, “I’ve been meditating on you. I think you should make movies.” http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com
Now he is considering combining his interest and experience in financing with documentary filmmaking.

“It’s too early to know,” Mr. Cotter said. “But I know I’m getting unstuck.” http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 12, 2008
An article last Saturday about the growing popularity of career coaches misstated the history of the term. “Career coach” has been used for at least two decades — not one — for people who offer counseling in job development.

Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, India’s best-known soldier and the architect of the country’s victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan that gave birth to Bangladesh, died in Wellington, India, on Friday. He was 94.

The cause was pneumonia, India’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Field Marshal Manekshaw first drew notice as a captain in the British Indian Army during World War II. He was severely wounded on Feb. 22, 1942, in a counteroffensive against the Japanese on the Sittong River in Burma, now known as Myanmar. But he kept exhorting his soldiers, and he continued fighting until he collapsed.

Fearing the worst, the English commander, Maj. Gen. D. T. Cowan, pinned his own Military Cross on Captain Manekshaw and was quoted as saying, “A dead person can’t be awarded a Military Cross.”

But the young officer survived, and a storied military career began. He not only recovered from his wounds but went back to Burma later in the war and was wounded again. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com

In 1947, as colonel in charge of operations, he oversaw Indian forces in fighting that broke out between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the territory claimed by both new nations.

With a military mustache guarding a genial face, he was known as a stern disciplinarian with a common touch. He once insisted on doing folk dances with his troops even though he had a sprained ankle. By the end of the night, the sprain had turned into a fracture.

He instilled a sense of duty, efficiency and professionalism in the Indian Army, and he taught officers to stand up to political masters and bureaucratic interference. His wit, sometimes bordering on sarcasm, did not go over well with many in power.

In 1961, he had a falling out with the defense minister, V. K. Krishna Menon. But by then a general, he was vindicated late the next year when Indian troops were overrun by Chinese forces that swept down from the Himalayas. Mr. Menon resigned and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been close to Mr. Menon, rushed General Manekshaw to the front. There he rallied the retreating Indian forces until a cease-fire was declared.

He became the eighth chief of the Indian Army in 1969, and in 1971 led India’s forces in the war with Pakistan that ended with the creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com

According to articles published in Indian newspapers after his death, General Manekshaw firmly resisted demands by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the spring of 1971 for an immediate invasion of East Pakistan in support of rebels there. He insisted that a campaign be put off until after the monsoon season ended and the armed forces were better prepared.

Just before the conflict began that December, the prime minister asked him, “General, are you ready for the war?” He replied, “I’m always ready, sweetie.” Less than three weeks later, Pakistan was defeated.

General Manekshaw became a national hero and a household name after this triumph, and in 1973, two weeks before his retirement, he became India’s first field marshal. He had already received India’s highest civilian awards — Padma Bhushan in 1968 and Padma Vibhushan in 1972.

He was born into a Parsi family, his father a doctor, in Amritsar in Punjab on April 3, 1914.

He briefly pursued a degree in medicine and studied at Sherwood College, in Naini Tal, and Hindu Sabha College, in Amritsar, before joining the first class of the new Indian Military Academy at Dehra Dun in 1934. It had been opened to train Indians for commissioned ranks in the British Indian Army. He was first attached to the Royal Scots regiment. He later joined a Ghurka regiment and wore the Ghurka cap even after becoming the army’s chief of staff.

He met Siloo Bode at a gathering in Lahore, in what is now Pakistan, in 1937, and they were married in 1939. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
She died in 2001. He is survived by his daughters, Maja Daruwala and Sherry Batliwala, and three grandchildren.

Like many officers of his generation, he had an affection for British military traditions. A 1971 article in The New York Times noted that upon waking at 5:30 every morning, he liked drinking a small glass of whiskey, listening to the BBC news and puttering in his garden before going to work.

Caught up in the giddy whirl of liberated Paris, she did find time to have a child: Bill Patten Jr. was born in 1948. Her passion, however, was for the salon, not the nursery. Social life revolved around the British Embassy, where the ambassador, Duff Cooper (afterward Viscount Norwich), presided in a candle-lit drawing room "untouched since the days of the Duke of Wellington." His wife, the former Lady Diana Manners, a celebrated beauty, held court in the more intimate salon vert, where statesmen mingled with such personages as Jean Cocteau and Nancy Mitford.

A year after Bill Patten Sr.'s death in 1960, Susan Mary married another patrician: the intellectually ornate, inwardly tormented Cold War scribe Joseph W. Alsop V. Through him Susan Mary gained entrée to the court of John F. Kennedy. When Camelot ended, the marriage -- which, given Joe's homosexuality, was probably platonic -- grew stale and was eventually dissolved. The two, however, remained close. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com
After Joe's death in 1989, Susan Mary, lonely and afraid, sought refuge in drink.

Thus her eventual dragooning to Minnesota and the Sturm und Drang of therapy. Picture Evelyn Waugh forced at gunpoint to attend a seminar on multiculturalism and you have some idea of the incongruity of Susan Mary Alsop, every inch the grande doyenne, sitting beside a tattooed truck-driver in rehab. Improbably enough, her patrician reserve melts. The stiff upper lip softens, then quivers uncontrollably. In the flood of cathartic disclosure, she confesses to Mr. Patten that he was sired not by Bill Patten Sr. but by Duff Cooper.
Susan Mary Patten's husband, American diplomat Bill Patten, is shown at bottom left, in 1957, with son William S. Patten, whose real father was Cooper. After Patten's death, Susan Mary married syndicated columnist Joe Alsop .

"I suppose," Mr. Patten writes, "it felt better to have a First Lord of the Admiralty as my dad than the milkman," but the revelation was nevertheless disconcerting. In "My Three Fathers" he tries to make sense of this multiple paternity. The result is a portrait not only of his mother and of his fathers -- ostensible (Patten Sr.), biological (Cooper) and surrogate (Alsop) -- but also of a class.

The patricians had their faults. They kept their feelings bottled up and spent a fair amount of time in bed, either engaged in amour or gripped by obscure funks that people today take pills for. Their cardinal therapeutic method -- "have a drink," the words pitched somewhere between a question and a command -- falls short of the contemporary hygienic ideal. In morals the upper crust inclined to libertinism and winked at what they called "naughtiness," though as a concession to virtue they insisted that the naughtiness be carried on discreetly.

In spite of these delinquencies, the privileged set got a heck of lot done. Duff Cooper was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry in World War I, won a seat in Parliament in the 1920s, served in the cabinet in the 1930s and wrote a number of books, among them a life of Talleyrand that is still read -- all the while hitting the bottle, playing cards and chasing beauties. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com
Life was a perpetual party, yet Cooper was clear-headed enough to resign from Neville Chamberlain's cabinet in 1938 over the prime minister's appeasement of Hitler at Munich -- this at a time when the masses were deliriously embracing the delusion of "peace in our time."

The fear of another Munich, Mr. Patten notes, drove Joe Alsop to urge American leaders to stand up to the Communists. In the 1960s, that meant championing the Vietnam War -- which Alsop did with gusto. But already a softening had set in: Many of Alsop's fellow grandees began to question the wisdom of the "containment" policy that they themselves helped devise.

Vietnam exposed a deeper uneasiness in the mandarin class. Its culture was -- to borrow Disraeli's phrase -- "for the few, and for the very few." A good number of Brahmins came to the conclusion that it was quite unfair. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com
They worked to create a more egalitarian state. Henry Chauncey, five years ahead of Alsop at Groton, was one of the fathers of the SAT test, intended to level the playing field for admission to the best schools.

The decline of the patricians' self-confidence prepared the way for their unhappy progeny, a lost generation sunk in dilettantism, devoted to navel-gazing therapy and largely innocent of achievement. Their therapeutic culture, Mr. Patten observes, is the antithesis of the old aristocratic culture, with its rage for distinction and penchant for elaborate façades. He contrasts the therapeutic faith "that we are far more alike than we are different" with the ideals of his mother, who "reveled in her own uniqueness" and who labored to make her singularity evident through accomplishment.

Mr. Patten does not, finally, judge the merits of the quarrel, which is probably unresolvable. The democrat adores the common; the aristocrat strives to transcend it in the pursuit of excellence, a beautiful and noble way of living. Neither can be allowed to have the last word. Aristocracy, degraded into caste, hardens into something feudal and burdens its younglings with too great expectations. Democracy, in its most exaggerated form, is a conspiracy against the exceptional.

Susan Mary Alsop unapologetically took her stand with the aristocrats, and soon after her stint in rehab she reverted to her patrician vices. Over cocktails in the last of the smoke-filled palazzi of Georgetown, she joked with friends about the ghastly ordeal of Minneapolis. She died in 2004 at the age of 86, drinking and smoking to the last. In "My Three Fathers," Mr. Patten has conjured a vanished class with a grace that perhaps owes something to -- dare one say it -- the good breeding of his mother, and of his various fathers.

They were the butt of jokes in the West. (“How do you double a Lada’s value? Fill up the tank”). Inside the Soviet Union, however, the quantity and quality of the cars it produced epitomised both the system’s failure and the capitalist world’s advantage.

Cars bring freedom of movement (at least until the roads are full of them) and symbolise personal aspiration: both were frowned on in the Soviet Union. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
In “Cars for Comrades”, Lewis Siegelbaum, a professor at Michigan State University, provides extensive examples of the mental knots in which the Communist leaders tied themselves, wanting on the one hand to boast about their superiority over the West on all fronts, and being unable and unwilling to match it when it came to cars. A revealing bit of Soviet jargon applied to owners of cars was chastnik, meaning, roughly, a suspicious private person. Until the early 1960s, Mr Siegelbaum reports, vandalism against private cars was dismissed by the police as an understandable expression of egalitarian sentiment.

“Cars for Comrades” is a bit too generous. The truth was that even for Communist Party members, a private car was a huge and barely obtainable luxury for most of the decades of Soviet rule. Only in 1972 did the Soviet Union begin producing more private cars than trucks. And once it did, as Mr Siegelbaum aptly notes, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. One reason, of course, was the glaring unfairness. For the Soviet elite, cars were plentiful. Some, like Leonid Brezhnev, had big collections of Western cars. The system also provided luxury limousines such as the sleek black ZIL. These were unreliable and thirsty, but a horde of mechanics took care of them.

As you became less important, life got worse. Lower down the range, there was the Volga, a mid-size saloon whose interior tended to fill with petrol fumes. The Lada was an obsolete Fiat, produced at the Togliatti factory south-east of Moscow: bought new, it required extensive repair in order to become roadworthy. Soon after that it would start rusting. Getting it serviced was a nightmarish process involving long waits, the use of personal favours, and unpleasant discoveries (light-fingered mechanics would steal scarce items such as the wing mirrors or windscreen wipers).

Soviet cars weren’t all bad: the excellence of Soviet engineering in the military field sometimes filtered through to civilian life. The Niva, an adapted army jeep, was a highly-strung but handy 4x4; oddly it is unmentioned in the book. Your reviewer bought a new one for $4,000 in 1998. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
It caught fire shortly after purchase, but then gave excellent service until its gearbox seized up four years later.

But those were rare exceptions. The worst Soviet cars were almost comical: when the Oka was launched in 1987, Mr Siegelbaum notes, “like the Zaporozhets [its predecessor], with which it shared a diminutive size and lack of safety features…it quickly became the subject of horrifying stories and mordant humour”. And for ordinary citizens, getting hold of even the worst rattletrap involved many years of waiting.

Even good cars fare poorly in Russia’s climate. The harsh winters, sloppy construction and scanty maintenance mean bad roads; salt and grit take their toll on bodywork. It is not surprising that Russia’s elite nowadays favour huge jeeps, invariably foreign-made. It is a pity that Mr Siegelbaum’s book has such poor photographs: for those who never experienced the true horrors of Soviet-era motoring, words are not enough.

Some fish have special proteins in their blood to stop them from freezing to death—a remarkable evolutionary trait made no less so by the fact that biologists have known about it for some time. How this trait spread, though, turns out to be even more remarkable. If Peter Davies of Queen’s University in Ontario and his colleagues are right, it demonstrates in fish an evolutionary mechanism hitherto seen mainly in bacteria, viruses and genetic-engineering laboratories. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com

As sea-ice develops, the briny water beneath it cools to -2°C. Whales, seals and penguins cope with the consequent danger of freezing up by burning vast amounts of food to keep their bodies warm and by insulating themselves with thick layers of fat. Fish, however, are not warm blooded, and are usually too small to support substantial fat layers, so they have found a different way round the problem. Many species that live in cold waters have special proteins in their blood which attach themselves to small crystals of ice and prevent these from growing to a size at which they would be dangerous.

Normally, such an advantageous trait would start as a chance mutation that gave its possessor an advantage in the struggle for life. The mutant’s descendants would first take over their own species. Then, as that species diversified to occupy new ecological niches with the assistance of the mutation in question, it would come to be found in a group of species that had a common ancestor. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
At the same time, the mutant gene would undergo its own process of evolutionary refinement, and would end up slightly different in each of the daughter species. In animals, at least, this is the way evolution normally proceeds.

As Dr Davies reports in the Public Library of Science, however, that is not what seems to have happened with at least one piscine antifreeze gene. He and his colleagues analysed the antifreeze of diverse species and found that three—herring, smelt and sea raven—have nearly identical antifreeze proteins, even though they do not share a recent common ancestor. The chance of such similar proteins emerging in unrelated species is so vanishingly small that the team propose another option. They think the genes for antifreeze proteins jumped from one species to another.

If fish were bacteria, this would not be an outrageous suggestion. Bacteria (and viruses) regularly swap DNA. Viruses also, though more rarely, swap DNA with animals. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
But animals swapping DNA directly with one another is previously unheard of.

Dr Davies suggests that it may have happened here because fish have external fertilisation. In other words, males squirt sperm over eggs that have already been laid. That process allows sperm to go astray and, potentially, to end up attached to the wrong egg.

If a stray sperm actually fertilised the wrong egg, the result would be a hybrid that would almost certainly die. But if the egg were already fertilised then perhaps a lesser form of gene transfer might happen, with only a small amount of the foreign DNA being incorporated into the new creature. In this case, an advantageous gene transfer might be preserved.

Given the number of ice ages over the past 20m years, an antifreeze gene would be of great advantage. But exactly how common such “horizontal” gene transfer is in fish remains to be seen. Until this piece of work was done, it was thought impossible, so no one has looked. Now they will start doing so. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
And, if you want to find something, there is nothing like looking.

A keen observer, she ascribed the success of Elizabeth Vesey's parties to the wealthy Londoner's furniture: "Her fears were so great of the horror, as it was styled, of a circle, from the ceremony and awe which it produced, that she pushed all the small sofas, as well as chairs, pell-mell about the apartments, so as not to leave even a zigzag of communication free from impediment."

Not everyone likes zigzagging furniture and conversation, of course. In "Brilliant Women," Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz also introduce us to Vesey's friend Elizabeth Montagu, who preferred to arrange her furniture in a semicircle so that everyone could share in one common conversation. Nicknamed "Fidget" as a child, she had enough energy to manage her husband's coal mines and estates (he was a mathematician and uninterested in mere accounts), promote the arts and still have the most entertaining guest list in town. "I never invite idiots," Montagu told the actor David Garrick, a frequent guest. Other habitués included Dr. Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson, the novelist Samuel Richardson, a few nonidiotic earls and dukes, and their favorite painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

But the most striking element of both Elizabeth Vesey's and Elizabeth Montagu's parties wasn't the furniture or even the A-list of famous men -- it was the number and quality of intelligent females. "Brilliant Women," a gorgeously illustrated book, focuses on the group of friends who met in London beginning in the 1750s: the Bluestocking Circle.

London parties at the time were dominated by rakes and roués who did nothing but gossip, gamble and drink deep. The Bluestockings took their name from the fact that some of the participants (beginning with the botanist and poet Benjamin Stillingfleet) were either too poor or too uncaring of social niceties to change their workaday blue worsted stockings for fine white silk ones. Bluestocking society was marked by the absence of swearing and card-playing. Instead, its members met for smart and stylish conversation on literary and philosophic matters while drinking tea, coffee or lemonade.

One of their members, Hannah More, wrote an amusing poem about them called "The Bas Bleu: or, Conversation" in which she defends the art of conversation by calling it "that noblest commerce of mankind, / Whose precious merchandize is MIND." But learning was to be presented with wit, not pedantry. The Bluestockings seemed to know several languages fairly well, and they were variously accomplished. Hannah More, for example, an early convert to evangelicalism under William Wilberforce, wrote two tragedies for Garrick and a best-selling novel, "Coelebs in Search of a Wife," along with her light verse.

In some cases the variety of learning coalesced into formidable scholarship. Elizabeth Carter made her living as a classicist, although she was unaffiliated with any university, since higher education was closed to women; her complete translation of Epictetus was the standard version until this past century, and it is still cited by respected authorities. Small wonder that artist John Fayram's portrait of Carter depicted her in helmet and breastplate as Minerva.

The Bluestockings cared more for intellectual merit, charm and congeniality than politics. The two authors of "Brilliant Women" -- a literary critic and an art critic -- try to be fair to the Bluestocking women who do not match our current feminist ideals, but they are clearly more sympathetic to, say, the radical historian Catherine Macaulay (no relation to the historian Thomas) than to the increasingly conservative Hannah More. Their essays are worthy productions, but the prose is trumped by the illustrations.

• "My Three Fathers": Bill Patten Jr. tries to make sense of the multiple paternity he learned of late in life.
• Five Best:2 The author of "Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family" picks the best father-son memoirs.
• "Enlightenment":3 Novelist Maureen Freely tracks the lives of a handful of friends in Istanbul, half of them Turkish and half American.
• "The Trouble Begins at 8":4 A lively illustrated biography of Mark Twain.

Included are paintings and Wedgwood plaques celebrating Bluestocking women as the nine muses of Great Britain, but also a satirical etching by Thomas Rowlandson showing them as brawling harridans. http://louisfjfsheehan.blogspot.com
Touchingly, many of the paintings and artifacts were commissioned so that one friend could have a memento of the other. It is a real pleasure to look upon the faces of these quirky, wry and concentrated women.

Is it possible to be one today? Our authors end on a glum note: "Perhaps it was easier to be a bluestocking in the eighteenth century than it is in our own age." Their despair seems to stem, in part, from a 1996 photo in the English magazine Country Life -- a kind of Vanity Fair for the would-be horsy set. The image, reprinted in "Brilliant Women," includes nine female performers and clothes designers but no intellectuals and not "a single professional writer." I don't know about you, but when I look around I see plenty of women who live by the word -- writers, scholars, pundits, all taking part in the best conversations. Am I Blue? I hope so.

In 1995, Bill Patten and his sister "intervened" in the life of their mother, the author and society dowager Susan Mary Alsop. In her dotage, she had taken to tippling, and after she tumbled into the shrubbery at Brooke Astor's house in Northeast Harbor, Maine, something had to be done.

After the obligatory confrontation, in Georgetown, with various "links" (as participants in interventions are called) in the "chain of love," the 77-year-old lady was hustled onto a plane. Her protests that she was engaged to dine with the editors of Architectural Digest were to no avail, and Susan Mary Alsop found herself, that night, in a sanitarium in Minnesota. In his arresting memoir, "My Three Fathers," Mr. Patten describes the comedy of manners that results when this flower of a patrician order in which reticence ranks among the virtues is thrust into the atmosphere of modern confessional culture.

Susan Mary in the rehab clinic is the image of displaced ancien régime dignity -- a Chippendale in the Bauhaus, a Fragonard amid the Abstract Expressionists, a couplet of Pope's on the road with the Beat Generation. Born in Rome in 1918, Susan Mary was a child of the Jays of New York and the scion of a long line of diplomats; she spent much of her early life abroad. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com
After World War II she went to Paris to join her first husband, Bill Patten Sr., who had obtained -- through the good offices of Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles -- a post at the American Embassy.

The daughter that Valentina Korshunova knew would never have taken her own life.

“She was so full of life; she loved life,” Mrs. Korshunova, 48, said tearfully, speaking through a translator on Thursday at a funeral home in Greenwich Village where her daughter’s wake was held. “She was very strong, even though she looked so fragile. She had stamina, inner strength, and always acted so rationally, so reasonably.”

It had been five days since the body of her daughter, Ruslana Korshunova, a 20-year-old model, had been found in Lower Manhattan, nine stories beneath her apartment. The police said she had jumped. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Upon hearing the news, Mrs. Korshunova flew immediately from her native city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, traveling alone because her son, Ruslan, 28, could not get a visa in time.

By the time Mrs. Korshunova’s plane touched down, speculation was raging about what might have caused her daughter to jump. The Daily News reported accounts of Ms. Korshunova’s lovelorn online musings, which hinted at desperation and a sense of being lost.

But Mrs. Korshunova, wearing black and shrouded in a mourning veil, insisted that her daughter was too excited about her future and too full of life to ever have considered ending it. Instead she believed, after speaking to the police, that the facts in the case did not add up and that her daughter, always adventurous, might have been making her way through construction netting to a neighboring balcony and accidentally slipped. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

The pair had always been close. Mrs. Korshunova washed her daughter’s Rapunzel-like hair, which brushed her upper thighs, until Ms. Korshunova was 16. They kept in nearly constant touch after Ms. Korshunova left Kazakhstan, at 16, to model in Moscow, then Paris and finally New York, a city she adored. They spoke often.

Before Ms. Korshunova began modeling, she was enrolled in a school for gifted children, her mother said, earning top marks and mastering Kazakh and German. She was known for her kindness, and for being a perfectionist: even after landing a major fashion campaign, she would set her sights on the next big job.

Mrs. Korshunova, who raised both of her children alone after their father died in 1992, last saw her daughter in May, when she was home to renew her passport. Ms. Korshunova was deliberating about whether to go to college, possibly in Moscow or New York, her mother said, and talked about one day becoming a mother.

Mrs. Korshunova said she planned to bury her daughter in Moscow, also a city she loved. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

“She was the closest person in the world to me, the most trusted; she would never let me down,” Mrs. Korshunova said. “I was always proud of her. And I’m proud of her today.”

Monogram Biosciences Inc. said it will begin offering a new test next week to diagnose patients with a very aggressive form of breast cancer.

The HERmark test, which will cost $3,350, will require that physicians send a biopsy sample to Monogram in South San Francisco, Calif. The service is to begin July 15.

Separately the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved another new test for aggressive breast cancer called the SPOT-Light test by Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif. A spokeswoman said the test kits will be sold to hospital laboratories for about $1,400 for a packet of 20 kits.

Unlike Invitrogen's test which is sold as a kit, Monogram's HERmark test will be marketed as a service performed at its laboratories. Such tests are certified by a route different from the FDA, under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the company said. http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com

The new tests reflect the growing business of developing diagnostics that help doctors determine which patients are more likely to respond to often costly treatments and spare those who aren't likely to be helped the cost and side effects that can accompany the drugs.

The new tests check patients for a form of cancer known as HER2-positive breast cancer because the tumor cells overproduce a protein called HER2. As many as a third of the breast-cancer cases in the U.S. -- or 60,000 cases a year -- are driven to aggressive spread by overactive HER2 genes, Monogram said.

Such cancers don't respond well to conventional treatment, but are treatable with drugs such as Genentech Inc.'s Herceptin, or GlaxoSmithKline's Tykerb. Abbott Laboratories and Dako Denmark A/S also market HER2 tests.

"The best methods to assess HER2 status remain controversial. We need to find better tests," said Edith Perez, professor of medicine and chairperson of the breast cancer program for the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. She said further studies are needed to correlate new testing technologies with patient outcomes.

About 182,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and 40,000 will die from it according to the American Cancer Society.

The new tests begin with a patient's tumor samples, but use different technologies to assess HER2 activity. Invitrogen's test counts copies of the HER2 gene, while Monogram's test checks for levels of HER2 protein churned out by those genes. Monogram Biosciences Inc. said it will begin offering a new test next week to diagnose patients with a very aggressive form of breast cancer.

The HERmark test, which will cost $3,350, will require that physicians send a biopsy sample to Monogram in South San Francisco, Calif. The service is to begin July 15.

Separately the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved another new test for aggressive breast cancer called the SPOT-Light test by Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
A spokeswoman said the test kits will be sold to hospital laboratories for about $1,400 for a packet of 20 kits.

Unlike Invitrogen's test which is sold as a kit, Monogram's HERmark test will be marketed as a service performed at its laboratories. Such tests are certified by a route different from the FDA, under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the company said.

The new tests reflect the growing business of developing diagnostics that help doctors determine which patients are more likely to respond to often costly treatments and spare those who aren't likely to be helped the cost and side effects that can accompany the drugs.

The new tests check patients for a form of cancer known as HER2-positive breast cancer because the tumor cells overproduce a protein called HER2. As many as a third of the breast-cancer cases in the U.S. -- or 60,000 cases a year -- are driven to aggressive spread by overactive HER2 genes, Monogram said.

Such cancers don't respond well to conventional treatment, but are treatable with drugs such as Genentech Inc.'s Herceptin, or GlaxoSmithKline's Tykerb. Abbott Laboratories and Dako Denmark A/S also market HER2 tests.

"The best methods to assess HER2 status remain controversial. We need to find better tests," said Edith Perez, professor of medicine and chairperson of the breast cancer program for the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. She said further studies are needed to correlate new testing technologies with patient outcomes.

About 182,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and 40,000 will die from it according to the American Cancer Society. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

The new tests begin with a patient's tumor samples, but use different technologies to assess HER2 activity. Invitrogen's test counts copies of the HER2 gene, while Monogram's test checks for levels of HER2 protein churned out by those genes.