TIMELINE: MAY 2004

In a world increasingly populated by machines and ever prone to forces of nature, the human body continues to stir the imagination and rouse barbaric hatred. The humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Gharib and videotaped murder of an American soldier were public and vicious acts of degradation, while another case of cruelty, the murder of Emmett Till, was reopened after decades. But the body was also the source of wonder last month. A boy was born from sperm frozen in 1981. Scientists tinkered with a drug that denies blood to fatty tissue to fight obesity. Roger Bannister returned to Oxford's Iffley Road, where 50 years ago he did the impossible and ran a mile in under four minutes. Randy Johnson became the first pitcher to throw a perfect game at age 40. Charlotte Benkner lived to be 114.

Col. Robert Morgan, who piloted the Memphis Belle, died in May at age 85. Richard Varco helped perform the first successful heart surgery in 1952. David Reimer was born as a boy but raised as a girl in a medical experiment. Tony Randall was best known for his role on The Odd Couple. Virginia Capers won a Tony Award in 1974 for her role in A Raisin in the Sun. Syd Hoff was the author of Danny and the Dinosaur. Roger Straus co-founded New York publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Alberta Martin, the last widow of a Civil War veteran, died at age 97.

• Timeline: April 2004

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — The splendid, rotting Palace of Grand Duke Alexei might be charitably called a fixer-upper, long overdue for its first renovation since well before the 1917 Russian Revolution. So, too, are the fire-gutted Sheremetyev Mansion along St. Petersburg's prestigious riverside embankment and the historic barracks in nearby Kronstadt, where Bolsheviks once bloodily suppressed an uprising. But if you are a Russian tycoon with a few million to spare—and Russia these days has more billionaires than any other country in the world except the United States—the properties just might become an irresistible new real-estate opportunity. The cash-strapped St. Petersburg government has announced plans to privatize many such historic relics, selling off palaces, aristocratic estates and other sites that it cannot afford to renovate … [as a] way to ensure that the crumbling 300-year-old city founded by Peter the Great preserves its architectural heritage as the pre-revolutionary capital of the czars.  

From the New York Times :

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — It is hard to imagine there are many terrorist threats in a place where tumbleweeds regularly blow down the streets, as they do here in Wyoming's largest city and state capital. For those who doubt, however, Wyoming officials point to the two men who were stopped by a state trooper in February on Interstate 80. … Wyoming officials disposed of their nine pipe bombs using a robot bought with a federal antiterrorism grant. That grant was part of the very antiterrorism program that New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently called "pork barrel politics at its worst." Testifying in May before the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bloomberg said too much money was going to places that face limited threats—like Wyoming, whose population is about half a million, the smallest in the country—which this year will receive more than $38 a person in antiterrorist financing, more than any other state. … But as with the nuclear missiles that stand hidden in silos beneath the rolling hills and grassy plains here in the state's southeastern corner, the logic of why so much homeland security money seems to be flowing so freely in Wyoming can be found only below the surface.

MAY BOOK BLOG

Book News:

• More used books being sold online, says the New York Times . Book Reviews:
• Diarmaid MacCulloch's history of the Reformation is among "the most magisterial and stylishly written historical works to be published in a decade," says Benjamin Schwarz in the Atlantic Monthly.
• A botched attempt at a "theography," or map of the idea of God, says the London Guardian.
• James Wood on the latest volume ofThe Oxford English Literary History, in the London Review of Books.
• Collection of James Wood essays explores humor in fiction, says the Guardian.
• The Master: Henry James, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• Beethoven's last years, from the Times Literary Supplement.
• Mozart's letters, from the Guardian.
• Jane Jacobs looks at the future of cities, from the Toronto Globe and Mail.
• New biography of Napoleon, from the New Republic.
• Sports in Ancient Greece, from the Weekly Standard.
• William Langewiesche on anarchy on the world's oceans, from the New York Times .
• The history of Venn diagrams, from the Boston Globe.
• Why we have biological clocks, from the Times Literary Supplement.
• Why many are smarter than few, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• The 1912 election as a defining political moment, from the New York Times .
• bin Laden in Soviet Afghanistan, from the New York Review of Books.
• Roger Scruton's memoir of moving to the British countryside is "sparklingly written, affectionate without being cloying," says the Economist.
• Books for Mother's Day, books for Father's Day, from the New York Times .
• April book blog

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.