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Sunday reading on nybooks.com: Albert Einstein, the glory of the Plains Indians, a sprawling Ming novel, images of Don Quixote, the overabundance of books, and the entrails of spring.
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Freeman Dyson
There are a few scientists whose lives and thoughts are of perennial interest, because they permanently changed our way of thinking. To the few belong Galileo and Newton and Darwin, and now Einstein.
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Thomas Powers
The horse is the first great fact in the lives of the Plains Indians during their glory years; the next is disease, especially smallpox, pneumonia, cholera, and measles, which decimated the Plains tribes in a wave of epidemics beginning pretty much at the moment Spanish explorers arrived looking for rumored cities of gold.
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Perry Link
During the 400 years since it appeared, it has been known in China as an “obscene book.” Governments have banned it and parents have hidden it from children. One anecdote—a false story, but an indication of the book’s reputation—is that it originated as a murder weapon.
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Colm Tóibín
The French artist Charles Coypel’s images of Don Quixote are so dramatic in their visual scope and use of space and color and contrast that they must have been a gift to both engravers and tapestry-makers.
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Christopher Benfey
The melting snow-bank slowly yields its hoard: a Sunday Times, buried by the snowplow in January; a flattened can of Red Bull; an opossum’s corkscrew tail.
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Tim Parks
If the Internet hadn’t opened up endless oceans of space on which to write, would we take our books more seriously? Would we find our way around more easily?
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April 23 is Saint Jordi’s Day. Celebrate with Colm Toíbínand Jordi Puntí as they pay tribute to the great Catalonian author Josep Pla (New York Public Library)
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