Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Weekend reading on nybooks.com: On the science of sound and language, why Chinese schools are a bad model for the United States, the fight for justice by the families of kidnapped students in Mexico, Rembrandt’s extraordinary late work, a 3-D film collage of phenomenal detail, and an alternative account of postwar American art.   THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

The Mysterious World of the Deaf Gavin Francis How can one give a deaf child the best chance of acquiring language and enabling communication? Lydia Denworth’s book explores the science surrounding that question. It is a personal memoir as well as a journalist’s inquiry by a mother who urgently needed to find her own answer.   ADVERTISEMENT   The Myth of Chinese Super Schools Diane Ravitch A test-based education system is responsible for the high performance of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and East Asian nations on the international tests. China has a problem, however, that is seldom discussed: cheating and fraud.   ‘We Are Not Sheep to Be Killed’ Alma Guillermoprieto One reason the police abduction of forty-three poor students in Guerrero has created such a crisis for the Mexican state is the fight put up by the organized, tough, militant families of the victims to recover their children.   ADVERTISEMENT   Rembrandt in the Depths Andrew Butterfield In the fifteen years before his death in 1669, Rembrandt suffered one terrible reversal after another. Yet this time of anxiety, debt, grief, and solitude was the most productive of his career, when he created many of his greatest paintings.   Grotesque, Garish, Exuberant American Art J. Hoberman Mutated versions of Surrealism and Pop Art and tendencies without a name arose and flourished outside of New York and Los Angeles throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.   Tree! Fire! Water! Godard! Geoffrey O’Brien A single viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s new 3-D film Goodbye to Language has equipped me neither to summarize its storyline, to the extent that any linear story can be said to exist, nor to provide anything like an interpretation.