Unlike many other Disney classics, from “Cinderella” to “Frozen,” this fright fest is not based on a fairy tale. It was adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten. The book rendered Salten famous; the movie, which altered and overshadowed its source material, rendered him virtually unknown. And it rendered the original “Bambi” obscure, too, even though it had previously been both widely acclaimed and passionately reviled. The English-language version, as translated in 1928 by the soon to be Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, was enormously popular, earning rave reviews and selling six hundred and fifty thousand copies in the dozen-plus years before the film came out. The original version, meanwhile, was banned and burned in Nazi Germany, where it was regarded as a parable about the treatment of Jews in Europe.
Kelly Korreck is still thinking about the time her spacecraft flew into the sun, how one moment, the probe was rushing through a stormy current of fast-moving particles, and the next, it was plunging somewhere quieter, where the plasma rolled like ocean waves. No machine had ever crossed that mysterious boundary before. But Korreck and her team had dispatched a mission for that exact purpose, and their plan worked. For the first time in history, a spacecraft had entered the sun’s atmosphere.
“This is a totally cool place to go—well, I guess, hot place to go,” Korreck, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told me. “We’ve touched plasma and gas that actually belongs to the sun.”
We had been driving for four hours and had yet to see another soul. No people. No cars. Just eerie, lunar nothingness stretching south to the horizon. To the left, desert; to the right, ocean. A packed salt road sewed a tight seam between the two. Under an overcast sky, the three surfaces faded into a single indistinguishable gray-brown smear.
We were traveling along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, a region often referred to as the end of the Earth.
Ruth Miner, a young woman living in a brutal 17th-century New England, can’t seem to catch a break. She flees her hometown after allegations of witchcraft and becomes a stowaway on a ship with her childhood friend Owen Townsend as the first mate, but danger abounds amidst the other lecherous crew members. And this is one of her safer adventures in Leah Angstman’s debut novel, When Ruth disembarks in a new town and Owen can’t—or won’t—stay with her, she buys land, befriends a Pequot Indian, and learns to speak French—all punishable offenses for women in 1689 New England. When Owen returns for a visit and tells her he won’t return again for at least another year, Ruth, for her own safety and wellbeing, accepts a marriage proposal from another man—which becomes the catalyst for the rest of the dangerous situations she encounters throughout the novel.
The title of Rosemary Sullivan’s important new book, “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” resounds far beyond its primary meaning. Sullivan is chronicling the investigation of a cold case, the unsolved mystery of who alerted authorities in the summer of 1944 to the hiding place of Frank, her family and four other Jewish people, above a pectin and spice warehouse in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, resulting in their arrest and deportation to concentration camps. Two official investigations, begun in 1947 and 1963, failed to reveal the identity of the informant; the matter has preoccupied multiple biographers since. Sullivan writes with absolute dedication and precision, bringing a previously obscure suspect to the fore.
You don’t have to be a foodie to enjoy this charming, fun memoir. But it will get you thinking about great meals and the people you share them with.