It is one of the most powerful images in the book, rendered beautifully by a fine, fine artist.
Do the decades between the completion and publication of "The Red Book" render it less potent or interesting?
Though Hersh goes soft on Hoover toward the end, his book renders a clear judgment: Bobby Kennedy was closer to the mark than his rival.
Mallarmé, the first to introduce the category of the "virtual" into poetics, would have gasped (and not entirely joyfully) at the unfolded and expanded, omnipresent, omniscient "book" or data tomb within whose soft walls we live now – and gasped most loudly at the irony that this "book" renders the role of its writer redundant.
The book renders the incredible segregation of the city - Chicago has always been one of the most polarised cities in America - by simply showing that for some residents of the overwhelmingly black South Side, the white North Side barely existed; the worlds seldom intersected.
I've never been to India, but the book rendered it strangely familiar: from courtly and provincial Brahmpur to swinging, jazzy Calcutta, destitute village life in Rudhia and the wretched squalor of the shoemakers and tanners, the ever-present shadow of communal violence and the riotous colour of Pul Mela.
Her narration of her own life in "Red Azalea," like the passages in her new book rendered in Madame Mao's own voice, is marked by an emotional nakedness and a sexual intensity that overwhelm history, narrative and even sometimes the English language.
"Will the profession of librarianship endure?" With so many changes raising so many unanswerable questions this year, it is perhaps comforting that the most-challenged book of 2010 is an old favorite: "And Tango Makes Three," the picture-book rendering of Central Park's real-life two-daddy-one-baby penguin family is back on top, after slipping to second place in 2009.
They have been lionized in coffee-table books, rendered on canvas and hung in exhibitions.
Over all, they were, as record books render it, the two "winningest active coaches" in the game.
Both are "as-told-to" books, rendered in the rich argot of the criminals themselves, and they fizz with sociological details and blackhearted mobster humour.
