TIMELINE: MARCH 2004

The services of 16 violinists in the Beethoven Orchestra, we learned last month, may come with strings attached. The musicians, disgruntled with the lighter workloads of the wind and percussion sections, sued their orchestra in Bonn, Germany, for the right to be paid by the note. The lawsuit raised questions of quantity versus quality—other sections, after all, tend to play louder, longer notes—but the attempt to quantify the seemingly unaccountable was evident elsewhere last month. In Iraq, the U.S. government began the grim task of settling on sums to pay families for the lives slain civilians. In Madrid, the death toll exceeded 200 after multiple terrorist bombings of commuter trains. In the U.S., the number of presidential challengers dropped to one, then returned to two. McDonald's dropped its most famous measurement, announcing it would stop "supersizing" its meals. Numbers were the root of wonder in March. The odds of giving birth to two sets of identical twins are one in 11 million, but a Houston couple proved to be that one. The worth of a stolen 1866 silver dollar, found last month by a Maine librarian, was said to be at least one million dollars (meaning a one-in-a-million coin was actually one million in one). The Japanese horse Haru-urara was embraced by fans as its streak of losses stretched to 106. And one reporter measured the long-suspected futility of signal buttons at New York City crosswalks, finding that 2,500 of the 3,250 buttons were inoperative.

Alistair Cooke filed his last "Letter From America" for the BBC last month, and later died at age 95. Former Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, who ended Dutch imperial control of Indonesia, died at age 94. William Pickering oversaw the launch of America's first satellite in 1958 and early spacecraft ventures to Venus and Mars. Zhong Wei Chen, a pioneer in microsurgery, was among the first surgeons to successfully reattach a severed hand. Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar for All The King's Men in 1949, was the voice of the demon in The Exorcist. Peter Ustinov won an Oscar as a supporting actor in Spartacus. One of the few female broadcast engineers in the 1950s, Marianna Woodson Cobb scaled the tower on top of the Empire State Building.

Note: Omitted from last month's Timeline was the death of former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, whose books, including The Image and his three-volume The Americans, were landmark works in the study of American history. (More from the Library of Congress and PBS.)

More March newsmakers: Water on Mars, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Richard Clarke, 9/11 panel, Martha Stewart, first female Pritzker Architecture winner, deposed opera singer Deborah Voigt, demoted radio legend Bob Edwards.

• Timeline: February 2004

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Atlantic Monthly:

If you drive three days north and west out of Kabul, into the western range of the Hindu Kush, and pass beyond the district of Kahmard, you come upon a forgotten cut called the Ajar Valley. … Ajar was the hunting reserve of King Mohammed Zahir Shah from 1952 until 1973 … The valley was gaudy in its plenty in those days. … There were vines, flowers, songbirds of many colors. … Up above … [were] good numbers of urial sheep, musk deer, wild boar, jackals, wolves, lynxes, common leopards, and snow leopards. To those the King had added, lower down, a number of yaks and a small herd of endangered Bactrian deer. No one really knew what had happened to these animals in twenty-three years of war. The United Nations Environmental Programme, mandated to assess the wildlife situation in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, had not visited Ajar. … Reports by occasional Afghan visitors suggested that the land and the trees were in poor shape, and that some of the animals had fled across the mountaintops, even as far as China. The Bactrian deer had certainly been gunned down, and it was also known that Communist Party officials had butchered the yaks and distributed the meat among the people. More than that no one could say for sure.

From the New Yorker:

Victor Gruen's most famous creation was in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis. He began work on it almost exactly fifty years ago. It was called Southdale. It cost twenty million dollars, and had seventy-two stores and two anchor department-store tenants, Donaldson's and Dayton's. … Suburban shopping centers had always been in the open, with stores connected by outdoor passageways. Gruen had the idea of putting the whole complex under one roof, with air-conditioning for the summer and heat for the winter. … Southdale Mall still exists. It is situated off I-494, south of downtown Minneapolis and west of the airport-a big concrete box in a sea of parking. … It does not seem like a historic building, which is precisely why it is one. … Today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. … Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century. He invented the mall.

MARCH BOOK BLOG

Book News:

• Da Vinci Code said to set record for one-year period for adult novel.

(See also: analysis of DVC's historical accuracy)

Book Reviews:

• How Christianity uniquely links beauty and infinity, from First Things.
• Rachel Cohen's multiple biography of writers and artists is "cunningly crafted," says the New Republic.
• "Urban tribes" as the new American families, from the London Guardian.
• Travels to Easter Island, from the New York Review of Books.
• Psychology's chaos of contradicting theories, from the London Telegraph, and re-examining the psychology of trauma, from the New York Review of Books.
• New addition to meager annals of good wine writing, from the New York Times .
• Ambition—good and bad—as the key to pre-20th century American history, from the New York Times .
• Sounds as spiritual forces in early America, and Anne Hutchinson versus the Puritans, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• Manhattan's Dutch history, from the New York Observer.
• The history of Times Square, from the New Yorker.
• The "Old Urbanism" of Italian cities, from First Things.
• A new biography of Arthur Miller, from the London Review of Books.
• The making of Captain Siborne's scale model of Waterloo, from the London Telgraph.
• W.B. Yeats' place in the history of poetry, from the National Review.
• What does Genghis Khan have to do with modernism? From the London Independent.
• Four books on immigration history and policy in America, from the Los Angeles Times.
• Books on Song of Songs, a Catholic critique of end-times prophecy, marriage and globalization, the Washington Senators' one World Series win, and more in First Things' book briefs.
• February book blog (scroll down)

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