TIMELINE: JANUARY 2005

"Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better," said Richard Hooker. This was true in Iraq in January, as the nation continued its painstaking and violent change into a democracy, and in Israel, where new Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas brought new but contested hope for change. President Bush's second inaugural address was a call for change, in oppressive governments abroad and social programs at home. The horrific change wrought by the tsunami was on the world's mind in January. But even amid a tempest, some things can go from worse to better, as with Owen, a hippopotamus orphaned by the storm who came under the care of a tortoise. Over 900 million miles away, a rover's photographs of the exotic surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn, changed the way we looked at the ringed planet's companion. Philadelphia celebrated the change in fortunes of its football team, which finally qualified for the Super Bowl on its fourth straight try. Few of the teams' players had their lives change as suddenly as Jeff Thomason, a construction worker who was recruited to replace an injured player in the Super Bowl. You're never too old to change; at least Romanian Adriana Iliescu wasn't in January—she gave birth at age 66.

Johnny Carson, who presided over late-night television's finest hour for three decades with class and wit, died in January at age 79. Miriam Rothschild, the inimitable naturalist who discovered how fleas jump, died at 96. Arthur Walworth, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Woodrow Wilson, died at age 101. Rosemary Kennedy was the disabled sister of President John F. Kennedy. Bob Moch was the coxswain of a crew that overcame Germany for a dramatic gold medal win at the 1936 Olympics, with Hitler looking on. Peaches, an African elephant at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, died in January at the age of 55.

• Timeline: December 2004

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

DRACHTEN, The Netherlands* — Like a naturalist conducting a tour of the jungle, Hans Monderman led the way to a busy intersection in the center of town, where several odd things immediately became clear. Not only was it virtually naked, stripped of all lights, signs and road markings, but there was no division between road and sidewalk. It was, basically, a bare brick square. But in spite of the apparently anarchical layout, the traffic, a steady stream of trucks, cars, buses, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians, moved along fluidly and easily, as if directed by an invisible conductor. When Mr. Monderman, a traffic engineer and the intersection's proud designer, deliberately failed to check for oncoming traffic before crossing the street, the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or shouted rude words out of the window. Used by some 20,000 drivers a day, the intersection is part of a road-design revolution pioneered by the 59-year-old Mr. Monderman. His work in Friesland, the district in northern Holland that takes in Drachten, is increasingly seen as the way of the future in Europe.

LOS ANGELES* — A phantom oil slick floating somewhere along a 90-mile stretch of Southern California coastline is killing sea life as investigators scramble to find its whereabouts and origins. More than 700 seabirds have died, another 700 are under care, and at least one sea lion has been taken to a marine mammal center, officials say. Scientists were unaware that a killer blob was at sea until birds started turning up a week ago on the shoreline from Santa Barbara to Venice Beach. Most of the birds affected have been Western grebes, though a few are rare pelicans.

The Coast Guard has conducted an aerial search of the shoreline, and oil samples have been taken from the birds and shipped to laboratories for analysis. Still, officials are flummoxed. Among the possible sources that investigators are looking into are pipes broken during the La Conchita mudslide that killed 10 people last week, leaking oil platforms in the ocean, seepage from the seafloor, abandoned oil wells, runoff from the Los Angeles metropolis, even cars and trucks that slid into the ocean during the torrential rains that recently pummeled California.

JANUARY BOOK BLOG

Book News

• The joys and woes of self-publishing, from the Washington Post.
• Changes at Publishers Weekly, from the New York Times .
  Book Reviews
• Was Marlowe better than Shakespeare? From the New York Times .
• A vivid illustrated history of maps of North America, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• The history of the number 13, from the London Telegraph.
• Three books on graphs, numbers and statistics, from the Economist.
• Richard Rorty on 20th-century philosophy, from the London Review of Books.
• Sister Helen Prejean's eyewitness accounts of innocents' executions, from the Washington Post.
• Blink hails the quality of quick decisions, from the New York Times .
• The tedium of dogmatic atheism, from Reason.
• Michael Wyschogrod on the future of Jewish-Christian relations, from Commentary.
• Fusing Eastern and Western Buddhism, from the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Seven books on what America can do about terrorism, from the New York Review of Books.
• Why we can't stop Iran from going nuclear, from the Washington Monthly.
• What it was like in the Twin Towers on September 11, from the New York Times .
• Is leftist libertarian a contradiction in terms? From Reason.
• What failure meant in 19th-century America, from the Atlantic Monthly (second item).
• Two new biographies of Leonardo Da Vinci, from the New Yorker.
• The abolitionist movement in the British Empire, reviewed by Marilynne Robinson in the New York Times .
• A new look at Auschwitz, from the Washington Post.
• Rethinking Hannibal and his Carthage campaigns, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• The escape of Sally Miller, a white slave, from the Monitor.
• The forgotten settlement of Dutch Manhattan, in brief from First Things.
• A dishonestly glamorous history of prostitution, from the London Guardian.
• Joseph Roth's essays from prewar Paris, from the Yale Review of Books.
• Umberto Eco's collection looks at literature, from the Telegraph.
• A lively collection of George Plimpton essays, from the New York Times .
• Alan Dershowitz on John Grisham's latest, in the New York Times .
• A makeover for Bridget Jones: Christian, British, Nigerian-born, from Reuters.
• Anne Proulx's short stories set in Wyoming, from the Economist.
• Complicated dialogues about post-apartheid South Africa in novelist's latest, from the Yale Review of Books.
• W.E. B Griffin's latest thriller pits terrorists against the Liberty Bell, from the New York Times .
• High on ideas but low on plot, novel depicts mother's intervention in life of suicidal protester, says the San Francisco Chronicle.
• What Jim's wife would have said in Huckleberry Finn, from the Christian Science Monitor.
• The trouble with translating Gogol, from the Moscow Times.
• A bilingual edition of Victor Hugo poems, from the London Guardian.
• Stephen Spender's eccentric poetry, from the Atlantic Monthly.**
• 'There is no real achievement in this year's Best American Poetry,' says the Boston Comment.
• Biographies:Alec Guinness - Francis Galton –Robert Oppenheimer -Robert Louis Stevenson - Voltaire
• Children's book awards and National Book Award finalists in fiction, from the Christian Science Monitor.
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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.