Some place in the prints this morning, I saw President Obama characterized as bi-racial. It led me to thinking about the way we read men and women with different proportions of blackness in them. Pretty much up to now, it was the Nuremberg Law model: a little bit of Jewish blood, you're Jewish … a little bit of black blood, you're black.

The German Mujahid

By Boualem Sansal

Translated by Frank Wynne

(Europa Editions, 240 pp., $15)

I.

Starting at midnight on December 15, 2009, the Google logo was draped in a green flag. Perhaps you thought it was the Palestinian or the Saudi flag; perhaps this unsettled you enough to mouse it. If you did, you’d have learned that the flag celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto. And if you clicked on it, you’d have helped make “L.L. Zamenhof” the third most often-searched term on Google that day.

"It's a rough patch I'm going through," says Chris Dodd. How rough? Not long ago, Dodd entertained dreams of ascending to the White House. He moved his family to Iowa in 2007 and enrolled his daughter in a Des Moines public school, all in the hope of winning the state's caucus. He gave solid (if never spectacular) performances in debates while fund-raising prodigiously. And, though he didn't vault into the top tier of candidates, he managed to end his bid for the presidency with his long-standing reputation as a serious player in Democratic politics basically intact.

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

By Saul Friedlander

(HarperCollins, 870 pp., $39.95)

Since the 1960s, when Michael McClure imagined Billy the Kid humping Jean Harlow in The Beard and Barbara Garson had Lyndon Johnson whacking Jack Kennedy in MacBird, it has grown obvious that actual people, often still among us, have become the grist of American playwriting. In one recent week alone, a musical opened by Michael John LaChiusa called First Lady Suite, featuring Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Mamie Eisenhower, along with a semi-fictional comedy by A.R. Gurney called Mrs.

Adenauer's Germany and the

Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration

By Norbert Frei

Translated by Joel Golb