Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

The Many Lives of Anne Frank, by Ruth Franklin (Yale). This book depicts the rich texture of Frank’s life, and the “complicated genesis” of her published diary, while also exploring her afterlife as a “figurehead against prejudice,” one whose story has been edited, censored, commodified, and appropriated. Franklin, an award-winning biographer, details how Frank’s legacy was formed, and sometimes deformed, by her father, Otto, who survived her. Otto’s role as the keeper of Frank’s memory is “perhaps the most confusing—and most contested—aspect of Anne’s story,” Franklin writes. With sensitivity and assiduous research, she constructs a vivid cultural history that advocates for a reëvaluation of Frank, not as a symbol or a saint but as a human being and a literary artist.

Ends of the Earth, by Neil Shubin (Dutton). In this comprehensive yet concise history of modern polar exploration, Shubin, a professor of evolutionary biology, mixes urgent scientific findings about glaciers and sea-level rise with prescient geopolitical histories of Arctic territorial disputes. Throughout, Shubin relates stories from his own field expeditions: a pilot lands a propeller plane in an icy valley; a crew member stumbles on kaleidoscopic hues of blue while spelunking in Antarctic crevasses; Shubin’s team discovers a field of dinosaur footprints that had been miraculously preserved under layers of ice. Such descriptions enliven the book, and capture Shubin’s reverence for both the beauty and the mysteries hidden in the cold, barren tundra.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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