News/Events

Very early photographic images of humans discovered

In the steady barrage of images that make up the digital age, it's almost impossible to fathom a time when photographs of people were nonexistent. But rest assured, kids, that such a time did exist -- and it really wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things.

So the recent discovery of what appears to be two men near the river's edge in a photo of Cincinnati taken in 1848 is kind of a big deal among photography historians.

As reported by NPR's Robert Krulwich last month, the photo was taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter -- who were standing on the other side of the Ohio River -- on Sunday, September 24th, 1848, 162 years prior to Krulwich's post about it. The photo is what's known as a daguerreotype -- an image developed via an early photographic process developed in France. When zooming in on the photo, Krulwich noticed what appeared to be two human figures. You can see them in a close-up image below:


A reader of Krulwich's blog took the photo and "lightened it up a bit and messed with the contrast a little" and posted a clearer version of it on his own blog. He thinks that "the man on the left is standing behind the wooden beam wall (wharf? dock?) with his left leg up on the wall and his left hand resting on his knee, while the man on the right is standing on top of that wall."

In case you're wondering if this is the earliest photograph taken of a human -- as Krulwich himself did in a recent headline -- well, it's not. The credit for photographing a human for the first time is generally given to Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype process. In an 1838 photo he took of Paris, Daguerre caught an image of a man who appears to be getting his shoes or boots shined at a street corner. You can see the figure -- together with that of the shoeshiner -- in the bottom left of the image here.

Daguerre's process involved exposing a chemically treated metal plate for several minutes. If someone or something was moving within the frame, it wouldn't show up in a daguerreotype photo. But since this person remained relatively stationary as the image was captured, he showed up in the picture. The anonymous Parisian thus gets credit for being the first person ever to have his picture taken.

News/Events

Stranded Humpback Whale






RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) – A 25-tonne humpback whale that has run aground on a beach in the posh resort town of Buzios, needs to be towed out to sea by a ship with the oil giant Petrobrasm, authorities said.

A towing ship arrived at Geriba beach in Buzios and experts tried to figure out the best way to move it without harming it, firefighters told Globo's G1 site.

Dozens of tourists looked on as the rescue operation got into gear.

"It is quite complicated, but we are going to try to save the whale," said Buzios mayor Mirinho Braga.

This is the 90th humpback to run aground in Brazil this year, a record high number that has scientists baffled, officials said.



New species discovered in the Amazon










NAGOYA, Japan (AFP) – Spectacular species previously unknown to the outside world are being discovered in the Amazon rainforest at a rate of one every three days, environment group WWF said in a report published Tuesday.

An anaconda as long as a limousine, a giant catfish that eats monkeys, a blue fanged spider and poisoned dart frogs are among the 1,220 animals and plants to have been found from 1999 to 2009, according to the study.

The report was released on the sidelines of a United Nations summit in Japan that is being held to try to stem the mass extinction of species around the world, and the WWF said it highlighted why protecting the Amazon was so vital.

"This report clearly shows the incredible, amazing diversity of life in the Amazon," Francisco Ruiz, head of WWF's Living Amazon Initiative, told reporters at the launch.

"(But) this incredible region is under pressure because of the human presence. The landscape is being very quickly transformed."

Logging and clearing for agriculture uses such as cattle farming and palm oil plantations have led to 17 percent of the Amazon -- an area twice the size of Spain -- being destroyed over the past 50 years, according to the WWF.

The WWF compiled the findings reported by scientists over the 10-year period to highlight the extent of biodiversity loss that may be occurring without humans even knowing while the Amazon is being cleared.

"It serves as a reminder of how much we still have to learn about this unique region, and what we could lose if we don't change the way we think about development," Ruiz said.

One of the most amazing discoveries was a four-metre (13-foot) anaconda in the flood plains of Bolivia's Pando province in 2002.

[Photos: See more new species discovered in Papua New Guinea]

It was the first new anaconda species identified since 1936, and became only the fourth known type of that reptile, according to the WWF.

There were a total of 55 reptile species discovered, with others including two members of Elapidae -- the most venomous snake family in the world that includes cobras and taipans.

A kaleidoscope of different coloured frogs were also found, including 24 of the famed poison dart variety and one that was translucent.

Among the 257 types of fish discovered in the rivers and lakes of the Amazon was a "goliath" catfish.

One of them found in Venezuela measured nearly 1.5 metres long and weighed 32 kilogrammes (over 70 pounds).

Although the "goliath" catfish normally exists on a diet of other fish, some of them have been caught with parts of monkeys in their stomachs, according to the WWF.

Another extraordinary species of catfish that was discovered in the Brazilian state of Rondonia was extremely small, blind and red.

Villagers found the fish when they accidentally trapped them in buckets after hauling up water from a well.

At least 500 spiders were also discovered, including one that was completely brown except for a pair of almost fluorescent blue fangs.

Thirty-nine new mammals were also found, including a pink river dolphin, seven types of monkey and two porcupines.

Among the 637 new plant species discovered were sunflowers, ivy, lilies, a variety of pineapple and a custard apple.

The Amazon is home to at least 40,000 plant species, and the WWF described the scale of diversity in some areas as "mind boggling".

It said 1,000 plant species were documented in one hectare (2.5 acres) of lowland rainforest in Ecuador, while 3,000 were found in a 24-hectare region of the Colombian section of the Amazon.

As part of efforts to save the Amazon, the Brazilian government has worked with the WWF, the World Bank and other groups to establish protected areas of rainforest covering 32 million hectares over the past six years.

The WWF said the protection efforts, in which foreign governments and organisations provide some of the finance to help run the projects, should serve as a model for the world in how to save rainforests.

Light Photography

News/Events

Eye-Popping for Art’s Sake: An Advocate for 3-D Films

Nearly a year after his fantasy movie “Avatar” broke box office records and opened a floodgate of big-budget 3-D features, James Cameron is still very much immersed in his budding science-fiction franchise and 3-D filmmaking.
Filmography: James CameronAs he prepares an extended version of “Avatar” for a home video release next month, Mr. Cameron said he had started work on a 3-D reissue of his 1997 blockbuster, “Titanic,” for a theatrical release in 2012.


Astronomers say they've found oldest galaxy so far

Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe: It's a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.

Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.

By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn't exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"We're looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age," said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "In human terms, we're looking at a 4-year-old boy in the life span of an adult."

While Ellis finds the basis for the study "pretty good," there have been other claims about the age of distant space objects that have not held up to scrutiny. And some experts have questions about this one. But even the skeptics praised the study as important and interesting.

The European astronomers calculated the age after 16 hours of observations from a telescope in Chile that looked at light signatures of cooling hydrogen gas.

Earlier this year, astronomers had made a general estimate of 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang for the most distant fuzzy points of light in the Hubble photograph, which was presented at an astronomy meeting back in January.

In the new study, researchers focused on a single galaxy in their analysis of hydrogen's light signature, further pinpointing the age. Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the scientist behind the Hubble image, said it provides confirmation for the age using a different method, something he called amazing "for such faint objects."

The new galaxy doesn't have a name — just a series of letters and numbers. So Lehnert said he and colleagues have called it "the high red-shift blob. "Because it takes so long for the light to travel such a vast time and distance, astronomers are seeing what the galaxy looked like 13.1 billion years ago at a time when it was quite young — maybe even as young as 100 million years old — Lehnert said. It has very little of the carbon or metal that we see in more mature stars and is full of young, blue massive stars, he said.

What's most interesting to astronomers is that this finding fits with theories about when the first stars and galaxies were born. This galaxy would have formed not too soon after them.

"We're looking almost to the edge, almost within 100 million years of seeing the very first objects," Ellis said. "One hundred million years to a human seems an awful long time, but in astronomical time periods, that's nothing compared to the life of the stars."

conti Light and paint photography

Light and Paint photography

News/Events

ART: An Itinerary of Bronzino, Mondrian and Gauguin

Matisse and Picasso exhibitions will never be in short supply, and you’ll never have to go far for them. But a comprehensive survey of one of Italy’s greatest 16th-century artists, Agnolo Bronzino, is a once-in-a-lifetime affair, and to see it you’ll have to travel to Florence, where “Bronzino, Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici” appears through Jan. 23.

Bronzino (1503-72) was court painter to Cosimo I de’Medici, and a brilliant multi-tasker. His aristocratic portraiture, with its chilly hauteur and lacquered perfection, set a fashion for all of Europe, and some of the grandest will be assembled for this occasion. He was also a superlative religious painter, contributing work to Florence’s most important churches. Many of those paintings are still in their original locations. And while the show is installed at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence itself will function as a kind of Bronzino museum, and a necessary stop on any European art tour.

Similarly, Paris will be an extension of “Mondrian in Paris: 1912-1938” at the Pompidou Center from Dec. 1 to March 31. The Dutch painter spent most of his long career there, until World War II forced him to leave for London and then New York. With a reconstruction of Mondrian’s dazzlingly designed Rue du Départ studio as its centerpiece, this overview will trace his development toward abstraction in pictures shaped by the jazz rhythms and architectural lines of the City of Light.

Although Paul Gauguin had virtually no association at all with London, he’s the toast of the town now that “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” is at the Tate Modern. This enormous show, his first major British survey in half a century, includes his South Seas paintings, a roomful of self-portraits, and — perhaps most interesting — an archive’s worth of illustrated letters and sketchbooks revealing the not necessarily attractive human side of an artist who was himself a myth. (After the show closes on Jan. 16, it moves on to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.)
HOLLAND COTTER


Paying Homage to Japan’s Raw Edges





“THE eye adjusts,” as fashion people say, a truism routinely exploited in defense of styles so extreme that they often affront conventional tastes. It took some adjusting indeed to digest and assimilate the groundbreaking trends spawned in Japan in the early 1980s — a period of fashion revolt that ushered in radical innovations like breastplates and street-sweeping skirts.
Those pioneering inventions — more “bleeding edge” than cutting edge, according to the fashion historian Valerie Steele — are highlighted in “Japan Fashion Now,” an exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, one that traces the Japanese influence on runways and urban streets.

The exhibition, conceived and organized by Ms. Steele, the museum’s director, showcases contemporary designers, among them avant-garde labels like Phenomenon, whose designer, known as Big-O, has offered swirling skirts for men; and Chitose Abe, whose eccentric designs for Sacai appear to be a hybrid of beat-up old sweaters and silk shirts. Also represented are modern Tokyo’s quirky fashion subcultures, some inspired by manga or anime; others, like the mori (forest) girls, are a bizarre pastiche of Central European folkloric costume pieces.

Perhaps most tellingly, the show reintroduces the designs of renegades like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, designers who gained cult followings by dispensing with the hallmark nipped waists and contour-hugging fabrics of traditional Western fashion in favor of the asymmetric, overscale and patently distressed looks that ushered in a brash new age.

Dismissed in their day as sexless and ungainly, these wayward experiments look remarkably relevant — not surprising since many have resurfaced on the catwalks, recast and updated for a modern eye.

In-class light&paint photography

These are the photographs taken in class on Thursday.

News and Events

Cold-Case Trial: Two Opposites on Same Side, Facing Down a Killer


Last year Michael Connelly took his readers on a slow boat to China. He wrote “Nine Dragons,” a disappointingly flat and gimmicky story featuring his long-suffering Los Angeles police detective, Harry Bosch. Harry’s usual stomping ground is the depraved underbelly of Los Angeles, but “Nine Dragons” sent him on a touristy detour to Hong Kong. It also used one of the detective novel’s cheapest tricks, the kidnapping of someone near and dear to the hero (in this case his schoolgirl daughter) to generate suspense.
Fortunately Mr. Connelly has returned to solid ground. He has written “The Reversal,” which has a “the” title that makes it sound safely like one of John Grisham’s courthouse generics (Mr. Grisham’s next one, due later this month, is titled “The Confession”) and the setting that Mr. Connelly knows best. “The Reversal” also brings back Mickey Haller, the relatively new Connelly character who emerged as a leading man in “The Lincoln Lawyer.” He even showed up in “Nine Dragons,” which seemed to incorporate everything but the Connelly kitchen sink.

Taking no chances this time Mr. Connelly creates major roles in “The Reversal” for both the contentious Mickey and his moodier half brother, Harry. However venerable and well-loved Harry may be, it’s become clear that Mickey’s brazenness brings these books a new brio. So Mr. Connelly gives Mickey the larger role and makes him the story’s narrator. He has dreamed up a criminal case in which both can be involved. And then, once the story’s larger framework is in place, he executes the subtle sleight of hand that makes each of his books so much more than the sum of its parts.

The first few pages of “The Reversal” will convince no one that this book ought to be read on its literary merits. They explain how Mickey, ordinarily a wily defense lawyer (“me, Mickey Haller, defender of the damned”) and a happily outlandish one, is roped into serving as a prosecutor for a change.

The case is 24 years old. The defendant, Jason Jessup, was convicted for killing a 12-year-old girl. He went to prison, but now he is being retried on the basis of new DNA evidence, thanks to the Genetic Justice Project, which has turned the Jessup case into a cause célèbre and Jessup into a lowlife celebrity. The new trial has become so fraught that the district attorney wants to bring in an outsider to keep his own rival, the California attorney general, away from the proceedings. Enter Mickey.

“That case is a duck without wings,” Mickey complains, sounding like no human being this side of a movie screen. “The only thing left to do is shoot it and eat it.” In much the same spirit he throws back talk at the D.A. (“I’m an independent contractor, remember? You treat me otherwise and you’re going to be holding his hot potato without an oven mitt.”) No matter: Mickey is soon hooked. He’d like to prevail against Jessup, a gloating lout who stands to become rich and famous if exonerated. But what the man, whose slogan was once “Any case, Anytime, Anywhere,” likes even better is calling himself “Mickey Haller for the People.”

Now Mr. Connelly works Harry into the mix. Mickey needs an investigator. And, as this author’s longtime devotees know, Harry Bosch is simply the best. The story also draws on Maggie McPherson, a k a Maggie McFierce, the deputy D.A. who is Mickey’s ex-wife, and Rachel Walling, the F.B.I. profiler who has been a very close personal friend of Harry’s. This criminal investigation threatens to turn into a double date.

But the serious strengths of “The Reversal” become apparent after the principals are in place. Mr. Connelly likes to explicate the workings of the judicial process, especially for the benefit of people “who venture naïvely into the justice system” and “leave the courthouse wondering what just happened.” He can illustrate the basics of criminal investigation better than most. And he makes suspenseful use of simple but diabolical complications for the prosecution. In the case of “The Reversal” it is essential that the jury never learn, despite runaway press coverage, that Jessup has stood trial for the same crime before.

All stylistic posturing vanishes when this book gets down to basics, creating a classic detective-story puzzle around the facts of the girl’s disappearance. Her home was near a church. A swimming pool was being constructed in the backyard. So the victim and her sisters were doing something they didn’t normally do by playing in front of the house. The front lawn was obscured by a six-foot-high hedge. One of the victim’s sisters thinks that the abductor was a garbage man, but there were no garbage collections on Sundays. The three main suspects were tow-truck operators who looked for churchgoers’ illegally parked cars. The police were so desperate to find the girl alive that they rushed their investigation, zeroed in on this threesome and then singled out Jessup too recklessly.

Harry expertly tracks down leads in this long-neglected case, while Mickey prepares for the chess maneuvers of the trial. And when all of the characters begin working together, sparks really fly. Suffice it to say that there is a moment in the courtroom when Mickey outmaneuvers the defense so well that Harry glares at Jessup and feigns a throat cutting, just to indicate which side he thinks is winning. But Mr. Connelly doesn’t really write about winners and losers. He writes true-to-life fiction about true crime. What makes his crime stories ring most true is that they’re never really over.




Shedding Some Light on ‘Darkness’




A lot of motives might have been at play in “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ ”: nostalgia, vanity, a desire for documentation or benediction. One thing that’s undoubtedly on display, though, is bravery.

For much of the documentary, making its debut Thursday night on HBO, the director, Thom Zimny, cuts between a contemporary interview with Bruce Springsteen and footage shot more than 30 years ago of the young Bruce, an intense and beautiful creature who looks like the Robert De Niro of “Mean Streets,” but friendlier.

Mr. Springsteen, now 61, is aging remarkably well, but still — how many of us, at that age, would want to spend an hour and a half being compared with our 28-year-old selves?

Those scenes of Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band in the studio during the year they worked on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” their fourth album, were shot in grainy black and white by Barry Rebo, a future cinematographer and producer. Along with old color home movies of the Springsteen family, they give “The Promise” a surface resemblance to Bruce Weber’s great musical documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” about the trumpeter Chet Baker.

“The Promise,” however, is much smaller in scope. It’s a standard making-of documentary, proceeding chronologically through the tribulations and triumphs on the road to the 1978 release of “Darkness,” three years after “Born to Run” — an agonizingly long gap at a time when new songs on the radio were the only way to reach a mass audience.

What elevates the film are its subjects, both the artist and the album, which established a style and a set of themes that would define Mr. Springsteen’s subsequent career. Punk, which was developing at the same time, may get all the credit for revolutionizing popular music, but Mr. Springsteen’s determination to move away from the highly engineered and sterile perfectionism of 1970s rock made “Darkness” just as innovative in its own way.

Springsteen fans — a particularly knowledgeable and devoted audience — will be mesmerized by Mr. Rebo’s footage, which, according to HBO, has never been shown publicly. Those of us who remember where we were when we first heard the album can indulge our nostalgia while taking in the evidence of Mr. Springsteen’s stubborn yet calm determination to find exactly the sound he was seeking.

Happiest of all will be the Springsteen completists, rewarded by nuggets like his singing of “Candy’s Baby” (an earlier version of “Candy’s Room”); an alternate verse of “Something in the Night” or the never-released “What’s the Matter Little Darling”; or songs that went to other artists, like “Because the Night” (Patti Smith) and “Talk to Me” (Southside Johnny).

In the background of one shot Mr. Zimny identifies the fan Obie Dziedzic, who advised his hero to record the version of “Racing in the Street” that included a verse about a girl he met — thereby helping preserve some of Mr. Springsteen’s most romantic lyrics. (“Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea/and wash these sins off our hands.”)

In addition to the interview with the latter-day Mr. Springsteen “The Promise” includes reminiscences by most of the core members of the E Street Band and the producers Jon Landau and Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Springsteen is as intelligent and articulate a commentator as always, but he doesn’t have much to say that sounds new. On the themes that underpin “Darkness,” like sin or “deep despair, resilience, determination,” you’d rather just hear him sing.

More enlightening is Chuck Plotkin, who was brought in to help Mr. Iovine mix the album and who describes how Mr. Springsteen communicated the sounds and effects he wanted to achieve through visual, cinematic images. More amusing is Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist and latter-day “Sopranos” star, who still gets testy on the subject of the 70 new songs he had to learn before Mr. Springsteen chose the 10 that would make it onto the album. (“The Promise” was one of the rejects, after the band had spent three months rehearsing and recording it; it would show up 21 years later on “18 Tracks.”)

“The Promise” (the film) fits on the shelf with other friendly documentaries released in the past few years about great rock songwriters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Tom Petty. It doesn’t approach the complexity or panache of Martin Scorsese’s movie about Mr. Dylan or Jonathan Demme’s films about Mr. Young, but in its modest way it’s a fitting tribute to an album meant to be lean, angry and unadorned.

Visions of Light

I have seen over ten or more of the movies shown on "Visions of Light" on AMC. Whenever the network honors an actors/actresses career whether for their anniversary in the business, birthday, or death, the commmentator always talk about how the directors placed the actors in different lighting's to enhanced the characters in the movie or a particular place to film. In the black and white films, you can almost always figure out who is the main character. In the book "Hub", the character of the housekeeper is an African American woman. Hub character did sexual assault the housekeeper. The movie industry change the characters around to fit in the time. The book "Grapes of Wrath", the characters in the movie are close to the identity of the characters of the book. "Visions of Light" has excellent information, and gave great pointers on taking challenging images,which makes a good source for research to keep close by.

Light painting photographers

German duo Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke create stark imagery that brings a ghostly quality to the beauty of nature, turning striking natural settings into backdrops for glowing organic forms made of moving light. Their subtle use of light painting in deserts, canyons, forests and snow-covered fjords makes the illuminated forms seem to blend in with their backgrounds in a way that brings to mind alien landscapes on some far away planet.









Patrick Rochon creates stunning images by moving light through various media and capturing the movement with photography and video. Patrick’s light painting is unique even among a field of very innovative artists, using lasers to illuminate his subjects in ways that create an eerie, otherwordly feel in the finished portraits. Patrick has also taken light painting to a whole new level by building costumes of lights and performing light painting on a giant screen to create a unique visual experience.













Michael Bosanko is a photographer who’s taken on light painting in a series called “We Come in Peace”, in which figures made of light seem to interact with their surroundings in a way that’s comical, fun and highly engaging. The series features giant spiders crawling down a highway, “alien” rocks gathering around a central “spaceship”, a light figure skateboarding on a ramp and another hitchhiking on the side of a road.






Mike Stobbs

News/Events

The Paris That Awoke to Atget’s Lens

Atget returned again and again, especially in his later years, to the Parc de St.-Cloud, seen in an image from March 1926 and recently.

In a city that maintains a strong reverence for its past, many of the scenes photographed by Eugène Atget still exist — untouched.


Books of The Times
Newark 1944, When Polio Disrupted the Playground

Philip Roth’s latest protagonist is not one of his self-conscious writer-heroes, like Nathan Zuckerman or Peter Tarnopol, who spend their lives turning sentences around and contemplating the equation between life and art. No, he’s a simple Newark gym teacher who in the summer of 1944 is supervising the neighborhood playground, watching the boys play ball and the girls jump rope. In Mr. Roth’s new novel, “Nemesis,” it’s the summer when a polio epidemic sweeps through the city, spreading anxiety and suspicion.

Times Topic: Philip RothLike his 2008 book, “Indignation,” “Nemesis” is a modest undertaking: a small-scale portrait of an era and of an earnest young man who finds the unstoppable engine of history steamrolling over his life. In this case, Bucky Cantor, 23, is one of the neighborhood’s few young men who aren’t off fighting the war; although he wanted to enlist along with his two best friends, he was rejected by all the services because of his terrible eyesight. The sense of duty instilled in him by his grandfather has made him feel guilty about not being able to serve his country. He feels “ashamed to be seen in civilian clothes, ashamed when he watched the newsreels of the war at the movies.”

Still, as Mr. Roth’s narrator recalls, Bucky is venerated by the neighborhood boys as “the most exemplary and revered authority we knew, a young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair-minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular — a comrade and leader both.” The boys admire Bucky’s athletic skills, and they look up to him as a role model — especially after he faces down a gang of menacing teenagers.

Bucky resembles Marcus, the hero of “Indignation,” in that he’s the very paradigm of niceness. He is not torn, as so many Roth heroes famously are, between responsibility and transgression, tradition and rebellion. He doesn’t even have a sense of humor — doesn’t engage in irony or sarcasm, and rarely speaks in jest. Whereas “Portnoy’s Complaint” was an outrageously comic tale about the throwing off of duty, “Nemesis” is a pleasantly told parable about the embrace of conscience — and what its suffocating, life-denying consequences can be.

That Bucky is such a one-dimensional character makes for a pallid, predictable story line in which the random workings of fate and the fate of temperament — rather than genuine free choice — are the narrative drivers. It’s all a bit by the numbers, though Mr. Roth executes Bucky’s story with professionalism and lots of granular period detail.

As he did in “The Plot Against America” (2004) — a novel with much bigger ambitions and a sweeping historical canvas — Mr. Roth conjures up World War II-era Newark and a Jewish neighborhood, where the routines of daily life are suddenly ruptured by fear. This time it’s not anti-Semitism that’s arrived, but polio, which has abruptly stricken two boys from the playground: Herbie Steinmark, a “chubby, clumsy, amiable eighth grader who, because of his athletic ineptness, was usually assigned to play right field and bat last,” and Alan Michaels, another eighth grader, who “was among the two or three best athletes” and “the boy who’d grown closest to Mr. Cantor.”

At the time, no one understands how polio spreads, and as more and more children succumb to the disease, panic and paranoia proliferate. Neighbors of the families with sick children call for quarantines; a local hot dog joint is shunned; and a mentally disabled man named Horace is accused of being a carrier.

Bucky tries to be a calm, stoic parental figure for the children, but he is shaken by an outburst from a hysterical mother with two sick boys. She accuses Bucky of letting them “run around like animals” on the baseball field, of letting them drink from the public fountain, of failing to look after the children’s welfare.

Bucky’s girlfriend, Marcia, wants him to quit his job and join her as a counselor at a camp in the Poconos, far from the contagion. At first he resists her, arguing that he has a responsibility to stay in Newark, but as more of his young charges fall sick, he tumbles into a full-blown existential crisis. In wondering how God could allow such innocent kids to suffer, he begins to wonder how God could have let his mother die in childbirth, how God could be so heartless and cruel.

Racked with doubt and anger and fear for his own health, Bucky impulsively changes his mind and accepts the camp job. He tells his boss in Newark that he is resigning and is soon in the bucolic Poconos with his beloved Marcia. For a few days, everything is idyllic: Bucky bonds with his new charges and exults in the lovely country air — so pure, so cool, so uncontaminated. And then everything changes: one of the boys in Bucky’s cabin falls ill and is rushed to the hospital. The epidemic has arrived at the camp, and Bucky thinks, “Who brought polio here if not me?”

Given Bucky’s personality and history, it’s not hard for the reader to figure out what happens next, even if Mr. Roth makes the aftermath a lot more melodramatic than you might expect. It’s not unmoving, exactly, but all a little synthetic — less like a vintage Roth narrative than like a very well-executed O. Henry story, complete with a deliberately ironic plot twist and a sentimental outcome.