hat are we to make of all those happys like poppies dense in a simple, flat field? Each happy alters the happy that follows it. The plain language complexes through each repetition, until it’s as insided-out and upsided-down as the language of “Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook,” the one book, worked on for more than 20 years, that Silverstein, the prolific writer who gave us the peppermint gale of most every elementary-school literature syllabus, kept not quite finishing.

For those who need a recap: Boy meets adoring, obliging apple tree and eventually, through a combination of utter impotence and blatant manipulation, makes off with her branches, her trunk and, of course, the literal fruits of her labor.

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings.

Szmul is a kind of saint of Auschwitz, ascetic and selfless. If he is not an altogether convincing character, it’s a nearly impossible task to give a convincing voice to such a person (and such a person very likely existed).

By Evan Osnos

A compulsive womanizer and a sexual braggart, he is erotically obsessed with the wife of the camp commandant, Paul Doll—the elusive and haughty Hannah, who “conformed to the national ideal of young femininity, stolid, countrified, and built for procreation and heavy work.”