The setting of “West Side Story” is San Juan Hill, the nickname of the Lincoln Square area of Upper West Side of Manhattan—an area bulldozed and redeveloped into the Lincoln Center performing arts complex in the early 1960s.
Mary Magdalene’s actual history, as Margaret Arnold tells us, is much richer than we think. The tradition’s appropriation of Mary Magdalene is much more intricate and complex—as the saint herself is complex.
J. W. Mohnhaupt’s first book, The Zookeepers’ War, is an earnest plunge into the extraordinary history behind Berlin’s competing zoos during the Cold War.