The Isle of View (Warner Bros.)

By Joyce Millman

Chrissie Hynde is in full new-wave/folkie/chanteuse bloom on a splendid live acoustic set recorded in London, with a classical string quartet playing backup. Her dusky alto and thrilling vibrato is more expressive than ever as she, long-time drummer Martin Chambers and the latest incarnation of the band rethink some of their greatest hits; if you think a masterpiece like "Back on the Chain Gang" can't be improved upon, listen to Hynde's full-throated cry of loss and rebirth on the final verse. They also rescue unjust obscurities like "Criminal" (from 1990's Packed!), which, with its love and addiction metaphors, might've been an outtake from Joni Mitchell's Blue.

The strings work marvelously in the oddest places, like on the stuttering "The Phone Call." And while the song selection is a bit quirky, it's also defiantly personal. At the end of "Lovers of Today," when Hynde purrs, "I'll never feel like a man in a man's world" -- just as she did on the 1980 version of the song -- the line feels like a promise kept.

The Day After Trinity (Voyager CD-ROM)

By Scott Rosenberg

Why did the poetry-loving physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer harness his genius to the invention of the atom bomb? What happened to the idealistic community of scientists he led when they realized their invention would be used to annihilate Japanese cities? And how could the Manhattan Project boss have lost his security clearance during the McCarthy era?

Director Jon Else's 1982 documentary is less interested in the science of the bomb than in the souls of the men who created it. The Day After Trinity finds in Oppenheimer's journey an emblematic Faustian tragedy of scientific hubris and political expediency. On CD-ROM the 90-minute film's visual quality is inevitably degraded, but that's more than made up for by Voyager's enhancements -- including critical commentary, audio interviews with the filmmakers, a dossier of historical documents and helpful running annotations.