Of late, referring to Alaskans as “real people” smacks of a political agenda. But the indigenous people of the North, the Iñupiat, have been “real” for thousands of years. This simple fact resounds in the straightforward voice of Alaska’s native rights advocate William L. Iggiagruk Hensley.
It’s not until the acknowledgments arrive on page 261 of Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur’s You Can’t Be President that readers learn the book was first conceived in French (and written jointly in French and English) as a means “to ‘explain’ U.S. democracy to a foreign audience.” The belated revelation explains quite a bit. For Gallic readers who often find themselves asking, “What’s the matter with the United States?” the account that MacArthur offers will serve as an excellent introduction to the distinctive dysfunctions of our democracy. But domestic prisoners trapped in the damned thing can probably afford to take
As someone who played Dungeons & Dragons obsessively from age nine through fourteen, I have my share of regrets, but they are as nothing when compared with those of Mark Barrowcliffe, an English novelist and ex-gamer, whose memoir, The Elfish Gene, chronicles a D&D habit the likes of which few people have known, or at least survived.
In historical photographs, events from long ago are easy to distinguish from more recent ones: The distant past is always in black-and-white. Even though experiments in color photography began in the mid-nineteenth century, color wouldn’t be widely used until the mid-1930s, and even then mainly for documentary and commercial purposes. But in 1909, two years after the Lumière brothers invented the Autochrome process, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn initiated a twenty-two-year project (brought to an end by his ruin in the Great Depression) to photograph the world in color. Known as the Archives de la Planète, this astounding body
“Length is measured by the speed of a moving shadow. Is seaweed beautiful? A change in a narrative’s temporal modality rids us of our Cartesian arrogance—it’s autumn now, but back then it was spring. Is it possible to say that seaweed is much more beautiful than the dryness in your mouth?” These are lines from the first paragraphs of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Dust, a book of essays that is certain to rid its readers of any Cartesian arrogance when it comes to narrative.
IN STEVEN SEBRING’S DOCUMENTARY Patti Smith: Dream of Life (2008), the godmother of punk is seen roaming cemeteries, scribbling in notebooks, reading poetry, and peeling open freshly snapped Polaroids. Smith’s music anchors the film, but Dream of Life’s unspoken theme is that she is an old-school romantic, one whose art-as-life approach to creativity makes her a sanguine torchbearer for the Beats and the nineteenth-century French poets she deeply admires.
In the age of e-mail’s immediacy, we have all but lost the sense of what a letter is: half of an extended, extemporaneous conversation that tries to anticipate and respond to its other half, as well as reward rereading over the comparatively long lag time between missives. Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax’s Letters to Poets, an anthology of correspondence between fourteen pairs of poets, tries to reclaim the expansiveness and durability of snail mail. Inspired by the centennial of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, the editors sought to create a personal dialogue around the poetics and
Mary Gaitskill defies definition. In fact, during our conversations about her extraordinary story collection Don’t Cry (Pantheon, $24)—her fifth book, following her multi-award-nominated 2005 novel, Veronica—she told me so. Gaitskill’s candor is just one of the virtues I find beguiling about her and her fiction. How else but with honesty and an unflinching eye could she portray the often-disturbing interior and exterior lives of the people who appear in her pages, like the grief-stricken Texas nurse haunted by a dream of two men locked in murderous battle following a game of pickup basketball, and the Iraq-war veteran bearing witness to
Since I’ve spent much of this decade inveighing against the debt-driven housing bubble in reports, columns, and other venues, I welcomed the chance to read The Foreclosure of America. As one of the first insider accounts of Countrywide Financial, the mortgage giant at the center of the mania, Adam Michaelson’s book gave me the illicit feeling that I had stormed enemy headquarters and found its battle plan. Not surprisingly, that plan was not terribly impressive.
The Philip Johnson Tapes, edited transcripts of ten conversations conducted in 1985, provides portraits of both interviewer (Robert A. M. Stern) and interviewee (Johnson) as no less than besotted with architecture, the history thereof, and, not inappropriately, their respective roles in shaping its discourse. As someone who, beginning in the 1980s, spent many hours in conversation with both Stern and Johnson, I found that the voices captured in these transcripts sounded amazingly familiar. While the presence of a tape recorder can often result in a deadening sense of historical self-awareness, Stern and Johnson display an intense familiarity—and comfort—with the mechanics
Man was created a rebel,” Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor admonishes the silent Christ in his prison cell, “and how can rebels be happy?” The burden of freedom, the responsibility of finding—or creating—one’s own purpose and meaning without the guidance of authoritative, inherited creeds and values, is too heavy for all but a few. The rest of us cannot endure for long the tensions of uncertainty. We must, at some point, stop questioning, quiet our doubts, turn away from moral and metaphysical inquiry and toward life. Untrammeled skepticism ends in paralysis. This is true of societies as well as of individuals. No
The Barack Obama era will bring us many things, including, no doubt, a major motion picture. That may at first seem counterintuitive: After all, the story itself is certainly nowhere near completion. Asked during a Frost/Nixon junket interview in December, producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard agreed it was too early to talk about an Obama biopic. But the onetime Illinois senator’s acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, remains a much-discussed potential movie property, and with good reason: It’s a self-contained bildungsroman, written before Obama entered politics. While the forty-fourth president’s story may have just begun, the narrative
If by some chance you happen to be passing through Rensselaerville, a formerly wealthy, now eerily becalmed, mill town in far upstate New York, you might possibly notice a neat, substantial, brick-built house at the center of town. It’s elegantly austere, nineteenth-century, with two doors and six windows symmetrically arranged on the front, and on the side is one of those plaques telling you how far you are from other places in the world: 29 miles from Catskill, 262 from Montreal, and 2,358 from Panama.
When, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history, he did so with mixed feelings. The good news, he thought, was that the ideological supremacy of free markets and of the political arrangement most suited to them (liberal democracy) had been established—even communists were talking about the importance of being competitive in the marketplace. The bad news was that without “the worldwide ideological struggle” between capitalism and socialism to inspire us, we were in for “a very sad time.” “In the post-historical period,” he wrote, “there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum
In days of yore, before the first JAP communed with a pair of Blahniks in the sanctum sanctorum of Bergdorf’s, Jews appreciated the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of footwear. In Jews and Shoes (Berg, $35), an odd collection of essays by Jewologists, folklorists, and an interdisciplinary mélange of cultural historians, editor Edna Nahshon cobbles together a surprisingly rich account of the Tribe’s journey via their footwear. Who knew?
Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg and Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett were men of the odd fringes of softening empires; each would, in his own way, champion a fantasized primitivism as the antidote to a civilization in decay. David Grann’s The Lost City of Z describes Fawcett’s obsession with the fabled Amazonian city, a spiritual El Dorado and “the cradle of all civilizations.” In 1925, Fawcett set out, on foot and with only his son and a sidekick, into the jungle in search of Z. At the time, he was probably the most famous anthropologist-explorer since Livingstone; he did not
More than a century ago, inventor Nikola Tesla saw the potential of remote-controlled weapons in war. In the 1890s, he used radio waves to steer a small boat before a crowd at Madison Square Garden, but when he tried to sell the idea of a remote-fired torpedo to the United States government, the official who listened to the inventor’s proposal “burst out laughing.” Tesla died penniless, a man ahead of his time.
In 2001, the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a resolution rejecting “the core concepts of Darwinist ideology that certain races and classes of humans are inherently superior to others.” The resolution’s sponsor, an African-American Democratic legislator, asserted that by teaching “that some humans have evolved further than others,” the nineteenth-century English naturalist Charles Darwin “provided the main rationale for modern racism.” Upping the ante, Expelled, last year’s documentary-style motion picture by entertainer Ben Stein, who is Jewish, blamed the Holocaust on Nazi racism rooted in Darwinian science.
Denis Dutton is a man with a mission: Against cultural anthropologists, art historians, critics, and aestheticians who have advanced the idea that taste is relative and socially constructed, he wants to demonstrate that there is an “instinct” for beauty, skill, and pleasure. As proof of the universality of this instinct, he offers descriptions of its “spontaneous” emergence in children, along with ethnographic reports of its existence in “preliterate hunter-gatherer tribes that survived into the twentieth century, since their ways of life reflect those of our ancient ancestors.” The second part of that sentence—“since their ways of life reflect those of
Texas has long had a jujitsu hold on the American psyche. Residents of other states share a combined revulsion and admiration for the Lone Star State, the only member of the union that—stop me if you’ve heard this—was a country before it was a state. For the most part, this wariness is mutual, as one can quickly gather from the occasional pickup-truck bumper sticker bearing an image of the Texas flag with secede stenciled over the top—an odd posture for a resident of the state recently governed by the last occupant of the Oval Office.
