Tag
History
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“Recover, Replant, Return”: Talking Nuclear History, Writing, and Food with Kate Brown
“Were people in the past like me, did they feel like they were in some historic maelstrom? If they did, how did they scrape by?”
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The Confidence Economy: An Interview with T. J. Jackson Lears
Questions about trust, faith, and chance in American cultural history are at the core of your work as I see it. Your interest in confidence and con men is especially striking …
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Landscape with Corpses
Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room is a stunning and disturbing novel of and about nightmares. Early on, the protagonist, Elinor Brooke, slashes off her hair in an act of vengeance against her femininity, then falls asleep: “she dreamt she was on her knees in a corner of the room, trying to vomit without attracting the attention…
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When the Past is Past
Set sometime in the early 1950s, Toni Morrison’s latest work of fiction centers on a 24-year-old black veteran of the Korean War named Frank Money, recently returned from the frontlines and showing signs of psychological disturbance. Home opens with Frank escaping from a Seattle mental hospital and making his way by bus across a still-segregated…
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Mapping a Young America
Maps are ubiquitous now, embedded in nearly every mobile device, but in the early days of America, maps were far more precious. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten argues that the formation of the United States allowed cartography to become an institutionalized practice in the country. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, the…
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Why Does the Historical Novel Need to be Rescued?
Hilary Mantel has won two Booker Prizes for her re-imagination of the court of Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, the first two installments in a planned trilogy narrating one of the most famous and most represented episodes in English history. Reviews of both books inevitably begin with a…
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The Alchemy of Finance
For a few years in the late 1990s, the myth of a New Economy was everywhere. The old economy, with its pesky booms and busts, was a thing of the past, replaced by a new era of infinite prosperity powered by globalization, the Internet, and—most of all—the stock market. Lured on by the promise of…
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Everything Old Is New Again
In the past few years it’s gotten so you can’t go to the movies without finding onscreen a burly guy dressed as Ernest Hemingway, cavorting with women wearing shingled hair and calf-length skirts. Everywhere filmgoers turn, flappers and gangsters and accent coaches abound. Culturally, we’re experiencing an intense fetish for the 1920s and ’30s that…
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Spain’s Unending War
The best seller El lector de Julio Verne (The Reader of Jules Verne) by Spanish author Almudena Grandes is the second novel in a planned series of six, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes of an Unending War), a large-scale narrative project that will aim to convey the devastating trajectory of the first twenty-five years…
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Graphic Fables of Old New York
Two recent books serve as potent reminders of the ongoing historiographic obsessions of graphic narrative. Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn and Mark Siegel’s Sailor Twain are both ambitious historical graphic novels that return to early periods of New York history. Using strikingly different visual styles and narrative techniques, both create deeply haunting fables that, like much of…
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The City as Literary Field
Sujan Singh Park is a tiny neighborhood by Delhi standards—more of a large square than a full-fledged “colony,” as the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of South Delhi are called. But this one happens to be where the city’s linguistic, social, and architectural capitals meet. Madhu Jain, a chronicler of the Indian arts scene, describes Sujan Singh Park…
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Dress-Up Games with Russian History
In 2002, the Kremlin-affiliated youth group Moving Together staged a public protest on Moscow’s Theater Square at which they threw the works of several prominent Russian postmodernist authors into an outsized papier-mâché toilet. In particular, they accused Vladimir Sorokin, who had achieved great acclaim in the preceding decade for his rather dense brand of conceptualist…
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The Persistence of Monarchy
“It is a mistake to think that the British monarchy persists only as an anachronistic institution, grafted awkwardly if beguilingly onto our modern celebrity-obsessed culture.”
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The Politics of Sacred Life
Humanitarianism, according to Didier Fassin, is “a relatively recent invention” that has become “a potent force of our world” that is “global and yet uneven.” It has come, he asserts, to occupy “a key position in the contemporary moral order.” It is “mobilized in the practices of our societies, from the treatment of poverty, asylum, and…
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The Iliad: A Romance
The first thing that needs to be said about the winner of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction—The Song of Achilles, a retelling of the Iliad by first-time novelist Madeline Miller—is that it is a pleasure to read a version of the Trojan war in which Achilles and Patroclus are in a devoted partnership, sex…
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Powerful Images Recollected in Tranquility
Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White takes advantage of the generic pluralism comics have enjoyed, or suffered, since becoming “respectable” in the mid-1980s. Expertly drawn with pencil, ink, and gouache, with a dash of Adobe InDesign, this coming-of-age memoir is also an immigrant story of the author’s Argentinian family and a unique…
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The Rise of Finance
In a February 2011 interview, the United States Treasury secretary insisted that the future of the American economy depends upon the continued growth of its financial sector. “I don’t have any enthusiasm,” said Timothy Geithner, for “trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because…
