Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2021-4

Fourth quarter 2021, Oct.-Dec.

Just realized we're in October (I was partly out of action in September). Will move the October postings to this thread.

This thread continues: Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2021-3.

Books have a supply chain problem:

Constance Grady. Vox, 10/06/2021: The great book shortage of 2021, explained.

Time to consider an e-book reader or app. However, only "surprise best-sellers" will be affected by the supply chain issue.

W.G. Sebald & the sources for his quasi-fictions:

Judith Shulevitz. The Atlantic, 10/05/2021: W. G. Sebald Ransacked Jewish Lives for his Fictions. Review of an upcoming biography: Caroline Angier: Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald.

Nobel Prize for Literature:

Alex Marshall. NYT, 10/7/2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah Is Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ron Charles. WaPo, 10/07/2021: Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 10/07/2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel prize in literature.

Late addition:

Kristen Roupenian. The New Yorker, 10/10/2021: The Impact of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize.

National Book Awards news:

Elizabeth A. Harris. NYT, 10/05/2021: Finalists Announced for This Year’s National Book Awards.

"Five books are now shortlisted for each of the five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Winners will be named in November."

TLS October 8, 2021|No. 6184

Literature:

Sophie Gee. Low tricks and high art: The unlikely making of an Enlightenment poet. Review of: Pat Rogers: The Poet and the Publisher: The case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, bookseller in Grub Street -- Joseph Hone: Alexander Pope in the Making.

Peter Parker. It was worth it: E. M. Forster’s Maurice at fifty. (Essay)

Min Wild. Cutting his lining: The excessive ingenuity of Tristram Shandy. Review of: Ryan J. Starck: Biblical Sterne: Rhetoric and religion in the Shandyverse -- Helen Williams: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth Century Book.

David Gallagher. Chronicle of a death: The last days – and long shadow – of an illustrious literary father. Review of: Rodrigo García: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A son’s memoir. A son's memoir of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's death.

Mercedes Aguirre. Outlaw from the rules of life: The political radicalization of a 1920s avant-garde icon. Review of: Jane Marcus, edited by Jean Mills: Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger.

Arts:

Paul Griffiths. Playing and praying: Meditation, God and Bach. Review of: Steve Isserlis: The Bach Cello Suites: A Companion.

Carolyne Larrington. Games and thrones: Where nothing is certain except death and foxes. Review of the film The Green Knight.

Religion:

Vernon White. Finding grace under hellfire: Why no one has to suffer eternal torment. David Bentley Hart: That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and universal salvation.

Science and Technology:

Christopher Mole. Ideas in their infancy: How to measure a child’s rational. Review of: Susan Engel: The Intellectual Life of Children.

Jonathan Buckley. Enough to drive you mad: Difficult conditions and the doctors who treat them. Review of: Alastair Santhouse: Head First: A psychiatrist’s stories of mind and body.

History, Society, Politics:

Arnold Hunt. Charity grown cold: Why the people next door have always mattered. Review of: Andy Wood: Faith, Hope and Charity: English neighbourhoods, 1500–1640 -- Katie Barclay: Caritas: Neighbourly love and the early modern self.

Francesca Happé. Fight, flight or fawn: A correspondence with misunderstood women. Review of: Joanne Limburg: Letters to My Weird Sisters: On autism and feminism.

Samuel Earle. Never so sawcie: Why young people aren’t to blame. Review of: Bobby Duff: Generations: Does when you’re born shape who you are?.

Violet Hudson. Glittering crises: Bright women and the fortunes that ruined them. Laura Thompson: Heiresses: The lives of the million dollar babies

In Brief Review of: Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko: Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the mind of QAnon.

In Brief Review of: Dominique Kalifa, translated by Susan Emanuel: The Belle Epoque: A cultural history, Paris and beyond.

Notable articles from the Oct. 21 issue of The New York Review of Books:

Jessica Riskin. Nature’s Evolving Tastes. Review of: Jeremy De Silva, editor: A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution -- Catalog of the exhibition edited by Laura Bossi and translated from the French by Valentina Baslyk, Jill Corner, and others: The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century -- Robert McCracken Peck, with a foreword by David Attenborough: The Natural History of Edward Lear: New Edition.

Carolina A. Miranda. ‘Who Designs Your Race?’. Review of: Catalog of the exhibition edited by Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and Elia Alba: Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21 : an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, New York City, March 13–September 26, 2021.

Giles Harvey. ‘All One’s Capacities’. Review of: Shirley Hazzard, edited by Brigitta Olubas and with a foreword by Zoë Heller: Shirley Hazzard: Collected Stories -- Shirley Hazzard, with an introduction by Lauren Groff: The Transit of Venus.

Jenny Uglow. Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy: How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.. Review of: Cynthia Saltzman: Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast.

Martin Filler. Hollywood’s Master Builder. Review of: Karen E. Hudson, with photography by Benny Chan and a foreword by Michael S. Smith: Paul R. Williams: Classic Hollywood Style -- Marc Appleton, Stephen Gee, and Bret Parsons: Paul R. Williams -- Janna Ireland: Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View -- Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story: a documentary film directed by Royal Kennedy Rodgers and Kathy McCampbell Vance.

Ben Lerner. The Storyteller. Review of: Carole Angier: Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald.

Adam Schatz. Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’. (Essay)

Jerome Groopman. What Does the Microbiome Do? Review of: Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty: Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health.

Laura Marsh. Are the Kids All Right?. Review of: Jonathan Franzen: Crossroads.

Sue Halpern. The Human Costs of AI. Review of: Kate Crawford: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence -- Simon Chesterman: We, the Robots?: Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law -- Kevin Roose: Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation -- Erik J. Larson: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do.

Perry Link. The CCP’s Culture of Fear. (Essay)

Matthew Aucoin. The More Fraught the Better. (Essay on Igor Stransky-W.H. Auden collaboration on the opera The Rake's Progress.

Ed Park. A Poet's Eye View. Review of: Yi Sang, edited by Don Mee Choi and translated from the Korean by Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Joyelle McSweeney, and from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu: Yi Sang: Selected Works.

Ruth Franklin. ‘The Lucky Ones’. Review of: Mikhal Dekel: In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust -- Eliyana R. Adler: Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union -- Julius Margolin, translated from the Russian by Stefani Hoffman, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder and an introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck: Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag.

Two recent New Yorker articles on books:

Clare Bucknell. The New Yorker, 10/11/2021: The Myth of Oscar Wilde’s Martyrdom.

Nick Romeo. Is It Time for a New Economics Curriculum?. Review of a free online textbook: The Core Team: The Economy.

Constance Grady. Vox, 10/09/2021: The rise and fall and rise again of Jonathan Franzen.

TLS October 15, 2021|No. 6185

Literature:

Nnamdi Ehirim. Sickness in the body politic: Wole Soyinka returns to the novel after fifty years. Review of: Wole Soyinka: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.

Giles Foden. Hybridity and roots: The salient ideas, elegant writing and ethical commitment of this year’s Nobel laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah. (Essay)

Lucy Scholes. Mistress of the macabre: The lively correspondence of Shirley Jackson. Review of: Shirley Jackson, Laurence Jackson Hyman, editor: The Letters of Shirley Jackson.

Alex Clark. A small town in England: John le Carré’s final verdict on the ‘vast apparatus of espionage’. Review of: John Le Carré: Silverview.

Ladee Hubbard. Darkness in the city of light: American racism through the lens of the Algerian War. Review of: William Gardner Smith: The Stone Face (Reprint of the novel 1st published 1963)

Russell Williams. Autumn livres: The trends and triumphs of a seasonal literary jamboree. (Essay)

In Brief Review of: Hosanna Krinke: Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The afterlife of Victorian illness.

Arts:

Anna Picard. The black ribbon of suffering: A new production of Janáček’s dark yet tender opera. Review of a new production of the Leoš Janáček, Jenufa.

Michael Caines. Life in Elsinore World: A spare new Hamlet, with modern trappings. Review of a new production of Hamlet.

Lucy Dallas. Putney’s prime, decline and fall: The final volume of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy on stage. Review of a theatrical adaptation of Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light.

Kathryn Hughes. More first-class monkey business: The elder statesman of family comedy keeps it real. Review of: David Sedaris: A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003–2020).

Olivia Potts. Sun in your stomach: A Hollywood recipe for authentic charm. Review of: Stanley Tucci: Taste: My life through food.

Science and Technology:

Anna Katharina Schaffner. Can it be that it was so simple then?: A guide to the mindset of our evolutionary past. Review of: Charles Foster: Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 years of consciousness.

History & Society:

Michael Sonenscher. Democracy, know thyself: The comparisons at the heart of Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Review of: Alexis de Tocqueville, Edited by Françoise Mélonio and Anne Vibert: Œuvres Completes: Tome XVII: Correspondance à divers: Volume One.

Jonathan Clark. Neither mad nor bad: How we still get George III all wrong. Review of: Andrew Roberts: George IIII: The life and reign of Britain’s most misunderstood monarch.

Michele Pridmore-Brown. Knowing what’s best for baby: Breast milk and the rise of the bottle. Review of: Lawrence Trevelyan Weaver: White Blood: A history of human milk.

Mia Levitin. Ill-fitting attire: Does physical distaste underpin misogyny?. Review of: Eimear McBride: Something Out of Place: Women and disgust.

New edition of Mrs. Dalloway in the offing, annotated by one of my favorite current critics:

Seth Katz. LARB, 10/18/2021: Holding and Unfolding Woolf’s Treasure: On “The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway”.

An anarchist version of early human history:

William Deresiewicz. The Atlantic, 10/18/2021: Human History Gets a Rewrite. Review of: David Graeber & David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

A related essay from the same issue (taken from the anthropology periodical Sapiens): Josie Glausiusz: The Mystery of Why Our Ancestors Left Africa.

Also from The Atlantic, a review of a new book on Crime and Punishment:

James Parker. The Atlantic, 10/18/2021: Why Did Dostoyevsky Write Crime and Punishment?. Review of: Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and the Saint.

The novelist Paul Auster (yes, that Paul Auster!) has written a massive biography of Stephen Crane:

Adam Gopnick. The New Yorker, 10/18 (25)/2021: The Miracle of Stephen Crane. Review of Paul Auster: Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane.

TLS October 22, 2021|No. 6186

Arts & Literature:

Julie M. Johnson. You can’t stop me: How women artists have portrayed themselves. Review of: Jennifer Higgie: The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, revolution and resilience: 500 years of women’s self-portraits.

Jenny Quilter. Picasso is your daddy: A portrait of the artist, but only as a young woman. Review of: Alexander Nemerov: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York.

Armand D'angour. Ars no longa: Why it is hard to know the meaning of dance. Review of: Deborah Tarn Steiner: Choral Construction in Greek Culture: The idea of the chorus in the poetry, art and social practices of the archaic and early Classical period.

Adam Mars-Jones. Snail mail: Wes Anderson’s new film: a refracted hommage. Review of the Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch.

Scott Redford. In echoing arcades: A foundational story for one of the jewels of Islamic architecture. Review of: Alain George: The Umayad Mosque of Damascus: Art, faith and empire in early Islam.

Imogen Russell Williams. Speed, rage, heat or stink: The conventions and merits of the children’s graphic novel. (Essay).

Peter Stothard. Picking up the threads: Highlighting the heroines of Greek myth. Review of: Charlotte Higgins: Greek Myths: a New Retelling.

Stephen Henighan. What is Canadian?: A national literature on the point of fragmentation. Review of: David Staines: A History of Canadian Fiction.

Clare Saxby. Between heaven and earth: The ‘elemental’ work of a resilient and single-minded sculptor. Review of: Eleanor Clayton: Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life and the exhibition of the same name.

Sarah Watling. Close to home: An alternative history of early twentieth-century art. Review of: Rebecca Birrell: This Dark Country: Women artists, still life and intimacy in the early twentieth century.

Emma Smith. A rough night in filthy air: Radically redeeming the fallen world of an overfamiliar tragedy. Review of a production of The Tragedy of Macbeth.

In Brief Review of: Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba: The Postcolonial Genocide Novel: Quests for Meaningfulness.

Philosophy & Religion:

Jane O' Grady. Feel like a rational woman: Intelligent conversations. Review of: Suki Finn, editor: Women of Ideas: Interviews from Philosophy Bites.

Carlos Fraenkel. Horrible heresies?: How Spinoza really viewed religion. Review of: Clare Carlisle: Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics.

In Brief Review of: Peter Stanford: If These Stones Could Talk: The history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland through twenty buildings.

History, Society, Politics:

Alastair J. L. Blanshard. Total conscripts of the heart: The story of the ‘army of lovers’. Review of: James Romm: The Sacred Band: Three hundred Theban lovers fighting to save Greek freedom.

Bryan Cheyette. Liberal limits: Why the ‘longest hatred’ persists today. Review of: Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam, editors: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History.

Keith Kahn-Harris. What went wrong: Assessing the fallout of antisemitism in the Labour Party. Review of: Jewish Voice for Labour: What the EHRC Got It So Wrong: Antisemitism and the Labour Party -- David Renton: Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the left got wrong and how to learn from it.

Carol Tavris. Bias cut: How best to achieve diversity in the workplace. Review of: Joan C. Williams: Bias Interrupted: Creating inclusion for real and for good.

Wendy Slater. News from nowhere: Incarceration in the Gulag – and a nineteenth-century predecessor. Review of: Alena Kozlova, Nikolai Mikhailov, Irina Ostrovskaya and Svetlana Fadeeva, editors; translation Georgia Thomson: My Father's Letters: Correspondence from the Soviet Gulag ‘MEMORIAL’ International Historical, Educational, Human Rights and Charitable Society -- Sarah J. Young: Writing Resistance: Revolutionary memoirs of Shlissel’burg Prison, 1884–1906.

A. E. Stallings. The poetry of earth: A visit to Euboea weeks after it was devastated by fire. (Essay)

Rachel Hadas. Anger and arias: A lyrical account of pain and suffering. Review of: Fred D’Aguiar: Year of Plagues: A memoir of 2020.

Lengthy essay on the new biography of Edward Said:

Bruce Robbins. n+1, 09/20/2021: Said of the Sixties. Review of: Timothy Brennan: Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said.

TLS October 29, 2021|No. 6187

Literature & Arts:

Richard Lea. Star writer: The mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s cranky cosmology. Review of: John Tresch: The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the forging of American science.

Katharine Clark. Whassup?: The ephemeral yet enduring literary form of the ballad. Review of: Patricia Fumerton: The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving media, tactical publics -- Oskar Cox Jensen: The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian England.

Brian Moloney. The piano and the parodist: A half-portrait of a great philosophical novelist. Review of: Peter Davies: Life Into Art: Italo Svevo and the novel.

Lynne Murphy. Stay for the aphorisms: The wisdom of a seasoned New Yorker. Review of: Fran Lebowitz: The Fran Lebowitz Reader.

Natasha Lehrer. Merge and multiply: Zen and whimsy in a novel about how we read. Review of: Ruth Ozeki: The Book of Form and Emptiness.

Claire Lowden. Strings attached: Helen Oyeyemi’s latest puppet show. Review of Helen Oyeyemi's novel: Peaces.

M. M. Owen. Sand and spice: A science fiction classic on screen. Review of the 2021 film Dune.

Carmine di Biase. Revenge of the White Goddess: Neorealism’s fateful late encounter with Greek myth. Review of: Cesare Pavese: Dialoghi con leuco.

History, Politics, Culture:

David Wallace-Wells. Avoiding apocalypse: COP26: Doomsters, deniers, deal-makers and dreamers. Review of: Jem Bendell and Rupert Read, editors: Deep Adaptation: Navigating the realities of climate chaos -- Andreas Malm: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to fight in a world on fire -- Katharine Hayhoe: Saving Us: A climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world -- Bruno Maçães: Geopolitics For the End Time: From the pandemic to the climate crisis.

Joe Moran. Not so now, now: How the age of irony curdled into our post-truth world. Review of: Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern.

Roderick Beaton. That Greece might still be free: The bloody but decisive transformations of 1821. Review of: Mark Mazower: The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the making of modern Europe.

Clarissa Hyman. Leaf-eaters to macaroni-eaters: Busting some myths about Italy’s national dish. Review of: Massimo Montanari, translated by Gregory Conti: A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce.

John Haffenden. The Ghost at Renishaw Hall: What really happened to ‘The Boy in Pink’? (Essay)

A. N. Wilson. Ruler in ordinary: How George V and his consort made the modern monarchy. Review of: Jane Ridley: George V: Never a dull moment.

Recent book reviews or bibliographical matters from The New Yorker:

Brandon Taylor. Oct. 18, 2021. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Haunting New Novel. Review of Knausgaard's The Morning Star.

Daniel Mendelsohn. Oct. 18, 2021:The Many Wars of Pat Barker. Review of Pat Barker: The Women of Troy (as well as her earlier books).

Elizabeth Kolbert. Oct. 25, 2021. Where Have All the Insects Gone? Review of Richard Rhodes: Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature.

Olufemi O. Taiwo. Oct. 25, 2021: Our Planet Is Heating Up. Why Are Climate Politics Still Frozen? Review of: Amitav Ghosh: The Nutmeg's Curse -- Kate Aronoff: Overheated -- Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective: White Skin, Black Fuel.

Parul Sehgal: Nov. 1, 2021: Is Amazon Changing the Novel?.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Nov. 8, 2021: Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out. Review of: David Graeber & David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. (Also reviewed in The Atlantic >12 featherbear: )

Edith Wharton's ghost stories:

Jack Hanson. The Baffler, 10/27/2021: Edith Wharton’s Hauntology. Review of: Edith Wharton: Ghosts.

TLS November 5, 2021|No. 6188

Literature, Bibliography, and The Arts:

James Waddell. Tales of lost virtue in the stacks: A 3,000-year survey of libraries, and the personalities behind them. Review of: Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen: The Library: A Fragile History.

Michael Sherborne. On the love island of Dr Moreau: A pioneer of science fiction in his prime – and beyond. Review of: Claire Tomalin: The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World -- J. S. Barnes: The City of Dr. Moreau.

Paul Binding. Not here to write, here to be mad: The trials of Robert Walser and his family. Review of: Susan Bernofsky: Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser -- Robert Walser, translator Tom Whalen: Little Snow Landscape.

Frances Wilson. Broken knowledge: A beautiful website that serves as ‘a labyrinth to get lost in’ Review of a website: Adam Green, editor: The Public Domain Review (publicdomainreview.org)

Nadia Beard. Space to sing and play: A parallel musical history. Review of: Kira Thurman: Singing Like Germans: Black musicians in the land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Alex Burghart. A medieval succession sewn up: How the Normans pictured their achievement. Review of: David Musgrove and Michael Lewis: The Story of The Bayeux Tapestry: Unravelling the Norman Conquest -- George Garnett: The Norman Conquest in English History (Vol. 1: A Broken Train)

Justin Warshaw. Secrets of the oyster: Slow-burn thrills in the Basque country. Review of: John Banville: April in Spain.

Philosophy:

Cheryl Misak. What are the limits of logic?: How a groundbreaking logician lost control. Review of: Stephen Budianksy: Journey to the Edge of Reason: The life of Kurt Gödel.

Science & Technology:

Pippa Goldschmidt. Stranger than fiction: The search for evidence of extraterrestrial sightings . Review of: Ross Coulthart: In Plain Sight: An investigation into UFOs and impossible science.

Niki Segnit. Take us back to the roots: An exotic journey through food and field. Review of: Dan Saladino: Eating to Extinction: The world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them.

Politics, Society, Culture:

Sholto Byrnes. From Third World to First: What Singapore’s success might mean for the rest of the continent. Review of: Jeevan Vasagar: Lion City: Singapore and the invention of Modern Asia.

Amy Hawkins. Nothing more than an ant: How social ties have been corrupted in China. Review of: Liang Hong, translated by Emily Goedde: China in One Village: The story of one town and the changing world.

Michael Vatioktis. . A thousand cuts: Maria Ressa and the hazards of life as a journalist in the Philippines. (Essay)

Anne McElvoy. After the last straw: Dmitry Muratov’s Nobel prize. (Essay)

From the Yale Review, Fall 2021, vol 109, no 3.

Edward Hirsch. The Brink of Destruction: Revisiting John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended.”

Sam Huber. AIDS Elegies After Ashbery.

Halloween items from various sources:

Molly Young. NYT, 11/02/2021: Louise Erdrich’s ‘The Sentence’ Considers the (Literally) Haunting Power of Books. Review of: Louise Erdrich: The Sentence.

Jonathan Elmer. Poe: America’s “Artificer.” Review of: Scott Peeples: The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City -- John Tresch: The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science.

Two items from journals I've never heard of, via Arts & Letters Daily:

Joshua Rivera. Polygon (a video game website, by the way), Oct. 31, 2021: Why every generation re-discovers Stephen King.

Sudipto Sanyal. The Smart Set (TSS), 10/28/2021: Poe Boy.

About the new biography of Robert E. Lee:

John Reeves. LARB, 11/03/2021: Lee’s Fault. Review of: Allen C. Guelzo: Robert E. Lee: A Life.

Amateur cataloger finds dust & artifacts in 19th century American schoolbooks:

Kim Beil. LitHub, 11/04/2021: What I Learned While Cataloguing an Entire Library of 19th-Century Schoolbooks.

TLS: November 12, 2021|No. 6189

Literature & Linguistics:

A. N. Wilson. Words of the prophet: Dostoevsky and the destiny of Russia. Review of: Andrew D. Kaufman: The Gambler Life: A true story of love, risk, and the woman who saved Dostoevsky -- Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Bad Business: Essential Stories -- Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a crime and its punishment -- Alex Christofi: Dostoevsky in Love: An intimate life.

Laura Hackett. Majors plus minors: Is there a numerical solution to James Joyce? Review of: Eric Bolson: Review of: Ulysses by Numbers.

Emily Bernard. Out of hatred, into the spotlight: The will-for-freedom of the first Black woman to win the Booker. Review of: Bernardine Evaristo: Manifesto: On Never Giving Up.

Phil Baker. In the spirit of rationalism: Crank theories and the sage of Baker Street. Review of: Brian McCuskey: How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the pseudoscientific method.

Michael Lapointe. Theme park of awfulness: The difficulties of writing the migrant crisis. Review of: Evelina Santangelo, translated by Ruth Clarke: From Another World -- Carmel Doohan: Seesaw -- Louis-Philippe Dalembert, translated by Marjolijn de Jager: The Mediterranean Wall: A Novel -- Rabih Alameddine: The Wrong End of the Telescope -- Zülfü Livaneli, translated by Brendan Freely: Disquiet.

Henry Hitchings. Fugitives in writing: The coinages and euphemisms of the First World War. Review of: Lynda Mugglestone: Writing a War of Words: Andrew Clark and the search for meaning in World War One.

Douglas Field. Flowers bloom: A paean to Black American culture. Review of: Farah Jasmine Griffin: Read Until You Understand: The profound wisdom of Black life and literature.

Johan Elster Hanson. Paint the grief away: The final parts of a notable septet. Review of: Jon Fosse, translation by Damion Searls: A New Name: Septology VI–VII.

In Brief Review of: Ato Quayson: Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature.

Arts:

Muriel Zagha. Pheasants and donkey skin: Pablo Larraín’s new film: the life of Diana as a fable. Review of the film Spencer.

Julian Bell. For paint’s sake: Sickert’s art of resistance and elusiveness. Review of Wendy Baron, Richard Shone, Luke Farey: Sickert: the Theatre of Life & the exhibition of the same name at Piano Nobile, and the exhibition Sickert: a Life in Art at the Walker Gallery.

Religion:

John Barton. Greatest story ever retold: The biblical conclusion to a lifelong study of comparative mythology. Review of: Robert Calasso, translated by Tim Parks: The Book of All Books.

John Jenkins. Parish news: How the Middle Ages defined the character of worship. Review of: Nicholas Orme: Going to Church in Medieval England.

History, Politics, Society:

Douglas Smith. First bite at the devil’s apple: A quiet revolution that transformed Russia. Review of: Paul W. Werth: 1837:Russia’s quiet revolution.

Misha Glenny. Children of a circle of hell: The terror and bizarre reality of life in communist Albania. Review of: Lea Ypi: Free: Coming of age at the end of history -- Margo Rejmer, translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones: Mud Sweeter Than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania.

Jane Yager. Double trouble, toil and rubble: Digging under the Iron Curtain. Review of: Helena Merriman: Tunnel 29: The true story of an extraordinary escape beneath the Berlin Wall.

Jeffrey Collins. Allow me to say this: Free speech absolutism is hitting the buffers. Review of: Eric Berkowitz: Dangerous Ideas: A brief history of censorship in the West, from the ancients to fake news -- Christopher Hilliard: A Matter of Obscenity: The politics of censorship in modern Britain.

Christine Burns. Silenced all these years: A landmark story of trans rights. Review of: Zoë Playdon: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: The transgender trial that threatened to upend the British establishment.

In Brief Review of: Peter Hughes: A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues.

In Brief Review of: Stephen Mumford: A Philosopher Looks at Sport.

In Brief Review of: Carol Leonnig: Zero Fail: The rise and fall of the Secret Service.

In Brief Review of: Will Storr: The Status Game: On social position and how we use it.

"Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t."

David Waldstreicher. Boston Review, 11/10/2021:The Changing Same of U.S. History. Review of: Gordon S. Wood: Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution -- Carol Anderson: The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Revisiting Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at 100.

Jared Marcel Pollen. The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle: Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” at 100.

On the life & career of the late David Graeber, co-author (with David Wengrow) of the recent The Dawn of Everything:

Molly Fischer. New York Intelligencer, Nov. 9 2021: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds .

Notable articles from The New York Review of BooksNov-Dec. 2021

Literature:

Joe Moshenska. Nov. 9, 2021: Milton, Freud, and My Cousin Hymie. (Essay)

Michael Gorra. Nov. 18, 2021: What Fear Feels Like. Review of: Paul Auster: Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane.

Elaine Blair. Dec. 2, 2021: Quick Words, Long View. Review of: Lydia Davis: Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles.

Miranda Seymour. Dec. 2, 2021: Our Trojan Moment. Review of: Pat Barker: The Women of Troy.

Lauren Groff. Dec. 2, 2021: Herring-Gray Skies. Review of: Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Martin Aiken: Karate Chop -- Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra: So Much for that Winter -- Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra: Mirror, Shoulder, Signal -- Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra: Wild Swims.

History & Society:

Joshua Hammer. Nov. 18, 2021: The Horrors of the Diamond Boom. Review of: Steven Press: Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa -- Mathew Gavin Frank: Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa.

Colin Grant. Nov. 18, 2021: Sins of the Fathers. Review of: Edward Ball: Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy.

Jake Bernstein. Loopholes for Kleptocrats. Review of: Casey Michel: American Kleptocracy: How the US Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History -- Chuck Collins: The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions.

Feminism & its discontents:

Marcie Bianco. LARB, 11/10/2021: White Feminism by Design. Review of: Kyla Shuller: The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism. (essay review covering a number of other similar publications)

From Public Books "B-Sides," essays on overlooked books, this by a notable New Zealand author:

Alex Calder: 11/11/2021: B-Sides: Janet Frame's "Living in the Maniototo."

A new biography of Hunter S. Thompson, coming out in November:

Kevin Mims. Quillette, Nov. 11, 2021: High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism—A Review. Review of: David S. Wills: High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism.

How are anti-racism bookclubs doing?

Fabiola Cineas. Vox, 11/11/2021: The lofty goals and short life of the antiracist book club.

On Louis Menand's recent book on American culture and the Cold War:

Greg Barnhisel. Public Books, 11/12/2021: Freedom's Stakes. Review of Louis Menand: The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.

"Unlike their STEM peers, Black and white humanities graduates earn about the same. How did that happen?"

Elizabeth Austin. Washington Monthly, Sept./Oct. 2021: The Secret Lives of English Majors.

The book based on the NYT 1619 Project is finally available.* More reviews to come, I'm sure.

Adam Hochschild. NYT, 12/15/2021: A Landmark Reckoning With America’s Racial Past and Present. Review of: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman and Jake Silverstein, editors: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

*Correction: publication date Nov. 16.

Carlos Lozada. WaPo, 7/19/2021: The 1619 Project started as history. Now it’s also a political program..

Jake Silverstein. NYT Magazine, 11/02/2021: The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History.

The crisis of the humanities or maybe not:

Tess McNulty. Public Books, 11/15/2021: Mission Impossible. Review of: Eric Hayot: Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan -- Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age.

TLS November 19, 2021|No. 6190

Literature:

Mark Ford. Fiery sermons on the way to Concord: Emerson, Thoreau and the journey towards self-determination. Review of: Robert A. Gross: The Transcendentalists and their World.

Emily Copely. Here’s to you, Mrs Dalloway: Two annotated versions of the novel. Review of 2 annotated editions of the Woolf novel: Virginia Woolf, editor Anne Fernald: Mrs Dalloway (Norton Critical Edition) -- editor Merve Emre The Annotated Mrs Dalloway.

Sarah Lonsdale. Incendiary material: How writers responded to wartime destruction. Review of: Will Loxley: Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine.

Vanessa Curtis. Bloomsbury blooms: New light on oft-told stories of the Group. Review of: Martin Ferguson Smith: In and Out of Bloomsbury: Biographical essays on twentieth-century writers and artists.

Miranda France. Fruits of foreign investment: The devastating machinations of an American company. Review of: Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Adrian Nathan West: Harsh Times.

Beejay Silcox. Book of numbers: Dave Eggers’s satire: a data dystopia. Review of Dave Eggers: The Every.

Natasha Cooper. A womb of my own: The lifelong frustrations of Patricia Highsmith. Review of: Patricia Highsmith, Anna von Planta, editor: Patricia Highsmith: Her diaries and notebooks: 1941–1995.

Louis Amis. Intimate violence: A novel of a brutal father and brutalizing fatherland. Review of: Francisco Goldman: Monkey Boy.

Arts & Bibliography:

Keith Miller. Heavenly, stately, saintly: A personal, partial tour of architectural masterpieces. Review of: Simon Jenkins: Europe's 100 Best Cathedrals.

Colin Grant. On the edge of danger: Rebecca Hall’s new film: on the farce of racial difference. Review of the Netflix streaming film: Passing.

Peter Davidson. Haunted by shades of meaning: Nocturnal strolls in art and life. Review of: Susan Owens: The Lighted Window: Evening walks remembered.

In Brief Review of: Elina Gertsman: The Absent Image: Lacunae in medieval books.

Philosophy & Science:

Raymond Tallis. Critique of poor reason: Two celebrations of sound judgement. Review of: Steven Pinker: Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters -- A. C. Grayling: The Frontiers of Knowledge: What we now know about science, history and the mind.

Beronda L. Montgomery. Small but mighty: How the simplest of plants can impart wisdom to humans. Review of: Robin Wall Kimmerer: Gathering Moss: A natural and cultural history of mosses.

Jennie Erin Smith. I feel your plant pain: A charismatic environmental advocate on disputed ground. Review of: Peter Wohlleben, translated by Jane Billinghurst: The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing our ancient bond with forests and nature.

In Brief Review of: H. Glenn Penny: In Humboldt's Shadow: A tragic history of German ethnology.

History, Politics, & Society:

Peter Geoghegen. Lust for life immortal: The worlds of Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Review of: Max Chafkin: The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s pursuit of power -- Brad Stone: Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the invention of a global empire.

Amarnath Amarasingan. Beliefs, not grievances: A groundbreaking new analysis of global jihad. Review of: Jytte Klausen: Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History.

David French. The man and the myth: Two differing views of Winston Churchill. Review of: Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Churchill's Legacy: An astonishing life and a dangerous legacy -- Anthony Tucker-Jones: Churchill, Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at war 1895–1945.

Daniel Beer. Flags and bayonets: The doomed struggles of a colourful revolutionary. Review of: Vladimir Alexandrov: To Break Russia's Chains: Boris Savinkov and his wars against the tsar and the Bolsheviks.

Kathryn Hughes. Much about Little: An involving locked-room mystery from the Irish archives. Thomas Morris: The Dublin Railway Murder.

In Brief Review of: Derek J. Taylor: England from the Sidesaddle: The great journeys of Celia Fiennes. "Born in 1662, she belonged to a noble family that had lost much of its influence as a result of backing Cromwell in the Civil War. In her mid-thirties she embarked on two “great journeys” of England, armed only with a notebook, a side-saddle and a small retinue of servants. Her motivations can be surmised from her remark that travel was a “sovereign remedy to … these epidemic diseases of vapours – should I add laziness?” She never married and her journal was not published until 1888."

In Brief Review of: Ann Oakley: Forgotten Wives: How women get written out of history.

In Brief Review of: Alison Peck: The Accidental History of the US Immigration Courts: War, fear, and the roots of dysfunction.

In Brief Review of: Sonia Overall: Heavy Time: A psychogeographer’s pilgrimage.

"... Dauber, who teaches a course on graphic novels at Columbia University, has written a scholarly survey that is both opinionated and frequently funny."

Michael Tisserand. NYT, 11/17/2021: A Sweeping History of American Comics. Review of: Jeremy Dauber: American Comics: A History.

National Book Awards:

Elizabeth A. Harris. NYT, 11/17/2021: Jason Mott Wins National Book Award for ‘Hell of a Book.’

Hell in books:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 11/11/2021: Conquering Hell.

About my favorite literary critic of the moment:

Leah Price. Public Books, 11/18/2021: Public Thinker: Merve Emre Throws a Party for Different Readers.

Some recent postings from The Los Angeles Review of Books:

MG Vassanji. LARB, 11/18/2021:“A Stroke of Ink Drawn by the Departing Empire.”. Review of Suchitra Vijayan’: Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India.

Naomi Kanakia. LARB, 11/15/2021: The Myth of the Classically Educated Elite.

Taoyu Yang. LARB, 11/17/2021: Down to the Wire in Old Shanghai. Review of: James Carter: Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai.

David Palumbo-Liu. LARB, 11/17/2021: An Urgent New Book for the Time Being. Review of Ruth Ozeki: The Book of Form and Emptiness.

Two sets of recommendations from the fivebooks.com site:

Gavin Francis (author of: Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession, interviewer Cal Flyn. 11/17/2021: The best books on Islands. Francis & Flyn discuss: J.F. Webb & D.H. Farmer, editors: 'The Voyage of St. Brendan' in the Age of Bede -- Adam Nicolson: Sea Room -- Diana Souhami: Selkirk's Island -- Christiane Richter: A Woman in the Polar Night -- Judith Shalansky: Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will.

Blessing Musariri (author of: Only This Once Are You Immaculate, interviewer Sophie Roell. 11/12/2021: Best African Novels. Musariri & Roell discuss: Ben Okri: The Famished Road -- Aminatta Forna: The Memory of Love -- Biyi Bandele: Burma Boy -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun -- Yvonne Vera (editor): Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women's Writing.

Recent book reviews from The New Yorker:

Jill Lepore. 11/15/2021 (print: 11/22/2021): The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are.

Maggie Doherty. 11/15/2021 (print: 11/22/2021): The Hard Choices of Elizabeth Hardwick. Review of: Cathy Curtis: A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick.

Adam Gopnick. 11/15/2021 (print: 11/22/2021): The War Inside H. G. Wells.

Meghan O’Gieblyn. 11/08/2021 (print: 11/15/2021): Are There Hidden Advantages to Pain and Suffering?. Review of: Leigh Cowert: Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose -- Paul Bloom: The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

Ethnic identity & Asian-Americans.

Zoe Hu. JewishCurrents, 11/17/2021: Bad Education. Review of: Jay Caspian Kang: The Loneliest Americans.

Libraries & trustees in a politicized atmosphere:

Cass Balzer. American Libraries, 11/01/2021: A Conflict of Values: How to prevent clashes between trustees and librarianship tenets.

Recent Los Angeles Review of Books articles of note:

Elena Comay del Junco. LARB, 11/21/2021: Living in the World: Peter Brooks on Balzac. Review of: Peter Brooks: Balzac's Lives.

Colin Marshall. LARB, 11/21/2021: Born Middle-Aged: Eight Books on Steely Dan. Review of: Jez Rowden: Steely Dan: Every Album, Every Song -- Brian Sweet: Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years -- Barney Hoskyns: Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion -- Anthony Robustelli: Steely Dan FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About This Elusive Band -- Don Breithaupt: AJA -- Donald Fagen: Eminent Hipsters -- Brian Thornton, editor: A Beast Without a Name and Die Behind the Wheel.

Sam Jaffe Goldstein. LARB, 11/22/2021: A Millennial’s Purgatory. Review of: Joy Williams: Harrow.

Austin Allen. LARB, 11/23/2021: Hard Line Politics: On the Myth of Free Verse.

Communist China & Texas converge:

Andrew Solomon. NYT, 11/23/2021: My Book Was Censored in China. Now It’s Blacklisted — in Texas. The book is: Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Long but quite absorbing).

Related:

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 11/25/2021: US libraries report spike in organised attempts to ban books in schools.

Nicole Asbury. WaPo, 11/24/2021: ODU professor steps down after firestorm over research into ‘minor-attracted people’.

How Richard Rorty gave up on philosophy:

George Scialabba. Commonweal, 11/23/2021: Should Philosophy Retire?

A response to left antagonism toward the concept of genetic influences on behavior:

Jerry A. Coyne. WaPo, 11/19/2021: Can genetics help eliminate inequality? Review of: Kathryn Page Harden: The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.

Another review of the new Elizabeth Hardwick biography:

Christian Lorentzen. Bookforum, 4th quarter 2021: Hardwick Times: The life of an essential writer. Review of: Cathy Curtis: A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick.

TLS November 26, 2021|No. 6191

Books of the Year 2021: Our contributors select their favourite books of 2021.

Literature:

Lara Feigel. Must all come to dust?: The hidden costs of ‘Sebaldian’ life-writing. Review of: Carole Angier: Speak Silence: In search of W. G. Sebald.

Bahrat Tandon. Look up, stranger: The surprising modernity of a classic Wessex novel. Review of: Thomas Hardy, edited by Tim Dolin: The Return of the Native.

Richard Lea. Uneasy settlement: A portrait of lives under colonial oppression. Review of: Gayl Jones: Palmares.

Ben Bollig. Inhuman zoo" A tribute to forgotten victims. Carlos Gamerro: La Jaula de los Anos. A novel about "the Selk′nam, an indigenous people from the southern tip of the Americas, displayed as anthropophagi to shocked crowds at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle." (Something similar done at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, if I recall)

Alev Scott. Out of Ottoman rubble: A Turkish classic starring an ‘anti-Madame Bovary.’ Review of: Suat Derviş, translation by Maureen Feely: In the Shadow of the Yali.

In Brief Review of: Jake Poller: Aldous Huxley.

Arts:

Adam Mars-Jones. Taking you places: Cigarettes and a Saab: a new film based on Haruki Murakami’s fiction. Review of a film by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi: Drive My Car, based on 2 short stories by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car and Scheherazade.

Anna Picard. The human factor: A new production that brings Wagner’s gods and heroes down to earth. Review of a new production by the English National Opera of Richard Wagner's The Valkyrie.

In Brief Review of: Nancy Ireson, editor: Suzanne Valadon: Model, painter, rebel.

Popular Culture:

In Brief Review of: Judith Levin: Soda and Fizzy Drinks: A Global History.

In Brief Review of: Don Stradley: The War: Hagler–Hearns and three rounds for the ages.

Philosophy:

Jessie Munton. Somewhere over the borderline: Representation, consciousness and cake. Review of: David Papineau: The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience -- Michael Tye: Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the looking glass.

In Brief Review of: Armand d’Angour: How to Innovate: An Ancient guide to creative thinking.

History, Politics, and Society:

David Pitofsky. From rust to robots
Why governments shouldn’t play the role of venture capitalists. Lawrence Tabak: Foxconned: Imaginary jobs, bulldozed homes, and the sacking of local government.

Michael Lapointe. System failures: How ‘low-status’ work harms the workers. Eyal Press: Dirty Work: Essential jobs and the hidden toll of inequality in America.

Jonathan Sperber. Empire without nation: New encounters with the Second Reich on the road to democracy. Review of: Oliver Haardt: Bismarcks ewiger Bund: Eine neue Geschichte des Deutschen Kaiserreichs -- Katja Hoyer: Blood and Iron: The rise and fall of the German Empire 1871–1918 -- Hermann Hiery: Deutschland als Kaiserreich" Der Staat Bismarcks – Ein Überblick -- Hedwig Richter: Demokratie: Eine deutsche Affäre.

Wow! Never thought it would get finished!

Siri Hustvedt. NYT, 11/20/2021: Fourth Time Around: The Final Volume of John Richardson’s Biography of Picasso. Review of: John Richardson, with the collaboration of Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga: A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943.

Recent book reviews from The New Yorker:

Max Norman. 11/20/2021: W. G. Sebald, the Trickster. Review of Carole Angier: Speak Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald.

Joan Acocella. 11/22/2021: How the Rosetta Stone Yielded Its Secrets. Review of: Edward Dolnick: The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone.

Carlos Lozada. 11/22/2021: The Cost of Sentimentalizing War. Review of: Elizabeth D. Samet: Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.

Jonathan Blitzer. 11/24/2021: Mario Vargas Llosa Returns to the Dictator Novel. Review of: Llosa's novel Harsh Times.

Two recent interviews/lists from fivebooks.com:

Maria Tatar, interviewed by Eve Gerber. 11/21/2021: Talismanic Tomes. Tartar's talismanic books are: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- The Magic Mountain -- The Bloody Chamber and other stories -- Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, not H.G. Wells) -- Middlemarch. She also talks about her latest book The Heroine with 1001 Faces & cover images of her other books are listed at the end of the interview.

Neil Gaiman, interviewed by Eve Gerber. 11/2021(?). Comfort Reads. Books discussed (some of these may not be so well known as Tatar's list): William Goldman: The Princess Bride -- Caryl Brahms & SJ Simon: No Bed for Bacon: Or Shakespeare Sows an Oat -- PG Wodehouse: Psmith -- Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Diana Wynne Jones: Archer's Goon. As with Maria Tatar, images from the covers of Gaiman's books are listed at the end of the interview.

Two collective feminist memoirs:

Megan Stephan. Public Books, 11/24/2021: Brilliant Together: On Feminist Memoirs. Review of: Nancy K. Miller: My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism -- Honor Moore: Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury.

And a collective biography of forgotten women immigrants who introduced the food of their origins:

Hetty McKinnon. NYT, 11/16/2021: Seven Immigrant Women Who Changed the Way Americans Eat. Review of: Mayukh Sen: Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.

Recent reviews from The New York Review of Books (12/16/2021):

Nathaniel Rich. Exhilarating Antihumanism. Review of: Joy Williams: Harrow.

Marina. Howl. Review of: Daniel Ogden: The Werewolf in the Ancient World.

Tim Flannery. Flies Like Us. Review of: Jonathan Balcombe: Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects.

David S. Reynolds. He Was No Moses. Review of: Robert S. Levine: The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson -- Brenda Wineapple: The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.

Dan Chiasson. Frost at Midnight. Review of: Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson, Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore: The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936.

Robert Pogue Harrison. Labors of Love. Review of: Dante Alighieri, translated from the Italian and with an introduction and notes by Mary Jo Bang: Purgatorio -- Dante Alighieri, translated from the Italian and with commentary by D.M. Black, with a preface by Robert Pogue Harrison: Purgatorio -- Editors by Nick Havely with Bernard O’Donoghue: After Dante: Poets in Purgatory: Translations by Contemporary Poets -- Rachel Owen, edited by David Bowe: Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno.

Kwame Anthony Appiah. Digging for Utopia. Review of: David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

.

Recent reviews from The Los Angeles Review of Books (11/26/2021).

Olivia Gerber. 11/26/2021: Say the Word. Review of: Amanda Montell: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism.

Brian Attebury. 11/27/2021: Review of David M. Higgins: Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood.

Woke as religion:

Daniel Gullotta. The Critic, 11/07/2021: Opiate for the leftists. Review of: John McWhorter: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

TLS December 3, 2021|No. 6192

Literature:

Andrew Hadfield. Theatre of blood: What conflict means in Shakespeare’s plays." Review of: Islam Issa: Shakespeare and Terrorism -- David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, editors: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War.

Emma Smith. Fearing our nature: What do Shakespeare and empathy have in common? Review of: Paula Marantz Cohen: Of Human Kind: What Shakespeare teaches us about empathy.

Margaret Drabble. A lovely bunch of rhizomes: Cut flowers and the scent of exploitation. Review of: Rebecca Solnit: Orwell's Roses.

Alison Kelly. Thereby hangs a tale: ‘Warm, confiding’ essays guided by self-reflection. Review of: Ann Patchett: These Precious Days.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams. All things gaze themselves: Striking similarities in two ‘country house’ poems – one English, one Dutch. (Essay comparing Andrew Marvell's & Constantijn Huygens's garden poems)

Nat Segnitt. Life of the mind: The free-associative ruminations of a veteran writer in Menorca. Review of: Cees Nooteboom, Translated by Laura Watkinson: 533: A Book of Days.

André Naffis-Sahely. We miss you every day: Poetry pamphlets and the Michael Marks awards in 2021. (Essay)

Carolyne Larrington. Master of glamourie: A remarkable new fable captures a lifetime’s work. Review of: Alan Garner: Treacle Walker -- Erica Wagner, editor: First Light: A celebration of Alan Garner.

In Brief Review of: Gabriel Josipovici: 100 Days. (Essay collection)

Arts:

Ferdinand Mount. Leading the eye a chase: The principles of William Hogarth’s art. Review of: Alice Insley and Martin Myrone, editors: Hogarth and Europe (and the exhibition of the same name at Tate Britain) -- Jacqueline Riding: Hogarth: Life in Progress.

Stephen Brown. Tease, bare soul, dazzle: Backstage with Mozart, the master of the classical style. Review of: Patrick Mackie: Mozart in Motion: His work and his world in pieces.

Muriel Zagha. From resistance to rebellion: Moral reckoning in the postwar films of Jean-Pierre Melville. Andrew Dickos: Honor Among Thieves: The cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville.

Ian Thomson. Blood on the knife: Leonardo Sciascia’s reflections on – and contribution to – cinema. Review of: Leonardo Sciascia; Paolo Squillacioti and Vito Catalano, editors: Questo non e un Racconto: Scritti per il cinema e sul cinema.

Philosophy:

Tom Whyman. To thine own self be true: How should philosophers think about life stories? Helena De Bres: Artful Truths: The philosophy of memoir.

History:

Richard Overy. The real Blitz spirit: How London society coped with wartime bombing. Review of: Jerry White: The Battle of London, 1939-45: Endurance, heroism and frailty under fire.

Richard Davenport-Hines. All ears: How the British monarchy has interacted with its secret services. Review of: Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac: The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana -- Christopher Andrew and Julius Green: Stars and Spies: Intelligence operations and the entertainment business.

Bryan Karetnyk. Twice damned by terror: Soviet slave labourers in the Third Reich, and afterwards. Review of: Memorial International, Translated by Georgia Thomson: OST: Letters, memoirs and stories from.

Politics & Society:

Kasia Body. Full-blooded blooms: The symbolic appeal of the ‘flower of martyrs.’ Review of: Simon Morley: By Any Other Name: A cultural history of the rose.

Jane Darcy. Mineral miracles: Where, and why, we learnt to take the waters. Review of: Melanie King: The Secret History of the English Spas -- Ian Bradley: Health, Hedonism, and Hypochondria: The hidden history of spas.

Kathryn Hughes. You do not need new socks: The respectable origins of highly effective bestsellers. Review of: Anna Katharina Schaffner: The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten timeless truths.

Arianne Chernock. Lust and stardust: Looking back on ten years of permissiveness. Peter Doggett: Growing Up: Sex in the Sixties.

Judith Flanders. Never knowingly very nice: Psychodrama and retail on Oxford Street. Victoria Glendinning: Family Business: An intimate history of John Lewis and the Partnership.

Guardian best books of 2021, chosen by authors who've also had books published this year:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/05/the-best-books-of-2021-chosen-by-o...

Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Klara and the Sun:
Mariana Enriquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Jonathan Calvert & George Arbuthnott, Failures of State
Jeremy Farrar, Spike: The Virus v The People - the inside story

Bernardine Evaristo, author of Manifesto: On Never Giving Up:
Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
Kehinde Andrews, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World
Corinne Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections

Damon Galgut, author of The Promise:
Sarah Hall, Burntcoat
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

Wole Soyinka, author of Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth:
Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician:
Hugo Hamilton, The Pages
Patrick Joyce, Going to My Father’s House
John McAuliffe, Selected Poems

Rachel Kushner, author of The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020:
Dennis Cooper, I Wished
Wolfgang Hilbig (trans. Isabel Fargo Cole), The Interim

Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees:
Anita Sethi, I Belong Here
Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

Sarah Hall, author of Burntcoat:
Tabitha Lasley, Sea State
Rachel Ingalls, Mrs Caliban

Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss:
Rachel Cusk, Second Place
Natasha Brown, Assembly
Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water:
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
Vanessa Onwuemezi, Dark Neighbourhood

Lauren Groff, author of Matrix:
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell

Chibundu Onuzo, author of Sankofa:
Otegha Uwagba, We Need to Talk About Money
Scholastique Mukasonga, Our Lady of the Nile

Well, that's about half way through.

There's also lists of best books of 2021 for:
art, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/05/the-best-art-books-of-2021
photography, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/05/the-best-photography-books-of-2021...
graphic novels, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/05/the-best-graphic-novels-of-2021
biographies and memoirs, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/04/best-biographies-and-memoirs-of-20...
fiction, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/04/best-fiction-of-2021
food, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/03/the-best-food-books-of-2021
science fiction and fantasy, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/03/five-of-the-best-science-fiction-a...
politics, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/02/the-best-politics-books-of-2021

Oh yes. And an article asking "Where's the list for romantic fiction / 'women’s commercial fiction'?"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/05/womens-commercial-fiction-...

>64 Cynfelyn: Thanks Cynfelyn!

Hard to believe 2021 is drawing to an end. Another 2021 list, a list of lists from fivebooks.com:

The best books of 2021.

Another best books list of lists, organized by year:

NYT Book Review, 12/2021: The 10 Best Books Through Time. Goes back year by year to 2004.

On the website The Millions, many authors contribute to the site's A Year in Reading, i.e. what various authors & critics say they read in 2021.

Articles from the recent Los Angeles Review of books:

Summer Kim Lee. LARB, 12/07/2021: Learning in Being Lonely. Review of: Jay Caspian Kang: The Loneliest Americans.

Brooke Clark. LARB, 12/07/2021: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History as Revenge Fantasy. "Is Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, actually an incredibly elaborate and sophisticated burn book — an act of literary revenge against those she felt disrespected her in college?"

Aaron Poochigian. LARB, 12/07/2021: The Challenge of Baudelaire at 200. (The problems with translating Baudelaire)

Got a subscription to the Chronicle last month in order to get thru the paywall to read some of the literary/bibliographic articles. This article concerns a 17th century Jesuit editor who convinced himself that Confessions of St. Augustine & The City of God were forgeries. He believed that "medieval thinkers had invented all that ancient and early Christian work to give themselves a backstory for their heretical imaginings." He went on to Virgil's Aeneid.

Christopher S. Celenza. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/03/2021: A Descent Into Textual Paranoia: What book history can tell us about the lunacies of the present.

On that note, see also an earlier article from the same journal:

Mark Dery. COHE, 05/12/2021: The Professor of Paranoia. "Mark Crispin Miller, who is suing his colleagues, used to study conspiracy theories. Now he pushes them."

What are the implications when you don't have a "normal" face:

Sharronna Pearl. Public Books, 12/07/2021: Thy Face Tomorrow. Review of: Sara Ruhl: Smile: The Story of a Face.

How progressives can benefit from studying the classics:

Liza Featherstone. The Jacobin, 12/07/2021: The Left Should Defend Classical Education. Review of Roosevelt Montás: Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.

New book reviews from The New Yorker:

Jerome Groopman. 11/29/2021: Understanding the Body Electric. Review of: Timothy J. Jorgensen: Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life. (Don't know why the New Yorker doesn't include the subtitle of the book under review)

Pankaj Mishra. 11/29/2021: Frantz Fanon’s Enduring Legacy. Fanon was the author of The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.

Margaret Talbot. 12/06/2021: What Was So Special About Greta Garbo? Review of: Robert Gottlieb: Garbo.

Casey Cep. 12/06/2021: Should We Believe the Stories of Men Mistaken for Gods?. Review of: Anna Della Subin: Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine.

In the context of the rise of xenophobia in France, the reviewer considers a new history of the topic by a psychiatrist (as was Fanon in the previous posting):

Zaid Jilani. Quillette, 12/08/2021: George Makari's ‘Of Fear and Strangers’—A Review.

TLS December 10, 2021|No. 6193

Literature:

J.S. Barnes. World of marvels: The soaring rise of the superhero: ‘the comic book’s big bang moment.’ Review of: Jeremy Dauber: American Comics: A History -- Douglas Wolk: All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told. Also the film Eternals and the streaming series Hawkeye.

Francesca Wade. No no no, nonsense, never: Hidden notebooks reveal the tense relationships behind Gertrude Stein’s genius. (Essay)

Emma Smith. A woman’s weapons: King Lear’s wife is resurrected as his chilling alter ego. Review of a novel by J.R. Thorp: Learwife.

Arts:

Carol Rumens. Fixing a whole: A lifetime’s work in songwriting. Review of Paul McCartney, edited by Paul Muldoon: The Lyrics, 1956 to the Present.

Adam Mars-Jones. Star-cross’d at the crossroads: Steven Spielberg’s new version of a twentieth-century classic. (Essay on the Steven Spielberg film West Side Story, comparing it to the Robert Wise production of 1961)

Holly Williams. Two Heddas are better: The later years of the Guardian’s lead theatre critic. Review of: Michael Billington: Affair of the Heart.

Wesley Stace. I saw a film today, oh boy: The myths, the truths and the music behind the Beatles’ final live appearance. Review of the streaming doc. by Peter Jackson: The Beatles: Get Back.

Gretchen Gerzina. Soil on our hands: How artists are reframing the history of country estates. Review of: Corinne Fowler: Green Unpleasant Land: Creative responses to rural England’s colonial connections.

Science & Technology:

Audrey Borowski. Networks of extraction: Is there a rat in the pipeline? Review of: Thomas S. Mullaney et al, editors: Your Computer is on Fire and Kate Crawford: Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence.

Niall Ferguson. Bad moves across the board: The pitiless logic of a war fought by AI. Review of: Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher: The Age of AI and Our Human Future.

Richard Dunn. Across heaven’s ramparts: The launch of the new space telescope in historical perspective. (Essay)

History, Politics & Society

Matthew Denison. Bitter fruits of a sweet investment: Two case studies in the brutal history of Caribbean exploitation. Review of: Alex Renton: Blood Legach: Reckoning with a family’s story of slavery and Richard Atkinson: Mr. Atkinson's Rum Contract: The story of a tangled inheritance.

Jan Machielsen. With suspicious minds: Hellish marriages and the witch craze in the seventeenth century. Review of: Malcolm Gaskill: The Ruin of All Witches: Life and death in the New World -- John Callow: The Last Witches of England: A tragedy of sorcery and superstition.

Lucy Wooding. Reform, wrath and ruin: The devastating end of Tudor monasticism. Review of: James G. Clark: The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History.

Peter Marshall. On the claustral range: What happened to the buildings that survived the Dissolution?. Review of: Jane Whitaker: Raised from the Ruins: Monastic houses after the Dissolution.

Sara Wheeler. Water under the old bridge: A ruminative portrait of rural Sweden. Marit Kapla, translated by Peter Graves: Osebol: Voices from a Swedish village.

In Brief Review of: Chelsea Wald: Pipe Dreams: The urgent global quest to transform the toilet.

Literary Review Dec. reviews that don't appear to be paywalled:

Emma Garman. Journal of the Plague Years. Review of: Hanya Yanagihara: To Paradise.

PS: Publication date of To Paradise is Jan. 11, 2022 in U.S.

Seamus Perry. Into That Good Night. Review of: Peter Davidson: The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered.

Joanna Kavenna. Have You Considered Accountancy? Review of: Wisława Szymborska (Edited and translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh): How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers.

Stahthis N. Kalyvas. Freedom or Death! Review of: Mark Mazower: The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe.

Cervantes, Don Quixote, and Islam:

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. Public Books, 12/08/2021: Did Don Quixote Long for Muslim Spain?

"The ambitious Times endeavor, now in book form, reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past."

Lauren Michele Jackson. The New Yorker, 12/08/2021: The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History. Review of: Nikole Hannah Jones et al.: The 1619 Project.

Some December articles from LARB:

Tom Zoellner. LARB, Dec. 5, 2021: A State of Unwholesome Fermentation. Review of William J. Bernstein: The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups.

Ryan Boyd. LARB, Dec. 5, 2021: Toward a Non-Dogmatic Pedagogy. Review of: Susan D. Blum: Upgrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)

Ted Scheinman. LARB, Dec. 9, 2021: The Wrath of the Gods: Surviving the Pandemic with Petronius, Fitzgerald, and Eliot.

Association item for the Scheinman article (should have been in Q3):

Frederic Raphael. The Critic, 06/2021: Cheeky blinder. Review of: Catullus, translator Isobel Williams: Shibari Carmina.

"Why John Rawls and A Theory of Justice still matter today."

Dylan Matthews. Vox, 12/09/2021: The most influential work of political philosophy in the last 50 years, briefly explained.

From the Dec/Jan/Feb issue of Bookforum:

Get Lit: Writers on their favorite books of 2021.

Sasha Frere Jones. Mask and You Shall Receive: Fernando Pessoa’s invented community of writers. Review of: Richard Zenith: Pessoa: A Biography.

Rebecca Panovka. A Spouse Divided: Two new biographies delve into Dostoyevsky’s relationship with his long-suffering wife." Review of: Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece -- Andrew D. Kaufman: The Gambler Wife.

Melissa Anderson. Primrose Pat: The private writings of Patricia Highsmith. Review of: Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1945-1995, edited by Anna Von Planta.

Literary Gossip! (with more to come):

LitHub, 12/09/2021: The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 50 to 31.

LitHub, 12/20/2021: The 10 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year.

So what happened to 30-39?

Way darker than >80 featherbear:

Lily Dunn. Aeon, 12/09/2021: Idealising the predator.

"How did certain French intellectuals get away with preying upon young girls, shamelessly, in public and over decades?"

Allan Sloane. WaPo, 12/10/2021: Bookstores are dying. Barnes & Noble’s pricing policy may help explain why.

Recommendations on recent economics books accessible to the layman, British perspective:

Diane Coyle, interviewer Benedict King. fivebooks.com, 12/10/2021:The Best Economics Books of 2021.

The Declaration of Independence, annotated with links to free scholarly papers:

Liz Tracy. JSTOR Daily, 12/09/2021:The Declaration of Independence: Annotated.

Also from JSTOR Daily, on monsters in fictions (& religion):

Cody Delistray. JSTOR, 12/08/2021: What If We’ve Been Misunderstanding Monsters?

Recent New Yorker reviews of or articles on books:

Louis Menand. 12/13/2021 (print: 12/20): What’s So Great About Great-Books Courses?. Review of: Roosevelt Montás: Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation and Arnold Weinstein: The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing.

Masha Gessen. 12/13/2021: The Russian Novel That Foresaw—but Underestimated—Totalitarianism. On Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.

Rebecca Panovka. 12/09/2021: The Tragic Misfit Behind Harriet the Spy. Review of: Leslie Brody: Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy.

Politics, culture, & writers:

Josh Gabert-Doyon. The Baffler, 11/29/2021: The Tyranny of the Task. Review of: Phil Jones: Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism.

Tom Stevenson. The Baffler, 12/07/2021: Spoiling for a Fight. Review of: Elbridge A. Colby: The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict.

Rafia Zakaria. The Baffler, 12/13/2021: In Sickness and in Wealth. Review of: Ross Douthat: The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery

Kevin Mims. Quillette, 12/11/2021: Dominick Dunne, Writer of Wrongs.

David Cohen. Quillette, 12/10/2021: The Eyes Have It. On Ayn Rand.

Liesl Schwabe. LARB, 12/12/2021: A Portrait and a Mirror. Review of: Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane: To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism.

I think of Morris primarily as an author, but a strong case can be made for him as a designer:

Cath Pound. BBC Culture, 11/29/2021: Why we still love original anti-minimalist William Morris.

A late addition, an obituary for an author (best known for Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy) & specialist on African culture:

Holland Cotter. NYT, 12/12/2021: Robert Farris Thompson, ‘Guerrilla Scholar’ of African Art, Dies at 88.

In part to promote an HBO Max mini-series on the post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven:

Adrienne Westenfeld. Esquire, 12/13/2021: Emily St. John Mandel Is Nobody’s Prophet.

"... I tried “distraction-free” writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die)."

Julian Lucas. The New Yorker, 12/13/2021; print 12/20/2021: Can “Distraction-Free” Devices Change the Way We Write?.

Harrison Smith. WaPo, 12/15/2021: Bell Hooks, trailblazing Black feminist and social critic, dies at 69.

Clay Risen. NYT, 12/15/2021: bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69.

Lucy Knight. The Guardian, 12/15/2021: bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69.

Shannita Hubbard. The Guardian, 12/16/2021: As we grieve bell hooks, let’s remember all that she taught us.

Reni Eddo-Lodge, et al. The Guardian, 12/16/2021: bell hooks remembered: ‘She embodied everything I wanted to be.’

"Anthony Broadwater was exonerated in the 1981 rape of Ms. Sebold, now a best-selling author. When his lawyers saw the trial transcript, they could only wonder what took so long."

Corina Knoll, Karen Zraick and Alexandra Alter. NYT Magazine, 12/15/2021:He Was Convicted of Raping Alice Sebold. Then the Case Unraveled."

TLS December 17, 2021|No. 6194:

Literature:

Michael Lipkin. A non-political Mann?: The novelist’s illiberal wartime thoughts. Review of: Thomas Mann, translated from the German by Walter D. Morris and others: Reflections of a Non-Political Man -- Herbert Lehnert: Thomas Mann. Die Fruhen Jahre: Eine Biographie.

Heather Webb. But for the grace of God: A great poet’s life between the lines of the historical record. Review of: Alessandro Barbero, translated by Allan Cameron: Dante.

Sally Read. Rhapsody of a secret chord: A passionate response to the Commedia’s thirst for Vision. Review of: Ned Denny: B: After Dante.

Dinah Birch. A world fed from below: A book about books and Indigenous lives. Review of: Louise Erdrich: The Sentence.

Theo Zenou. An artist of life: Late works from a neglected master of the ‘cutting edge.’ Review of: Clarence Major: The Lurking Place & Thunderclouds in the Forecast

Arts:

Ruth Scurr. This is not Painting, this is magic: How Bonaparte acquired an Italian masterpiece. Cynthia Saltzman: Napoleon's Plunder: And the theft of Veronese’s ‘Feast’.

Philosophy & Theology:

Audrey Borowski. Pure possibility: A German philosopher gets an anglophone audience at last. Review of: Hans Blumenberg. Edited and translated by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs and Joe Paul Kroll: History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg reader.

Jonathan Rée. Spinning Spinoza: The ‘radical’ versus the ‘moderate’ Enlightenment. Review of: Jonathan I. Israel: Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx: The fight for a secular world of universal and equal rights.

Catherine Conybeare & Simon Goldhill. ‘Look at this guy’: The necessary challenges of translating the Bible afresh. Review of: Sarah Ruden, translator: The Gospels -- Simon Gathercole, translator and editor: The Apocryphal Gospels.

Science & Technology:

Philip Bell. Servant or master?: Mankind’s relationship to the car. Tom Standage: A Brief History of Motion: From the wheel, to the car, to what comes next.

History:

John Banville. Everybody knew: Fintan O’Toole’s ‘masterpiece’ about a country that turned a blind eye to its own cruelties. Review of: Fintan O’Toole: We Don't Know Ourselves: A personal history of Ireland since 1958.

Colin Jones. Birth of a radical lawyer: How the Revolution made an authentic sans-culotte. Review of: Timothy Tackett: The Glory and the Sorrow.

Lauro Martines. Brocades and bloody deeds: The dark side of the most famous of Renaissance patrons. Review of: Jane Stevenson: The Light of Italy: The life and times of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.

Politics & Society:

Lawrence Douglas. No farewell to arms: The grey areas between war and peace. Review of: Samuel Moyn: Humane: How the United States abandoned peace and reinvented war.

Patricia Craig. Mourning becomes eclectic: Rituals old and new on the Irish mortuary trail. Review of: Ann Marie Hourihane: Sorry For Your Trouble: The Irish way of death.

Lindsey Hilsum. War in the Sahel: How climate change is driving jihadism. (Essay)

Miscellaneous:

In Brief Review of: William Germano: On Revision: The only writing that counts.

Hunter Dukes. A vision, or a waking dream?: The nightingale in history. Review of: Sam Lee: The Nightingale -- Bethan Roberts: Nightingale.

Articles from LARB:

Maria Bloshteyn. LARB, Dec. 10, 2021: Filling the Gaps: Soviet Life in Battle and on the Home Front in World War II. Review of: Brandon M Schechter: The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects -- Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer: Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front During World War II.

Dylan Brown. LARB, Dec. 14, 2021: Inching Toward His Due: On Two New Translations of Kleist. Review of: Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Matthew Spencer: Anecdotes -- Kleist, translator Michael J. Hofmann: Michael Kohlhaas.

A book review I overlooked:

Bryony Lau. The Baffler, Dec. 14, 2021: Southeast Asia’s Forgotten Revolutionaries: On transnational futures that never came to pass. Review of: John T. Sidel: Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia -- Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz: Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887–1912 -- Taomo Zhou: Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War.

Two recent article-reviews from Public Books:

Patrick Fessenbecker. 12/14/2021: Do the Humanities Need Experts or Skeptics?. Review of: Michael W. Clune: A Defense of Judgment and Dominic McIver Lopes: Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value.

Alf Gunvald Nilsen. 12/15/2021: Hindu Nationalism: A Movement, Not a Mandate. Review of: Christophe Jaffrelot, translated from the French by Cynthia Schoch: Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy.

Daniel Dennett on Richard Rorty:

Daniel C. Dennett. Philosophy Now, (current issue): Review of: Richard Rorty: On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished papers, 1960-2000.

Two from LARB:

Janine Barchas. LARB, 12/16/2021: Jane Austen, the Artful Tax Dodger.

Robert Minto. LARB, 12/16/2021: “Only Lovers Live in the Present”: On the Notebooks of Patricia Highsmith. Review of: Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941–1995 edited by Anna von Planta.

Military fiction with footnotes:

Peter Matthews. Dirt, 12/14/2021: Dirt: Useful fiction. Review of: August Cole and Peter W Singer: Ghost Fleet – A Novel of the Next World War and Burn In – A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution.

"“Useful Fiction” or “Fictional Intelligence.” The innovation of this technique is to combine fiction writing and near-future technology. The role of the writer in this setup is technocratic. Their job is to collect the “data” and package it in a form which will allow it to be received most effectively."

Another end of year "best" list:

Molly Odintz. crimereads.com, 09/16/2021: The best international crime novels of 2021.

Book porn; Kindle deal today, $1.99. Downloaded yesterday evening:

Jane Mount. Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany.

Probably best on a tablet w/Kindle app, since many maybe mostly color ill.

NYT, 12/15/2021: Times Critics’ Top Books of 2021. Also, additional suggestions from the comments section.

Ed Simon. Public Books, 12/17/2021: Tending Orwell's Garden. Review of: Rebecca Solnit: Orwell's Roses.

Richard Hughes Gibson. Hedgehog Review, Fall 2021: The Critic’s Critic: George Steiner and the art of hopeful failure.

Two by Marco Roth (the same person presumably); recently appointed critic-at-large at Tablet):

Marco Roth. N+1, 11/18/2021: On Sylvère Lotringer (1938–2021).

Marco Roth. Tablet, 12/15/2021: The Accidental Murderer. "Donald Antrim’s ‘One Friday in April’ gratefully embraces the medicalization of suicide."

Zareer Masani. History Today, 12/12/2021: Half a Life: The remarkable adolescence of the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Review of: Amartya Sen: Home in the World: A Memoir.

Two obits & a pic. gallery from The Guardian:

Associated Press, 12/20/2021:Eve Babitz, chronicler of 1960s and 70s Hollywood excess, dies aged 78. Chronicler of Hollywood (broadly defined) in the 70s, author of: Eve's Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, and Sex and Rage.

Oliver Wainwright. 12/19/2021:Lord Rogers of Riverside obituary. Books about Rogers include: Jeremy Melvin: Richard Rogers: Inside Out, Ken Powell: Richard Rogers: Complete Works, Deyan Sudjic: The Architecture of Richard Rogers, etc. "Richard George Rogers, Lord Rogers of Riverside, architect, born 23 July 1933; died 18 December 2021."

Oliver Wainwright. 12/19/2021: Eternal innovator: Richard Rogers' 10 best buildings – in pictures.

TLS December 24 / 31, 2021|No. 6195/6

Literature, Bibliography, & Arts:

Anne Rowe. ‘Not a dream but a vision’: What Christmas meant to Iris Murdoch. (Essay)

Boris Dralyuk. Give the people people: Chekhov’s commitment to hard-won dignity. Review of: Michael C. Finke: Freedom From Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s life and writings and Donald Rayfield: Anton Chekhov: A life.

Douglas Field. Freedom to blaze: The life, loves and jagged poetry of a Beat queen. Review of: Diane di Prima: Spring and Autumn Annals: A celebration of the seasons for Freddie -- Diane di Prima: Revolutionary Letters.

Cassie Miura. Get unhappy: The first brilliant diagnosis of a intractable disease. Review of: Mary Ann Lund: A User's Guide to Melancholy -- Robert Burton, Edited by Angus Gowland: The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Lamorna Ash. Twelve days to rule the air: An eco-novelist in his element. Review of: George R. Stewart: Storm.

Alison Kelly. All change: Flux and evolution in forty years of storytelling. Penelope Lively: Metamorphosis: Selected Stories.

Becca Rothfeld. Reflections on exile: The intimate estrangement of Anna Seghers. Review of: Anna Seghers, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo: The Dead Girls' Class Trip: Selected Stories.

Stephen Romer. Proofs of passion: Baudelaire’s inner and outer worlds on display. Review of the exhibition Baudelaire: La modernité mélancolique at Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Larry Wolff. Opera buffet: How food and drink set the stage for musical drama. Review of: Pierpaolo Polzonetti: Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance banquets to the Callas diet.

David Horspool. Spirits of the age: Dickens’s Christmas classic – without Scrooge. Review of the play Cratchit by Alexander Knott.

Jeff Koehler. After Proust: How Yves Saint Laurent fashioned his life on Proust. (Essay)

In Brief Review of: Lucy Razzall: Boxes and Books in Early Modern England: Materiality, metaphor, containment.

In Brief Review of: Kevin J. Hayes: How D. H. Lawrence Read Herman Melville.

Psychology:

M.M. Owen. Mind the gap: A neuropsychologist and his private patients. Review of: A.K. Benjamin: The Case for Love: My adventures in other minds.

History, Culture, & Travel:

David Armitage. An inhuman custom: An archival discovery reveals what the young George III thought of slavery. (Essay)

Mary Fulbrook. Peace with dishonour: Two portraits of life after Hitler in a divided country. Review of: Volker Ullrich, translated by Jefferson Chase: Eight Days in May: How Germany’s war ended -- Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside: Aftermath: Life in the fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955.

Judith Hawley. Booze as muse: Right and wrong when it comes to the hard stuff. Review of: Billy Abbott, edited by David Wondrich and Noah Rothbaum: The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails -- Billy Abbott: The Philosophy of Whisky -- Patrick Mahé: Rare Whisky: Explore the world’s most exquisite spirits -- Tara Richardson: The Gin-Drinker's Year: Drinking and other things to do with gin; day by day, season by season -- Shanna Farrell: A Good Drink: In pursuit of sustainable spirits.

Philip Mansel. From the East, but not of it: Mixed cities and hybrid characters in Palestine and Egypt. Review of: Michael Vatikiotis: Lives Between the Lines: A journey in search of the lost Levant.

In Brief Review of: Robert Martineau: Waypoints: A Journey on Foot. ("a thousand miles through Ghana and Togo to Ouidah on the Beninese coast.").

In Brief Review of: Michael Knox Beran: WASPS: The splendors and miseries of an American aristocracy.

Greece:

Mary Beard. What has Pandora still got in her jar?: The enduring lessons of a Classical respect for nature. Review of: Peter Fiennes: A Thing of Beauty: Travels in mythical and modern Greece.

Johanna Hanick. Speak, Hellenic memory: Greece’s historic quest for a global identity. Review of: Roderick Beaton: The Greeks: A Global History.

"This fall semester, Camus’s essay was among several works I taught in my French existentialism class. Time and again, I asked myself if I was chained to an absurd task. How could it not be, if students themselves feel that reading and studying are not worth doing?"

Robert Zaretsky. The Baffler, 12/21/2021: Burdened by Books.

William Grimes. NYT, 12/23/2021: Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87.

"Unsparing observer of national politics and her own life, she won enormous acclaim for her memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking":

Sian Cain & Edward Helmore. The Guardian, 12/23/2021: Joan Didion, American journalist and author, dies at age 87.

A review of The Year of Magical Thinking from 2011: New York, 10/14/2011:‘I Was No Longer Afraid to Die. I Was Now Afraid Not to Die.’

Critical Good War Theory:

Ben Rhodes. NYT, 12/01/2021: Has the Myth of the ‘Good War’ Done Us Lasting Harm?. Review of: Elizabeth D. Samet: Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.

LARB miscellany Xmas week edition:

Jeff Wheelwright. 12/24/2021: Mystery Illnesses Writ Large. Review of: Suzanne O'Sullivan: The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness.

Bill Thompson. 12/24/2021: Can We Talk?. Review of: Taylor Dotson: The Divide: How Fanatical Certitude Is Destroying Democracy.

Andrea Lingenfelter. 12/23/2021: Evocative Accounts of Soon-to-Vanish Sites: Recent — and Not So Recent — Hong Kong Poetry and Prose.

Angus Fletchler. 12/22/2021: A Neuroscience of Strange Gods. Review of: Lisa Miller: The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life.

New Yorker book articles at the end of the year:

"Her writing and thinking captured momentous change in American life—and in her own."

Nathan Heller. 12/23/2021: What Joan Didion Saw.

"A new book, at once skeptical and devotional, considers visions of Christ from the early days of Christianity to the present."

Casey Cep. The New Yorker, 12/24/2021: What It Means to See Jesus. Review of: Robert Hudson: Seeing Jesus: Visionary Encounters from the First Century to the Present.

Fiction & non-fiction about Amazon:

Lisa Borst. N+1, 12/20/2021: The Everything Snore. Review of: Dave Eggers: The Every and Mark McGurl: Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.

"It was actually written by Muppets staff writer Jim Lewis, but his name doesn’t appear anywhere in the text; the Library of Congress cataloging data lists the author as “moi.”

Abigail Weil. Electric Lit, 12/23/2021: I’d Rather Eat Like a Pig Than Dine Like a Mogul. Review of: moi: In the Kitchen with Miss Piggy.

Christmas spirit(s) in UK's The Critic:

Alexander Larman. Dec/Jan 2021/22: The myth of the Victorian Christmas.

Myke Barrett. 12/23/2021: Ghosts at the feast. "Christmas ghost stories are meditations on darkness at the darkest point of the year."

Holiday reading:

Jeremy Black. 12/03/2021: Murders for early December. Review of: Anthony Berkeley: Murder in the Basement -- E.C.R. Lorac: These Names Make Clues -- Peter Heller: Lorac, The Guide -- Rosemary Shrager: The Last Supper.

End of year summary of literary prizes for novels:

Bookmarks. LitHub, 12/23/2021: The Award-Winning Novels of 2021.

For more literary best-ofs of 2021: Bookmarks.

I've dreamed of visiting a book town if I ever got to the UK (or maybe Europe); never did cross the pond, though:

Reis Thebault and Quentin Ariès. WaPo, 12/26/2021: This village was a book capital. What happens when people stop buying so many books?

Edward O. Wilson, 12/06/1929-12/26/2021. Author of, among others: Sociobiology, Consilience, etc.

Reuters N.Y. The Guardian, 12/27/2021: Edward O Wilson, naturalist known as a ‘modern-day Darwin’, dies aged 92.

Carl Zimmer. NYT, 12/27/2021: E.O. Wilson, a Pioneer of Evolutionary Biology, Dies at 92.

From 20 years ago:

Ed Douglas, The Guardian, 16/02/2001: Darwin's natural heir.

Andrea Wulf. NYT, 11/10/2021. A Biography of E.O. Wilson, the Scientist Who Foresaw Our Troubles. Review of: Richard Rhodes: Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

"His classes at Yale and well-regarded books explored China’s vast history through details that illuminated bigger pictures and themes."

Neil Genzlinger. NYT, 12/27/2021: Jonathan Spence, Noted China Scholar, Dies at 85.

Author of: The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution -- Emperor of China: self portrait of Kʻang Hsi (Spence assembled fragments of K'ang Hsi's writings to create an "autobiography") -- The Search for Modern China -- The Death of Woman Wang -- God's Chinese Son: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan -- Mao.

Desmond Tutu, 1931-2021:

Zanele Mji and Lynsey Chutel. NYT, 12/27/2021: South Africa Begins a Week of Mourning for Desmond Tutu.

Marilyn Berger. NYT, 12/26/2021: Desmond Tutu, Whose Voice Helped Slay Apartheid, Dies at 90.

Glenn Frankel. WaPo, 12/26/2021: Desmond Tutu, exuberant apostle of racial justice in South Africa, dies at 90.

Stanley Uys & Dan van der Vat. The Guardian, 12/26.2021: The Most Rev Desmond Tutu obituary.

Bishop, activist, writer, Nobel Prize winner:

Desmond Tutu author page on LT.

"According to Michael Slater, a biographer of the Victorian author, A Christmas Carol is “Dickens’s reaction to the attitude of the government and many of the ruling classes in the 1840s … saying, if the poor couldn’t get work and couldn’t look after themselves, they’d have to go to the workhouses.”

This belief was part of a prevailing attitude in Victorian society that the poor were a problem to be dealt with, instead of people to be helped – a belief Dickens vehemently disagreed with."

Robyn Vinter. The Guardian, 12/28/2021: A Christmas Carol is not cosy, and its angry message should still haunt us.

And how was your year? Substack blogger aggregates responses from writers:

Sasha Frere-Jones. S/FJ, 12/27/2021: Monday, December 27 2021: Seventy-one reflections on 2021.

Also cultural stuff come 2022 you might not want to like any more; word of the year, "cringey":

Constance Grady. Vox, 12/27/2021: Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now.

Recent book reviews & book related articles from The New Yorker:

Elizabeth Kolbert. 12/27/2021 (Jan. 3-10 2022 print): How Politics Got So Polarized. Review of: Lilliana Mason: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity -- Chris Bail: Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing -- Taylor Dotson: The Divide: How Fanatical Certitude Is Destroying Democracy -- Robert B. Talisse: Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side -- Ezra Klein: Why We’re Polarized -- Stephen Marche: The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. Note: Kolbert's review published in the print edition as Poles Apart.

Parul Sehgal. 12/27/2021, print 3-10/2022: The Case Against the Trauma Plot. Discusses, among others: Resmaa Menakem: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies -- Ruth Leys: Trauma: A Genealogy -- Bessel van der Kolk: The Body Keeps the Score -- Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life -- Nicholas Dames: Amnesiac Selves -- Jason Mott: Hell of a Book -- David J. Morris: The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -- Melissa Febos: Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative -- George A. Bonanno: The End of Trauma -- Anthony Veasna So: Afterparties -- Uwem Akpan: New York, My Village -- Raven Leilani: Luster -- Cristina Rivera-Garza: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country -- Honorée Fanonne Jeffers: The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois --Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing, and references to classic works too long to list.

Bibliographical note: The New Yorker doesn't list books under review together at the beginning or end, and the typography for identifying a book title has changed (quotation marks rather than links to Amazon), so I'm not always sure if I've identified all the books cited in the articles.

A 2021 book list that made me feel "old":

Emily Temple. LitHub, 12/27/2021: The 36 Best (Old) Books We Read in 2021: Timeless Reading Recommendations from the Lit Hub Staff.

Continued by: Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2022-1 Jan.-Mar.