Looking4food

—the first public tweet

 

Make no mistake: there is a Tao to Twitter. There is a majestic random synergy that holds the potential to impact your life daily — if you know what you’re doing.

—from Mark Schaefer’s The Tao of Twitter

 

The communications platform Twitter celebrates its tenth anniversary on July 15, the day in 2006 when it was publicly and prematurely launched. At a Silicon Valley party convened in honor of all the start-up companies going out of business, one of Twitter’s co-founders drunkenly and without authorization began to demo the product to any dot-commer who would listen. The tweeter of “Looking4food” was also a tech blogger looking for a scoop; the next morning he and others posted about “a new mobile social networking application written by Noah Glass (and team).” By the end of the month, says Nick Bilton in Hatching Twitter, Glass was on the outside looking in, his fed-up “(and team)” having terminated his position with the nascent company:

Noah spent the next few days riding his bike around San Francisco . . . He cycled along the Embarcadero, watching the boats as they bobbed in the bay. He wrote in his journal as he lay in Dolores Park, the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark playing in the background. And he sat along the edge of the world as people played with massive kites in the wind. “Watching colorful parachutes trace the shape of infinity as they fall to earth,” he tweeted.

Bilton’s bestseller offers its personalized “True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” as a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs (and as enough raw material for an entire season of the Silicon Valley television series). But with an average of 500 million tweets now being sent each day, Twitter has become Valley legend and an essential tool for entrepreneurs hoping to replicate its success.

Acknowledging that the tweet-scape is in constant flux, Michael Schaefer’s The Tao of Twitter can only promise those hopeful of navigating it “a success formula of sorts.” But the original text from which Schaefer borrows his metaphor counsels the same: “The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way; the names that can be named are not unvarying names,” reads the opening sentence of the Tao Te Ching.

To parachute a metaphorical framework from a two-millennia-old Chinese text offering very different enlightenment — “Truly, only he that rids himself forever of desire can see the Secret Essences” — into a handbook about “Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time” suggests misappropriation. But social media itself is an ancient concept, says Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years. All historical eras before the rise of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of mass communication (newspapers, radio, television) had some types of social media — scrolls, posters, pamphlets, coffeehouses, and the like. Modern mass media, Standage argues, should be viewed not as the natural order of things but an exception: “After this brief interlude — what might be called a mass media parenthesis — media is now returning to something similar to its preindustrial form.”

And returning to some ancient debates, says Standage — such as the one about how Twitter et al. are coarsening public discourse. Standage notes that Erasmus, in the early sixteenth century, complained of printers who “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive.” Standage notes also Milton’s countering arguments in Areopagitica (1611), which lobbied “For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.” Time may tell otherwise, concludes Standage, but for now we must side with Milton and “Looking4food”:

One man’s coarsening of discourse is another man’s democratization of publishing. The genie is out of the bottle. Let truth and falsehood grapple.

Photo credit: Maddyhargrave via Wikimedia Commons.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29t0Y1y

If you’ve read Mychal Denzel Smith’s work, in the pages of The Nation or The New York Times or The Atlantic or The Guardian, among other venues, then you already know that Mychal’s writing sizzles and pops, it dissects and dissents, it’s prose that makes us pay attention, turn pages — and talk to one another.

That incandescent, indelible voice is just part of what makes Smith’s essay collection, Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, so urgent and necessary right now, and a natural pick by Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers selection committee.  And if you’ve read any of Mychal’s work on race, politics, social justice, pop culture, hip-hop, mental health, feminism, LGBTQ issues, and black male identity, you’ve had the experience of lighting upon multiple insights, each one more incisive than the last, that  circle back to a single, powerful question: How do you learn to be a black man in America?

“Affirming, necessary, even delightful despite its brutality and angst. We owe it to all the lost black boys and more importantly to ourselves to read Mychal’s book and render visible what we would rather forget,” is part of what Melissa Harris-Perry, Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forrest University, has to say about Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching.  Last month, she joined Mychal Denzel Smith on stage at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to talk about his writing and the questions that still drive his quest for understanding, justice and change.  The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. —Miwa Messer

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to start with Ferguson. Talk to me about how Ferguson shapes this book for you.

Mychal Denzel Smith: I was finishing up the proposal, and then Michael Brown was killed. One, it was just the urgency became more palpable. We saw, lying there in the street, his lifeless body, and the disregard for his humanity, and then the way in which the narrative was shaped after all of that, after the tanks and the tear-gas. Really, it’s about where . . . What I’m trying to accomplish with this book is getting into the interior lives of young black men. No one was doing that for Michael Brown. No one was affording him that . . . One, it was taken away from him, the chance to examine and interrogate himself. And then, in the aftermath of that, the way in which his humanity was stolen.

Then, a year later, while I was working on the book, visiting Ferguson for the second time for the one-year anniversary, and being in the street, watching beautiful, like, protest of all these young people celebrating their own lives in the wake of this tragedy, and pressing forward for some sense of justice, and just wondering what is the world that they will inhabit, that Michael Brown is not going to have a chance to . . . What are they going to learn? What lessons about activism and politics and gender and sexuality are going to be imparted on them? Because that’s the thing that falls by the wayside in these narratives after these tragedies. We focus in on the fact that these lives can be taken, just like that. But what about those of us who are lucky enough to survive? Where do we sit? Who are we going to be?

There’s a scene in the book from that time where I went back, and watching all of these young boys running around, like, free . . . It was beautiful. With their shirts off, running through the water! It was so free! But there’s still the understanding that, you know, particularly for these young boys, they will grow up in a world where they will inherit misogyny and homophobia and transphobia, and there’s not a guarantee that they are going to be asked to interrogate that. In some ways, adopting those stances will feel liberatory for them. Hopefully, what the book is, is an intervention in that conversation.

MHP: It was interesting to watch you start low and spin up a little bit, even be able to laugh a little bit. I’m glad you got there, because I’m going to tease you a little bit now. I have done a lot of events today; it’s my fourth event of four in two different cities. So I’ve been teasing all day that the fourth thing I had to do was to go talk to a twenty-nine-year-old about his memoir. I see a bunch of you smiling when I just say it. It’s funny. But even in that answer, you helped, I think, respond to why a twenty-nine -year-old would have a memoir to write. But maybe flesh it out a little bit more.

MDS: That’s the thing. I never approached this as writing a memoir. Right? Because I don’t think my life is that interesting. What I was attempting to do here is locate for people in the personal what the political context is. I just think that that’s for me a better narrative tool, to talk about my own experiences, and then draw it out to the bigger issues. So I don’t want people to walk away from the book feeling like that was just about Mychal Denzel Smith. I’m used as a proxy for understanding black male life. A very small slice, obviously, because I can’t represent every young black man. But to tease out what is it to grow up with an understanding of one’s blackness and all that it brings but also not have to challenge oneself on certain privileges that you may bring to the table, because we don’t, with regards to black men, have that conversation. And then to be challenged and pushed to examine that. Reading Hazel Carby’s book, Race Men, and then the first essay is about Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk, and the way in which Du Bois constructs a masculine identity out of his intellectualism, and then The Souls of Black Folk becomes the preeminent black literature that everyone is told this is the exemplar. And what does it mean for us to be handed down such a masculinist narrative about intellectualism and activism, and to set that as the stage? For young black men, what does that mean? When you want to do better, when you want to do more, when you want to not be a part of systems of oppressions, how are you going about extracting yourself from that?

Yes, it’s me, it’s my life, but hopefully you don’t get the sense that it ends there with me.

MHP: Will you read the first sentence for us?

MDS: “The NBA Western Conference All Stars had a sizable lead over the Eastern Conference All Stars, 88−69, when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin.”

MHP: I think I always forget why he was walking through the store, the context in which it’s happening.

MDS: Yeah.

MHP: Tell me more about that first sentence.

MDS: It’s doing a lot of work. Not just in terms of reminding us all of what happened, and very purposefully saying George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. We have to keep reminding ourselves that that’s what happened. He did not die. His life was taken away from him. But to situate him, to juxtapose the way in which black men are generally being consumed by the American public. Millions of people watching and flattening those men on the basketball court while Trayvon Martin’s life was also being flattened. But the difference is in the way that those flattenings operate. We dehumanize athletes all the time, particularly black athletes. But the way that that manifests for Trayvon Martin is his death. Right? George Zimmerman sees him and sees no more than White America has always told him about black boys. He sees a killer. He sees a thug. And he goes about the work of maintaining white supremacy by taking that boy’s life. To make us have to reconcile the fact that those things are happening at the same time — there are black men playing basketball on your TV screen and making millions upon millions of dollars, and you can think that this is freedom, you can think that we’ve been liberated. But, at that very moment Trayvon Martin was killed  — it sets up really the whole idea of the whole world watching, because the whole world started to look at Trayvon Martin, to look at his life, to examine him. It’s about these basketball players, because of their talent, are afforded that opportunity to be seen — in a very limited way, but they are afforded that opportunity. Trayvon was only seen in death. We only got the chance to meet him in death. And what does that mean for us, that we keep meeting, we keep being introduced to these young boys as a result of someone killing them?

MHP: I want to stay for minute upon this. We won’t stay down here the whole time. But after it was announced that the officer who shot and killed Tamir Rice would not face charges, you wrote an article for the Nation, “Black Children Are Not Children”: “The video didn’t matter to McGinty because killing black people is not a crime. Police are not afraid of cameras because the cameras only capture the police doing their jobs.”

MDS: Yes.

MHP: This question of visibility, and of watching, and of the world watching is obviously central not only to the title but to the work that you’re doing here. As a writer, part of what you’re trying to do is to render visible these experiences. But you’re also suggesting to us that visibility doesn’t inherently bring justice. So what are you up to?

MDS: I’m constantly trying to figure that out. Intellectually, yes, I know visibility does not bring justice. We’ve seen that over and over again. We knew that for Rodney King. Right? But I don’t think that resigning ourselves to that is useful. I think it’s still important to talk about it, to illuminate the fact that that doesn’t bring justice. So if people who claim to be invested in that idea are really invested in it, and they realize that the body cameras and the dashcam cameras and the Walmart security cameras do not bring justice, then what next? Figure something else out. We need new ideas about it.

Also a reframing of what justice looks like. It’s justice in one sense if these people were convicted. For me, the sense of justice is that these young men, and, increasingly and often, young women who are killed by police, who are assaulted by police. If we started there, by trying to actually end it — I think people think that those convictions will bring about an end, and I am just not convinced of that, simply because the function of this violence is a maintaining of our second-class citizenship. It is maintaining the idea of blackness as less-than. And if we are still structurally invested in that idea, then no amount of convictions are going to get us to shift that. It does take a radical reimagining of what our democracy looks like, what justice looks like.

MHP: I’m interested in this book because of what you started trying to make me talk about initially, but I just wasn’t taking the bait, which is the inter-sectionality parts of it. I almost cringed initially with the description of it as sort of this, you know, understanding around black manhood, because I think then the presumption is that this is a particular kind of book.

All the work you were just doing around Tamir and around Trayvon and around Michael brown, we don’t ever think of that work as specific, as presumably about straight black men.

MDS: Right.

MHP: But you purposely force us to think about it in that way. Why is that so important?

MDS: It’s important because of the way that chapter five starts, with recounting the tales of two gay black men who were killed, shot in the face. All they did was express their attractions to other men; like, that was their crime. The idea of leaving them out of our narratives of justice is unsettling because . . . they are us. They always have been us. But we continue to try to act like they’re not, to act like there’s something abnormal, unnatural and unwanted about being a black gay man. And we can’t afford to keep doing that. Because if we’re actually invested in this idea of freedom, if we’re actually invested in a politics of liberation, how are we going to leave people out? And how are we going to leave people out based on something like sexual identity, of all things? It bothers me. And it didn’t always. And that upsets me — that it didn’t always bother me, that I had to be challenged and be pushed on this, constantly.

When I told you I was writing a book for seventeen-year-old me, what would I want seventeen-year-old me to have known about me to have known about the world? I wouldn’t want seventeen -year-old me walking around being the homophobe that I was. That really is the long and the short of it, that we can’t afford to continue doing this. We can’t afford to continue writing people out of the story. On the basis of what?

MHP: On page 62, can you read the section on black rage?

MDS: “That anger has not only drawn attention to injustice, it has driven people to action, sparking movements and spurring them forward. At the very least, the public expression of black rage has allowed communities of people who have felt isolated in their own anger to know that they are not alone. Anger is what makes our struggle visible. We almost lost that rage. We almost sacrificed it in its truth-telling abilities for a symbol of hope. Now, we’ve done so, choosing an option Baldwin hadn’t imagined. America would have lost, too, its chance for redemption. Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to those whose identity depends on the lie to question and hopefully change. Our struggle has inspired oppressed people the world over, because if we former slaves can make the most powerful nation face itself, there’s a chance for everyone else. In a twist, our rage becomes hope for others. We almost gave it away.”

MHP: How is it that we almost gave it away?

MDS: This chapter starts with Kanye West and the “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment, and that as a public expression of black rage, and how, for me, I was hopeful that that was a resurgence of grass-roots organizing activism. Like any young radical, I had nostalgia for days that I didn’t experience. But what I saw then was the way in which that energy moved to Obama in 2007 and 2008. Obviously, this is a big deal. This is not anything to be, like, written off, that a generation directed political energy into the idea of electing the first black president, who came in and said, “I do want to change things; I have hope for you, and be a symbol and a political operative on your behalf.”

I think that what we then have to reconcile with is the fact that, one, American government is small-c conservative in that it’s just not built for rapid change. Our bureaucracies are just not equipped to do that. But also, if we were looking for some type of radical change in the body of Obama, we’re looking in the wrong place. His temperament and his politics are just more of a mainstream American, like, Democratic politics. That’s who he is. That’s why he has been so successful as a politician. But the idea that that one act of voting for him was going to produce the sort of shift that, you know, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” represents, is something that we can buy into. I think we were willing to take a chance on this whole idea. We were willing to say, “OK, we will be a part of the system; we will show up, we will do the voting,” but there was so much disappointment. I wish people would have been a little more clear-eyed from the beginning. But that disappointment meant that there was an opening for that rage to resurface, and it definitely did after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, and that you see now this movement being built, brick-by-brick, at the grass-roots level.

MHP: Name one person you hope loves this book?

MDS: The person I hope loves this book, I hope I never know their name. I hope it’s just black kids across this country– I’m not going to get a chance to meet all of them, but I hope that they love this book. I hope that they truly engage with it, and it offers something to them.

MHP: I actually think the most important endorsement that you’ve gotten for this book is not on the cover. I think it happened on Twitter. It was a little tiny person, and she said she was going to buy this book without having read it because it was black.

MDS: Because it’s black.

MHP: Is this a black book?

MDS: Is this a black book? Yeah. I’m a black writer. It’s all black. For me, I’ve never shied away from that. I’ve never understood . . . I mean, I understand for some people that they think that’s a limitation placed on them, the idea that they’re being boxed out or ghettoized or whatever. But no, I’m black as it gets.

MHP: What do you wear on your feet?

MDS: These are the Air Jordan Wine Chicago color ones. These are the very first ones that I’ve just put on, fresh out the box, back there. I laced them up and everything just now. This is my first time wearing them.

MHP: Why does that matter?

MDS: Sneakers are a thing for me because of the place that they’ve always held for . . . that they’ve come to hold in broad black male culture. The idea of your heroes doing these amazing things and accomplishing these amazing feats, and wanting a piece of that for yourself, and feeling like you can have that, that you can stand just as tall, that you can fly just as high. Jordan, for all of his political apathy, sort of represents bodily genius in his ever-present blackness, the disruption of a narrative of the simple black brute, and the idea of owning a piece of that for yourself, and then, these particularly, just because these particularly, just because they are the first one, and I am sitting here with my very first book . . . It feels special.

 

Image of Mychal Denzel Smith courtesy Nation Books.

Image of Melissa Harris Perry via melissaharrisperry.com.

 

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29th7Dk

When Robert F. Kennedy ran for a U.S. Senate seat from New York in 1964, many cried foul. John F. Kennedy’s younger brother had served as attorney general in the late president’s administration — an appointment that had itself generated controversy — and his candidacy in a state in which he neither resided nor voted (he lived in Virginia, voted in Massachusetts) was seen as a shameless attempt to use New York as a steppingstone for a future White House bid. The New York Times, which would eventually endorse his Republican opponent, called the campaign a “cynical” move and alleged that New York was nothing more to Kennedy than a “convenient launching-pad” for his “political ambitions.”

As Larry Tye recounts in his clear-eyed and absorbing new biography, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, others saw the same naked political calculations but responded with what amounted to a shrug. Kennedy, like many of his fellow citizens, was clearly still mourning the assassination of his revered brother the year before. “If the Attorney General has a wound so great that, not to heal him but just for a little while to relieve him, he must be made a Senator, then we owe him nothing smaller,” declared the veteran political journalist Murray Kempton in The New Republic.

The two reactions demonstrate how polarizing Kennedy was. To some, he was less like his brother Jack than like his ruthless, vindictive father, Joe. (“Jack made friends, Bobby enemies,” Tye quips.) But traveling in America and abroad, he attracted adoring crowds inspired by his youth and his promise, even before JFK’s death made him, as Tye writes, “a prince in exile.” Kennedy, of course, did win the Senate seat, and he used it to launch his presidential campaign in 1968, as political observers had predicted he would. The idealistic Bobby who ran against the Vietnam War and as a champion for African Americans and the poor — and who, like his brother, was cut down in his prime by an assassin’s bullet — is the Bobby we remember today.

There was much more to Kennedy, though, and Tye cuts through the gauzy nostalgia to create a perceptive account of a life rife with contradictions, unearthed via boxes of previously unseen family papers along with interviews with RFK’s widow, Ethel, his former aides, and many others who knew him. Early in his career, the liberal icon of the book’s title worked as counsel to the crusading anti-Communist senator Joseph McCarthy, a position secured for him by his father; he left the job less because of disenchantment with McCarthy’s overzealous witch hunts than because of his hatred for the senator’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn. (Cohn was just one of RFK’s famous nemeses; others included Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and President Lyndon Johnson.)

Bobby, as Tye refers to him throughout the book, was drafted by his father to manage JFK’s campaigns for Senate and then president, and his cutthroat techniques, along with Joe’s money, helped secure Jack’s victories. When Joe decided that Bobby would serve as Jack’s attorney general, both sons balked; JFK worried about charges of nepotism, particularly since Bobby had never actually tried a case in a court of law. Tye describes an astonishing encounter in which Joe Kennedy told John, “By God, he deserves to be attorney general of the U.S., and by God, that’s what he’s going to be. Do you understand that?” The president-elect responded, “Yes, sir.” Jack later joked that the job would give his little brother some legal experience.

It did, with mixed results. Take civil rights: the administration tried to walk a middle path, with Bobby gradually coming to appreciate the urgency of the issue of racial injustice and the need for federal action. While RFK increased the number of black attorneys in the Justice Department from six to sixty, he also appointed a number of racist, segregationist judges in the Deep South. He secured the safe passage of the Freedom Riders from Alabama to Mississippi, but he also approved FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s request to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr.’s telephones.

With JFK gone and Joe incapacitated by a massive stroke, Robert Kennedy, still only in his thirties, was at last free to be his own man. He fantasized about taking time off to teach or simply to read but knew that public service was, in Tye’s words, “his calling as well as his inheritance.” As a senator, he learned best through direct experience, traveling to Mississippi to witness poverty firsthand and to California to understand the abuse of farmworkers. “He came to us and asked us two questions,” recalled farmworker labor leader Dolores Huerta. “All he said was, ‘What do you want? And how can I help?’ That’s why we loved him.”

Tye, who is the author of previous biographies, of Satchel Paige and Superman, admits to having been “captivated” by his subject since he was in high school, and he occasionally falls victim to the sentimental depiction of Kennedy that he has set out to dispel. (When, while campaigning for the Senate, Bobby is asked a question about the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s assassination, Tye doesn’t just have RFK tearing up in response — he has “silver tears [collecting] on his lower lashes.”) These lapses are minor, though, in a book that demonstrates forcefully and convincingly that Kennedy underwent a genuine change to emerge on the right side of history. “In today’s derisive political context he’d be decried as a flip-flopper,” the author observes, “but his transformation was heartfelt and transcended politics.” While the Bobby we remember today is that passionate idealist running an insurgent campaign for the presidency on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed, Tye has done readers a service by showing us exactly how far he traveled to get there.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29t3Cng

 

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O, the Oprah Magazine.

What is an ideal summer read? That might be as personal a choice as the ideal vacation, but there are a few things we think of when we’re making a list of which books to pack with a swimsuit, hiking boots or a passport: we look for stories that take us on journeys as memorable as the ones we plan all year, works that will refresh us like a visit to a beloved place, voices that echo in memory after the season is over. Most of all, we want reading as special – and as fun – as the precious time we carve out of our routines for summer pleasures.

What to set aside for this summer’s book bag? We decided to ask Leigh Haber, Books Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine — whose “Reading Room” is a marvelous monthly guide to the best in new reading – and she shared with us the books she and the O Mag editors are most excited about, grouped helpfully into ten enticing and inspiring sets which you can explore – and sample – here.

FUTURE SHOCK

Like all standout speculative fiction, these books aren’t the result of authors squinting to look ahead, but rather with their heads cocked a bit to the side– looking back, and around. And in what they envision, destinies near and far, are traces of today – Widespread pandemics, fiscal crises, strange echoes of alternate histories, earth’s ecology in upheaval, and sex toys so real they descend into the uncanny valley.

SINNERS AND SAINTS

Start with the basics: bad guys and gals trying to make good. Sprinkle in a detective here and a paranoid schizophrenic there. Set deft fiction side by side with harrowing real life stories, then fold in heaping helpings of moral complexity. Add  redemption for a little sweetness, bake in the sun while on the beach or reclining in a hammock, divide six ways— and devour as much as you like.

HEAR THEM ROAR

The women at the centers of these six essential titles are united in trying to navigate a host of fresh-off-your-Twitter-feed issues including but not limited to sizeism, sexism, public exhibitionism, boring boyfriends, violent boyfriends, cocaine, the internet, date rape, buried family secrets, judicial corruption, writer’s block, hook-up culture, and Eastern European sex slavery. In genres ranging from memoir to crime thriller to short fiction, the scenes–even those that, on the face of it, seem far-fetched– are achingly recognizable and all too real.

ICONS

They say don’t meet your heroes lest they disappoint you…Whatever. We say you should bring them along on vacation. These vivid portraits of luminary rock-stars, poets, provocateurs, and an author David Foster Wallace called “the country’s best living fiction writer” will provide scintillating companionship wherever summer finds you.

 

THE GILDED CAGE

Designer gowns. Luxurious apartments. Black Escalades. Lear jets. The trappings of the 1% may seem as enticing as they are elusive, but does wealth equal happiness, or is there something corrosive about it? These offerings go beneath the sheen of affluence to reveal its underbelly — Park Avenue as a prison, a Dickensian alternate reality perfectly drawn for our status-obsessed era–and to underscore the truth that at the end of the day, mortality gets us all.

LOVE AFFAIRS

At one time or another many of us have dropped everything to follow our hearts, been betrayed or betrayed vows for lust, or magically found (or re-found) the soulmate we had given up hope of ever connecting with. What better way to celebrate the return of summer than to immerse ourselves in the soul-reviving, hormone pumping, faith-renewing power of…..LOVE.

 

WAR & PEACE

In a world consumed by wars of all kinds – hot, cold, tepid (albeit intractable) – books make sense of the madness, inviting us to listen and to learn, to swim against tides of violence, and to reconcile other perspectives with our own. From peerless on-the-ground reporting to fictional adventures and misadventures, these summer books offer a range of startling new views, plumbing the complex reasons why countries – and couples – can’t always coexist peacefully.

 

ODYSSEYS

It’s a story as old as Greek mythology: a hero or heroine embarks on a voyage and in the process is transformed. The changes can be subtle or immense, whether for an African girl in the Old South or for a leading scientist decoding the mysteries of medicine, as he unearths family secrets. These titles explore how personal journeys mirror dramatic developments in the world, from the tragedies of the African diaspora to the satisfying simplicity of Scandinavian culture to a gourmand’s culinary escapades among the cities and villages of China.

AMERICAN PASTORAL

Lurking somewhere in the endless vistas of our wide and deep country are young girls becoming indigenous berserks, little towns slowly and silently fading away, fruited plains and ferocious rivers, natural disasters and man made ones, wild horses and their even wilder masters – all coexisting on a sprawling, mystic frontier.

 

BORN IN THE U.S.A.

What is America made of? Is it the landscape? The people? An idea? What we revolt against? What we produce? These nonfiction titles tackle those questions from exhilaratingly different angles—culture, crime, the natural and the bureaucratic—each enriching our understanding of our roots, our appreciation of home.

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29lB2bp

Every novel starts with an act of imagination. A writer finds a story or a story finds a writer — it all starts with an act of imagination. Acts of faith and empathy, the occasional act of charity, come later; those layered acts build novels, conjure the emotional truths that underscore character, place, story — the elements that get readers turning pages, make them desperate to talk to each other about what they’ve just read.

A Summer 2016 selection of our Discover Great New Writers program, Rumaan Alam’s charming debut novel Rich and Pretty  traces the evolution of a long friendship between two women hits home for readers who hear echoes of our own friendships with other women as we read. Emma Straub (Modern Lovers) is also a fan of this “smart, sharp, and beautifully made” portrait of an enduring friendship “that is impossible to resist.”

A few weeks ago, Rumaan was joined for a reading and onstage Q&A at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper East Side by Mira Jacob, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. Jacob is the founder of Pete’s Reading Series in New York City; her work has appeared in Guernica and Vogue, among other outlets. The following is an edited transcript of their onstage conversation.–Miwa Messer

 

Mira Jacob: I have some questions for you, and I think the most pressing one starts this off, which is: How many lady brains did you eat to write this book? How did you make this up?

Rumaan Alam: I don’t know. I really don’t know. A lot of my closest friends are women. A lot of them are in this room right now. But I never asked anybody, you know, tell me about X or Y. I just watched these women over the course of our adulthood, and I knew more about their . . . They seemed to have fuller lives than I do. They had relationships. And I just sort of watched that whole thing unfold. And I guess I stole it. I guess that’s how I did it. I don’t know.

MJ: You stole it.

RA: I stole it. But isn’t that like . . . You do that, too.

MJ: I do that, too.

RA: That’s what you do. Right? So I stole it.

MJ: So then it’s not the lady brains.

RA: There’s a lot of frontline reporting in this book. Even I can recognize a lot of it. I think when my friends do finally now get a chance to read it, I anticipate them saying to me, “Oh, this is something that happened to me that you stole.”

MJ: Are you nervous about that?

RA: Well, I’m not, because I feel like it was well meant. I hope. I don’t think there’s anything mean or . . . Yeah, and there is not one person. It’s not like the book is about one person or two people. It’s a lie. That’s the other thing you do. Like, you’re lying.

MJ: Well, the book is about two people, but it’s not about two people in their actual life, right?

RA: Right.

MJ: So you’ve got the two main characters, who are white women.

RA: Yes.

MJ: You are brown.

RA: That’s true.

MJ: And a man.

RA: That’s true.

MJ: And gay.

RA: That’s true.

MJ: You are a gay brown man.

RA: Yes.

MJ: Can we talk about this?

RA: Yeah. I think we should talk about it.

MJ: How did you approach this?

RA: With some trepidation. Because I think that when you’re writing something that doesn’t belong to you, you should rightfully feel cautious about it. I was like, I just have to write it and see if it . . . Every person in the business of publishing is a woman. So if I had got it totally wrong, this book never would have gone anywhere. Right?

MJ: That’s a fair point.

RA: So I feel like it has been vetted, at least, and I feel like my editors and my agent would not let me do something stupid and make a big, obvious, stupid mistake, so I take some comfort in that. But I was very nervous about it for sure. For sure.

MJ: And it’s not the book that is expected of you.

RA: Yes, but that is its own kind of liberation. Because I think the book that is expected like you, when you look like you and I, is a book about people coming from overseas and struggling and learning a language. I see a friend of mine, who is a black woman writer, sitting in the audience, nodding her head, because she knows, and it’s the same thing that every writer who doesn’t look like Jonathan Franzen (unless he is Jonathan Franzen; he’s great), is meant to meet some expectation that is held by some person that no one can identify. I don’t know who that person is. I don’t know who that editorial director is. I don’t know who that critic is, who says, “This is the way the narrative of brown in America works.” I’ve read those books. I love Jhumpa Lahiri. She did, weirdly, write one story that is very similar to the story of my life. (Which is another story.) But she is, for the most part, not telling the story of my life. I felt very little desire to tell the story of my life. I felt like it was much more liberating to do something completely different. It was almost like writing about aliens.

MJ: Hilton Als, right, recently talked about this, about autobiography, and about Lemonade . . . How did you react to what he was writing?

RA: Well, I understand that there is a lot of dissent out there about his actual critique.

MJ: Could you summarize it in case someone missed it?

RA: That Beyoncé’s power comes from being a wronged woman, and because she has this visual iconography and this very precise writing, has recast the entire narrative of Black Womanhood, essentially. He makes the point in that particular piece that I loved, which is that people have a very specific expectation of autobiography from writers who are minorities — I don’t even know what “minority” means — but from writers who are brown.

MJ: Yes.

RA: They expect it to be autobiography. And I do it, too.

MJ: Did you do it with the dancing?

RA: No, I did it with Nicole Dennis-Benn, who I was just talking to you about.

MJ: Oh, that’s interesting.

RA: I was reading her book. Nicole Dennis-Benn is a Jamaican writer, and she has a book coming out in July that’s amazing, called Here Comes the Sun, and I was reading it, and I was like, Huh, I wonder if this was Nicole’s life story. Then I was like, that’s so fucked up that I think that when I know better, and I know that she’s just a really talented artist who was spinning a tale and building a universe, which is what everybody does. I don’t think anybody says — to use Jonathan Franzen, no one says Purity is the story of his life.

MJ: They don’t do that.

RA: They don’t do that. It is, I think, a kind of curse of being a minority writer. I think what Hilton was saying was that it’s the curse of being a minority artist.

MJ: Absolutely.

RA: That’s a fair point.

MJ: That is a fair point. Fairly quickly, just because we’re on the subject, what did you think of Lemonade?

RA: I don’t know. I haven’t watched the video because I don’t have that much time on my hands, honestly. I can’t sit and watch something for that long without getting, like, distracted. But I listened to it a lot. I think it’s great.

MJ: Give me three descriptions for each character in your novel. Like, if you were writing a dating profile, but honest. Three things that you could tell me about each of them.

RA: The book is about two women named Lauren and Sarah, and they are friends from the time they are eleven. The book takes place from when they’re thirty-two to around thirty-seven. Lauren is beautiful. She is sardonic. And she is uncertain. Sarah is lovely, and cultivated, and a square.

MJ: I feel like now is a good time to talk about the title.

RA: First of all, I don’t really believe in spoilers, unless you’re talking about Game of Thrones, which please don’t, because we’re very far behind. But the title is very reductive. The title of the book is Rich and Pretty, and it is intentionally a reductive way of talking about these two women. It is my opinion that it is a trick, and there is a scene in the book that gives context to the title that will hopefully make you feel that it is not as reductive as it may seem if you just see it. When I was writing it . . . You asked if it was, like, scary. I was imagining a woman seeing the title of this book and being, “What the fuck do I want to read this fucking book of some dude saying, ‘Here is a book about someone who is rich and someone who is pretty.’ ”

But in a way, that is like the joke that I am making. The title dares you to have that misunderstanding, and I would not . . . A woman who felt that way, seeing the title and seeing my author photo . . . a woman who felt that way would not be wrong to feel that way. You know?

MJ: Right.

RA: It is a reductive title.

MJ: You’re just hoping to punch through to the other side of that.

RA: Hopefully.

MJ: Who did you like writing more, Sarah or Lauren?

RA: Lauren.

MJ: Really?

RA: Yes, which is funny, because I am so much like Sarah. It’s funny, because it seems like the readers who have read the book . . . there does seem some sense that, like, people want to take a side and pick.

MJ: Absolutely.

RA: Yes. But you can feel for Lauren.

MJ: Did they stay with you, the characters?

RA: Yes. You know this. It’s like psychosis. It’s insanity. When I was writing this book — I mean, I can’t believe that I’m still married. In my experience, what it did to me was crazy. I thought about them all the time. I felt like I was them. When we’d walk around the city I’d look at things and shift, as I was walking, between “What would Lauren think about this?” and “What would Sarah think about this?” I’d go to places that I thought they would go to. It was insane.

MJ: Now you have two kids.

RA: Yes.

MJ: The oldest is?

RA: He’s almost seven now.

MJ: And you started writing this in 2009. I’m just doing the math here.

RA: I did not have kids when I started writing it.

MJ: And then it took over.

RA: Yes.

MJ: Did you ever find that it was a complete joy to disappear into these characters when you were in the throes of parenthood?

RA: I have always been suspicious of writers who are like, “I love writing,” because I think it sucks. I mean, there are certainly moments when I’m working, and everything is alive, and it’s working the way I want it to, and the words are coming out, and you can see the page count growing, and you’re like, “OK, I’m getting somewhere.” But the feeling is so fleeting. And then the next day you’re like, “Oh, it’s all garbage” — twenty pages of garbage.

MJ: So in other words, it was an escape from the drudgery.

RA: It was like a fugue state. It was like a trance state. I was very tired. I had kids. I wrote the book at night. I was always very tired when I was working on it. But I think in some ways, like . . . Yes, it was devoid of joy, but it was an escape, yes.

MJ: Interesting. You say that they are still with you. Did you ever think that you weren’t going to get it done?

RA: Oh yeah, all the time.

MJ: It sounds like it. It sounds like you were anxious about it.

RA: Yes.

MJ: Was there ever a specific point like, This is it; this is not going to happen.

RA: Yes. The book centers on Sarah getting married, and when I finally got to the point where she was going to get married, I was like, “Fuck, I can’t do this.” I don’t want her to get married, I don’t care about romance. But there’s another part of, the joke — it’s not a joke, again, but like the mechanism of the book is a mechanism that is really familiar. Right? Somebody getting married. But it was not one in which I was deeply invested. It was just that, like, that’s what they were doing. It was putting them through their paces.

MJ: It was the propulsion.

RA: Yes.

MJ: So when you got to the payoff point . . .

RA: Exactly. So the wedding, barely exists in the finished book, because I thought, I can’t do it. I couldn’t figure out how to talk about how a woman looks in a wedding dress, or how Sarah would have looked in her wedding . . .

MJ: You could figure out how to talk about how a woman looks. I totally don’t buy that.

RA: I just think . . . Who knows?

MJ: I know that this is years and years in the making, and many things have happened that your friends and family who are here today will know. Can you tell me, just for the joy of all of us, what have been the most gratifying things so far about this book?

RA: That is such a good question. Every milestone on this particular journey or whatever has been so gratifying. Like, I sent the book out . . . I’m so superstitious and stupid. I sent the book out to agents on our wedding anniversary . . . no, on David’s birthday. I thought, I’ll send it out on October 5th. Then I was convinced, I’m never going to get an agent; no agent is going to want anything to do with me. And then I got the best agent that I could want. Then I thought, Oh, this is amazing; now I have like the world’s best agent — but even she can’t sell this book.” Then she gave me all these, like, horrible edits to the book that I had to like go and do, and then it went out and I was like, No one is going to want to buy this book. And then my agent told me, “You have a phone call tomorrow with this editor.” I said, “Really?” Then I talked to her and she said, “I really liked your book.” So every part of that thing was so crazy and gratifying in its own way. So hopefully, there will be more.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29v7cSV

With its new black cover and red edging, it looks like the Bible. Fitting, because like the Gideons’ favored volume, Valley of the Dolls has spent a lot of time stashed in nightstand drawers. Not the nightstands of hotels, where the temporary guests have no reason to hide their vices, but the nightstands of suburban homes and small city apartments inhabited by the readers, especially housewives and what used to be called career girls, who bought 31 million copies of the Bantam mass market paperback and, maybe, were a little ashamed to read it in the open. Those were the nightstands from which kids, who knew something racy was being kept from them, filched the book and read it on the sly.

Fifty years after it was released, Jacqueline Susann’s story of three young women trying to make it in the showbiz worlds of New York and Hollywood still ain’t the Bible, but it’s acquired at least a glimmer of respectability. That started in 1997 when Grove Press reissued the novel in a fabulous pink paperback edition with a die-cut cover from under which peeked the stars of the 1967 film version. This was a meaningful collision. Grove, the house that, under Barney Rosset, had spent the ’60s as haven to the avant-garde and the prosecuted, the American publisher of Burroughs, Miller, Genet, de Sade, and so many others, was now the publisher of the book that had epitomized the mainstream the authors on Grove’s list had scorned. Of the pieces that noted the ’97 return of Susann’s novel, none was smarter or more impassioned than Mim Udovitch’s in the Village Voice Literary Supplement. Udovitch, who understood the novel as a prefeminist touchstone, was out to stake a claim for all those women who had been mesmerized by the book, who felt Susann was speaking rough truths about their lives and had been looked down on by the literary establishment for wallowing in trash. In the literary season in which Udovitch was writing, the book that was supposed to define women’s empowerment was Katharine Graham’s memoir Personal History. In it the Washington Post publisher wrote, among other things, about how she struggled to take over the paper after the previous publisher, her husband, Philip, committed suicide. Udovitch wasn’t having it. I’m sick, she announced, of being asked to marvel at the courage of Katharine Graham for taking over a paper she already owned.

It was a great rude remark, and it suggested how the division that existed over Valley of the Dolls, the adulation of a wide readership, and the scorn of cultural gatekeepers had always in part been a class division. That division was never clearer than in the review by the hapless Gloria Steinem, who wrote about Valley of the Dolls for the New York Herald Tribune Book Week. In 1987 Steinem told Susann’s biographer Barbara Seaman that she had said “Valley of the Dolls is for the reader who has put away comic books but isn’t yet ready for the editorials in the Daily News.” The class snobbishness of Steinem’s remark encapsulates the suspicion with which the literary establishment has always reacted to any book the popular audience responds to. That isn’t to say that a book is good because it’s popular. But if a book resonates with the reading public to the tune of 31 million paperback copies, any after-the-fact analysis needs to dig a little deeper than merely putting the response down to the bad taste of the masses.

There’s no denying Susann was a formally crude writer, working in a genre that was often cruder. Her novels didn’t offer the noble suffering endured by the heroines of Fannie Hurst and Olive Higgins Prouty. Susann’s beat was showbiz at its most ruthless and fame at its gaudiest. As an unsuccessful actress, sometime TV game show panelist, wife to the producer Irving Mansfield, mistress to stars both male and female, and, after she achieved fame, tireless self-promoter, Susann well knew the territory she was working. Trading in her own experience, as well as gossip about Judy Garland and Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe, Susann was employing the same formula Harold Robbins had worked to great success in his 1961 smash The Carpetbaggers (crass and vulgar to its soul, it is nonetheless a protean read), which had played off the stories of Howard Hughes, Jean Harlow, and others. One of the reasons authors no longer write trashy romans à clef about the rich and famous, the genre epitomized by Susann and Robbins and later Sidney Sheldon, is that the public no longer needs novelists to deliver disguised gossip when they can get it with the identities right out in the open. Websites and shows like TMZ provide much nastier gossip than any of the guess-who stories Susann and Robbins traded in. And when it’s the celebs themselves providing the gossip via reality TV shows, you know that Susann died before she got a chance to see her great subject, the self-cannibalizing potential of fame, taken to its most hideous extremes.

But vulgarity needn’t preclude sincerity or honesty. Nothing in Valley of the Dolls feels cynically calculated. What gives it its conviction — and what may have turned off the critics who can’t get past the surface absurdities of melodrama — is that as you read it you feel that Susann believes every word. In its way, this is an absolutely uncompromised novel. Susann drew in readers by putting them in the sensible shoes of her heroine (and stand-in), Anne Welles, who comes to postwar New York from a soul-stifling New Hampshire town (perhaps a nod to Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place?) and is swept up by the glamour of it all. Then, with heedless deliberation, Susann smashed those fantasies. Valley of the Dolls is a tour of hell in which every success or accomplishment is a herald to some new dissatisfaction, some new heartbreak. Neely O’Hara, the novel’s version of Judy Garland and its one true monster, goes from young singing sensation to wildly revered diva. No defeat is bad enough to preclude a comeback for Neely, and no success is so fulfilling that it will keep her from fucking up again.

Neely is the novel’s horror show in full, foul-mouthed flower. What makes her train wreck of a life unique is that Susann — for every character, not just Neely — removed the cliché that had provided the escape route in every lonely-at-the-top saga: the possibility of redemption. Nobody gets past their weakness here, not even the levelheaded Anne, whose grim future is laid out in the book’s final pages. As for the romantic notion of escape, Susann treats that for the lie it is when Lyon Burke tries to persuade Anne to return to the New Hampshire house she’s inherited from her mother and live with him while he finishes his novel. Lyon is everything Anne wants in a man, and even that won’t persuade her to give up New York for the picturesque little New England cow town she escaped. New York begins to look frayed and familiar to Anne as the novel goes on, but it beats the hell out of New Hampshire, and Anne is savvy enough to recognize the return to the simple life as the crock it is. Susann once said that the book gave readers living ordinary lives the kick of feeling they had found something better than the hell of showbiz success. But she was underselling herself, because the dissatisfaction she was writing about was the same for her readers — whether they were suffering it on Park Avenue or on Main Street.

Oddly, there’s no cruelty in Susann’s dashing every hope for happiness that she holds out. Rather, she’s keeping faith with an audience who, whether they had articulated it or not, had begun to resent being placated by soap operas and romance novels. Unlike the good cry they offered, the refuge of uplift to be found in the saga of some self-sacrificing heroine, Susann told her female readers that life was just as unfair and hypocritical and unfulfilling as they suspected it to be, and you can’t help but think part of the mammoth response to the book was gratitude to its author for not bullshitting them.

In 2000 the great feminist critic Ellen Willis wrote, “For its coiners, the idea [behind the phrase “the personal is political”] was that the social rules governing sex, marriage, and motherhood were part of a system that enforced women’s subordination, so that much of what appeared to individual women to be their own private unhappiness was widely shared and reflected their social inequality.”

Valley of the Dolls wasn’t the first novel to suggest that private unhappiness was systemic rather than personal. One of Susann’s models, the 1958 The Best of Everything, by Rona Jaffe, remains a remarkable work about the confining expectations placed on women. Like Valley, it follows a group of young women determined to make it in New York (this time in the publishing world). Far less profane and blunt than Susann’s writing would be, the novel still manages to be startlingly frank. When the smart-girl heroine, Caroline, finally goes to bed with the man she’s in love with, the sex is so unsuccessful that afterward she’s not sure whether or not she’s still a virgin. There are excruciating blind date scenes written from Caroline’s point of view in which her merciless eye for mediocrity is brought to bear on the well-meaning dullards who’ve been funneled her way by friends. What remains startling is that this smart young woman, who has no interest in fulfilling the expectations that have ben set for her, remains boxed in by the sexual double standard of the era, essentially unable to divorce any hope for love and a satisfying sex life from marriage.

And that’s the failure of imagination that hovers over Valley of the Dolls. The women here aren’t powerless, but their brains and success are not enough to keep them from buying into the internalized notions of what, for a woman, was meant to constitute happiness. None of them are so enamored of their careers that they wouldn’t chuck it for the right man. (Susann doesn’t delve nearly as deeply into the men, but she gets at how sex roles crippled them, too, nowhere more so than in the places where the nice, mild guys who’ve been content with a goodnight kiss suddenly explode in tirades of sexual jealousy when it becomes apparent to them they don’t have what it takes to excite the women they love.) And so the dolls, Susann’s own slang for the pills that deliver the release of sleep that each of the women in her novel seeks, are a logical step. This is a world in which Sleeping Beauty doesn’t want to be awakened but wants to keep on sleeping. You read Valley of the Dolls and you know why feminism had to come.

It seems incredible that we still have to insist that a novel can be entertaining, moving, enveloping, even important — and Valley of the Dolls is an important novel — without being literary. Susann defined a widespread dissatisfaction and despair shared by many women before there was a movement dedicated to naming and ameliorating that despair. And there’s no reason to think Valley of the Dolls would have been a better novel had the modern feminist movement, which burgeoned a few years later with the 1969 Women’s Strike for Equality, been there to support her. In fact it probably wouldn’t have. Writing out of her own experience and her insatiable need for fame, Susann didn’t worry about whether she was striking the right ideological note, whether she would be judged on the perceived right side of issues. She simply told the truth. And I’m not going to end with a line like “In the process, she also wrote a wildly entertaining novel.” That was no “also” for Jackie Susann. It was everything.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29oll19

“After being called out for editing its live broadcast of the fireworks in Washington, D.C., to show fireworks bursting in clear air — on a night in which the weather was dominated by fog, low clouds and misting rain — PBS called it ‘the patriotic thing to do….’ The public broadcaster acknowledged intercutting old footage with its live broadcast shortly after the show ended.”
— NPR, July 5, 2016

Viewers, we apologize for last night’s hurricane coverage, which we labeled the Storm of the Century.  We have just been informed that it was not raining last night, and what we aired was a combination of old storm footage, highlights from the 2000 film The Perfect Storm, and a home video of two toddlers playing in a bathtub.

We would also like to acknowledge that we edited Novak Djokovic back into Wimbledon this past week in celebration of St. Vitus’s Day in his native Serbia.  Despite what our coverage may have indicated, it is not the case that Djokovic beat Martina Navratilova in straight sets.

In addition, note that former figure skater Tonya Harding has not been accused of any additional assaults on Nancy Kerrigan this week.  Replaying segments of our 1994 scandal coverage was merely our attempt to increase the ratings for last night’s local news hour.

Obviously, our latest business report, with its detailed discussion of Brexit and the European Union, was much too confusing for American viewers, and irrelevant to our own independence weekend celebrations, which is why we instead aired a re-enactment of what television coverage would have looked like when the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929.  We realize now that it might have been poor judgment for us to report on our Twitter account that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen to a low of 238.

You may have figured out by now that Copernicus did not die of natural causes yesterday evening. We made an inadvertent error last night, intercutting a breaking news report about his death into a rerun of Modern Family. We apologize for any confusion.

There was not an earthquake this morning during the local weather report.  We just shook the camera a bunch.

Finally, we admit that our upcoming coverage of the next Presidential Inauguration will actually be reconstructed footage from the inauguration of President James K. Polk, which took place in 1845.  It is, we have to say, the patriotic thing to do.

Jeremy Blachman is the author of Anonymous Lawyer and co-author (with Cameron Stracher) of the recently-released satirical novel The Curve.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29ilams

The bookshelf devoted to works on war expands infinitely, but at least now you can be certain which book goes on the far left and which, for the moment, you can slide into the other end. Mary Roach is the hugely popular science writer who has taken readers on breezy trips down the alimentary canal, inside cadavers, and into the process optimistically termed lovemaking; she retains the adolescent’s adoration of the gross-out and makes humorous hay with it. In Grunt she examines the state of the scientific art of preparing soldiers to go into battle. That’s why her book goes first.

At the far side of the long line of volumes describing heroism and tragedy throughout humanity’s history of belligerence, a.k.a. humanity’s history, Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging prescribes the requisite conditions for the return from combat that will ensure a soldier’s best chance for healing — which is as much as to say no longer being a soldier.

The vast difference in tone of these two books is appropriate to their respective before-and-after placement. Perennially chipper, finding the punch line in even the grimmest circumstances (the 45 percent amputation rate resulting from “deck slap,” or underbody explosions; the ongoing struggle against the serious depredations of dysentery), Roach is writing from a safe, preemptive spot: Stateside, among the ranks of scientists who, in their laboratories, investigate methods of killing first and better and receiving fewer casualties than the guys who are trying to do the same to you.

Her book could have been titled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About War but Were Afraid to Ask. (And it could have been made vastly better if someone had cautioned her about the wearying effect of reading footnote after footnote constructed on an identical plan: even more awe-inspiring fact followed by rimshot joke.)  Junger writes soberly, at times with angry despair, about a fractured society ill equipped to restore the hearts and minds, the essential humanity, of those we’ve sent abroad armed with those superior adaptations.

Both authors write from an experiential standpoint. Roach tests her ability to withstand killing heat by treadmilling uphill wearing a thirty-pound pack in the “cook box” at the Consortium for Health and Military Performance; she stands by at a simulated casualty crisis management session, where fake blood spurts and scattered severed limbs demand triage from harried corpsmen. She learns from going to the source about how the government is working to devise an apparatus that can protect against hearing loss in the incredible din of war while at the same time — almost paradoxically — amplifying aural capacity, a lifesaving necessity in the field. She voyages in the military’s strange hierarchy of need, one that, for example, sets the best brains in the business to concocting the most noisome odor known to man. (Grunt stands as a concise explanation of those pie charts of federal spending in which, say, education is an anorexic sliver squeezed by the grotesque avoirdupois of the military budget.) But her primary aim is to entertain, to set us loose with a handful of ride tickets in a giant amusement park of thrilling facts. It is not to build an argument, although one hovers unsaid in the background: Stop and think. What is this expensive, amazing ingenuity for?

Sebastian Junger’s aim, on the other hand, is to militate, not against the military but against our fractured society. Good luck with that. Yet even though his case is brief — it contains elaborations loosely stitched onto a 2015 Vanity Fair article — it is persuasive. (He renders its gist in a recent TED talk.) That doesn’t mean it’s possible. He believes we must heal the rupture that represents modern capitalist society’s separation from our evolutionary past, in which groups of humans lived in small units marked by cooperation, mutual respect, and sharing. Our current valorization of individualism, in which the amassing of personal wealth and the notion of the family as an island has replaced the commonweal as the highest attainment, has left us a society marked by low “social resilience” — the amount of resource sharing endemic to its structure. Junger expends a fair amount of type describing Native American lifeways, a familiar and attractive ideal not likely to reappear anytime soon. The soldier who returns from war, where he has bonded to others of his unit as tightly as if in a nomadic tribe, finds himself alone, with only his disturbing memories and his status as a veteran — a person whose private agonies and wants can never be understood. The thank-you-for-your-service cant and 10 percent discounts reinforce his newly permanent status as outsider; true reintegration, Junger maintains, depends instead on the availability of meaningful work and deep connection to community.

Junger’s credentials for making such an argument result from his wartime experience; he was not a soldier but came very close, embedded with a platoon fighting in the dangerous Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. He chronicled it in his 2010 book War and the film Restrepo, made with the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington. Tribe is, in a way, a 168-page caption to the award-winning documentary, which powerfully brings to life Junger’s thesis that chaos and peril bind soldiers in a tightly knit – sometimes surprisingly happy — family in which every member, each a bulwark against death for the other, feels necessary, heightenedly alive. Then they come home. The “community of sufferers” (in the term of researcher Charles Fritz) they had formed at the front is disbanded. They long again for the closeness it seems only war can afford. Or at least not an America in which a handful of bankers can cause 9 million people to lose their jobs and go unpunished. (Junger similarly connects the shocking rise of rampage shootings — which have doubled in incidence since 2006, and this was written before Orlando — to the same ailing social system of which white-collar crime is also a symptom.)

The elemental joy that paradoxically arises when severe adversity calls upon people to set aside individual concerns and tend to communal needs was more thoroughly, and beautifully, detailed in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. She, like Junger, uses the London Blitz as an example of a time when people were in mortal danger but upon which they later looked back with a sort of longing. Not that either author promotes the idea that we should incite more crises to bring us together, to permit us to be the people evolution engineered from out of the most cooperative primates. We can only comment on what has been lost and yearn quietly for its return. Or welcome the revolution when it comes.

Tribe is a sketch of a book. Its most important points are artillery rounds, coming in so rapidly there’s little time to do more than take cover. Each one could be the subject of a whole new treatise. “A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly . . . isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.” It is also possible that America is just fine with being such an entity. All it has to do is perennially source enemies, among potential friends if necessary.

What Roach suggests, and Junger upbraids us for, is that war is in some ways our highest calling, as human as it is inhuman. It is a notion unspeakable but one that, these two very different writers are at pains to prove, must somehow be spoken.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k3PyR

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine.  See more topics here.

 

Like all standout speculative fiction, these books use alternate realities as MacGuffins, telling tales about the present, the past, or eras that have yet to occur.  In their visions of pandemics, fiscal crises, alternate histories, environmental disasters, and life-size sex dolls, you’ll discern a terrifying familiarity among the bizarre.

The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver (Harper)

In a Brooklyn soon to be, the upper-middle-class Mandible family copes with extreme water and food shortages, rampant homelessness, and an economy in meltdown. Tracing her characters’ varying responses to the emergency, Shriver deftly blends parable and satire with today’s headlines, creating a nightmarish world that looms just over our own horizon. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin (Ballantine)

In the explosive climax to Cronin’s best-selling Passage trilogy, a century-long vampiric siege has seemingly ended. But one monster lives on, determined to kill the young women who is humankind’s only hope. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

The Swan Book Alexis Wright (Atria)

Set in a surreal Australia that melds myths and fairy tales with political and environmental tumult, Wright’s astonishingly inventive novel creates its own language and illuminates the embattled history of the Aborigines. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Some Possible Solutions: Stories by Helen Phillips (Holt)

Phillip’s gift is for making the peculiar seem like it’s happening down the street. A couple in crisis decides to formally bring in a Stepford wife-like third party; a woman inhabits a city where she keeps encountering doppelgängers. And just when you think you’re onto Phillips game, here comes another little fable, postmodernist puzzle or sly revelation. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Underground Airlines by Ben Winters (Mulholland Books)

An altered past in which the civil war was never fought and slavery was not fully abolished leads to the strange, modern universe in this genre-bending detective yarn, in which Victor, formerly a slave, works as a bounty hunter tracking a mysterious runaway. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan (Hogarth)

The eagerly awaited second novel from the author of “The Panopticon imagines an ice age in which Stella, a transgender preteen, must make sense of herself and the glacial entropy around her. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading?  Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k4jF7

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O, the Oprah Magazine.  See more topics here.

Start with the basics: bad guys and gals trying to make good. Sprinkle in a detective here and a paranoid schizophrenic there. Set deft fiction side by side with harrowing real-life stories, then fold in heaping helpings of moral complexity. Sweeten with a touch of redemption, and devour.

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley (Doubleday)

It’s never easy being Easy Rawlins, especially when his main squeeze, Bonnie, cuts and runs just when he’s ready to pop the question. Next thing he knows, murder and intrigue are afoot, and we’re cruising the City of Angels in ’68, chock-full of degenerates, a few backsliding do-gooders, and everything in between. This is the 14th installment of Mosley’s celebrated mystery series. We say keep ‘em coming.  Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The Hospital Always Wins by Issa Ibrahim (Chicago Review Press)

Madness led Ibrahim to believe his mother was possessed and then kill her during an exorcism. His subsequent 20-year struggle to regain his sanity as a patient in a Cuckoo’s Nest-esque asylum roars to a searing, poignant climax. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Cook Up by D. Watkins (Grand Central)

After his older brother is murdered, the author quits college to run the family drug business. An East Baltimore bildungsroman memoir about hope, hustle, and getting out while you can. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

 

Walking the Dog by Elizabeth Swados (Feminist Press)

Following a lengthy prison term, Carleen lands a job as a dog walker in Manhattan, hoping to reconnect with her estranged daughter. Brilliant and layered, Swados’s posthumous novel asks searching questions about the delicate nature of atonement. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton (Putnam)

In this edgy, noir thriller from a crime fiction maestro, an ex-con struggles with unexpected freedom, falteringly rebuilding his life while a depraved puppet master still behind bars pulls his strings. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Crow Girl, by Erik Axl Sund (Knopf)

What is it about Sweden that produces such deliciously, darkly off-kilter thrillers, featuring fascinatingly idiosyncratic complex characters such as Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and now Detective Superintendent Jeanette Kihlberg? As Kihlberg investigates a killer who targets immigrant children, she must deal with xenophobia, extreme right-wing politics, and other hot button issues that only deepen our morbid fascination. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k3JY1