Category: Books

Banning Books: An American Tradition

America has a stubborn tradition of banning books. The First Amendment may guarantee free speech, but we’ve never stopped trying to police it.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses were once blacklisted. More recently, schools have targeted Harry Potter, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Kite Runner—and, with no sense of irony, 1984.

This isn’t new. Aristophanes’ 2,500 year-old comedy Lysistrata, in which women withhold sex to end war, was banned here from 1873 until 1954 under the Comstock laws. The crime? Mailing “lewd” material.

Easy to blame the Right. But the Left has been just as eager to censor.

In California, a liberal bastion, To Kill a Mockingbird was pulled from schools for its depiction of racism.

Progressives mirror conservative groups like Moms for Liberty. Campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books and Disrupt Texts demand the removal of classics: Huckleberry Finn for racial slurs, To Kill a Mockingbird _for “white savior themes,” Little House on the Prairie for its portrayal of Indigenous and Black people. Even Harry Potter  is shunned—not for witchcraft this time, but for J.K. Rowling’s views on gender.

The real answer isn’t banning. It’s conversation.

Read the books. Put them in context. Argue about them. That’s how we confront uncomfortable truths—and maybe even learn something from them.

rj

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others: A Review

Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images) Susan Sontag (Photo by Deborah


Taking photos is now so universally accessible via our smartphones that we’re likely to take it for granted.

Until recently, it required buying a dedicated camera, inserting a film roll, setting the lens, then waiting—perhaps a week or more—to see the results of a distant lab.

I think of photos as a freeze on time, lovers as Keats reminded us, still fresh in their youth; sons and daughters, children still; parents and grandparents as we remember them. But photos, buttressed with videos, do even more, providing a window on what ails us.

Susan Sontag in her splendid book I’ve just read, Regarding the Pain of Others, argues that the visual not only helps us remember, but sensitizes us to the plight of those who acutely suffer while we warm ourselves under the blankets on cold winter nights, our bellies full. A moralist and cultural critic, she takes on the scourge of war’s ravages, a predominantly male enterprise it seems, unleashing the human capacity to inflict limitless evil, often with impunity.

Photography reminds us of Hiroshima and Nagasaki viewed aerially following their atom bomb devastations, incinerating 200,000 civilians within minutes; of emaciated prisoners released from Nazi death camps, the residue of 12 million exterminated; of ethnic strife in Bosnia in 1992, culminating in Srebrenica; of the dead and dying of 9/11; the machete butchering, killing 500,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. We cannot afford to let their horrors be relegated to the dumpsters of oblivion.

I remember Vietnam and My Lai (1968) and the American massacre of 500 villagers, the burning of their village, that consolidated American resistance to a needless, barbarous conflict consuming 64000 allied lives and 900,000 Vietnamese, ending a president’s re-election bid. Without film crews, we would have lacked evidence, much like when unleashed Soviet troops raped 130,000 German women after taking Berlin.

The trail is long. Much of Sontag’s narrative isn’t pleasurable reading to be sure, but without photography’s capability for exactitude, man’s inhumanity will never be addressed and perhaps, though distantly, vanish like slavery from the human repertoire. It is our duty not to turn aside, but remember and, beyond acknowledgement, understand war’s antecedents and protest their repetition.

I mourn Sontag’s passing from us in her prime—her cerebral introspection of what ails us, delivered always with compassion and unceasing hope that we can and will do better.

After reading her book, I thought of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, desperate for food, killed daily, many of them women and children. As I write, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) informs us that 900 Palestinians seeking food have been killed since mid-May. Unlike other conflicts, the foreign press has been banned from access to Gaza.

I think, too, of Putin’s accelerated nightly aerial assaults, on Ukraine, targeting civilian infrastructures: hospitals, ambulances, apartment buildings, shopping malls and, by day, farmers plowing their fields.

Photography offers documentation. Sontag was right: without photography, we are denied access to the truth and the scourge of war is assured its continuence.

—rj





Remembering Edmund White (1940-2025)

I’ve just come off reading Edmund White’s 2005 New Yorker essay, “The Women I Dated as I Tried to go Straight.”

Whatever your sexual orientation, reading Edmund White’s essay is worth your time—the unchecked wit; the metaphoric grace; the vivid, often astonishing anecdotes; the shimmering brilliance that makes experience palpable. Like essayists Orwell, Woolf, or Sontag, he has that rare ability to make you pause, reassess, change course.

Above all, there’s his candor.

This morning I was heartened to see The New York Review of Books commemorating him by featuring six of his essays, written for them over the years.

Just a few weeks ago, June 3, 2025, White slipped into eternity. He had long faced declining health: a heart attack, a stroke, and his decades-long reckoning with HIV. He was 85.

I read somewhere that Vladimir Nobokov, that other preeminent prose prodigy, admired White’s literary acumen, so much like his own. What writer wouldn’t relish Nabokov’s compliment, bestowed upon so few.

White was the high priest of gay literature, writing prolifically on its themes and torments, addressing with fearless clarity the culture’s imposed shackles of shame.

Across five decades, he authored thirty books—novels, memoirs, plays, hundreds of essays, many of them distilling the gay journey into a language of self-acceptance and grace.

A devoted Francophile, he spent nearly twenty years in France, where he would write his erudite The Flâneur and Genet: A Biography.  

In A Boy’s Own Story, a blend of fiction and autobiography, White chronicles the interior landscape of a young gay man confronting the burden of identity.

His 2005 autobiography, My Lives, unflinchingly narrates his first 65 years.

With the essay “The Women I Dated as I Tried to Go Straight,” White reflects on his early sense of same-sex desire, repressed under the weight of cultural condemnation: “In the past, when homosexuality was still considered shameful, I was slow to confess my desires to anyone.”

To atone for those hidden desires, “the fire in the crotch,” White dated women—many drawn to his intellect, good looks, and sensitivity. Empathy pervades his essay as he recalls these women, acknowledging the structural inequities they faced, confronted with a patriarchal hegemony: “I came to think of men as monsters with absolute power, the darlings of the Western world, and of women as their unfortunate victims.…This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.”

White’s sympathy undoubtedly owes its genesis to the gay community’s own troubled quest for validation.

I found his retrospective vignettes of women moving, bringing alive each woman’s individuality in vivid, lyrical prose replete with introspective finesse:

Sally was celebrated for her big breasts and her face, which was that of the Apollo Belvedere—bow-shaped lips, a long, straight nose, a wide, domed brow, an ensemble that was classical and noble and oddly mature. She looked like a woman, a grownup woman, not a raddled adolescent. She said little, but she smiled dreamily with veiled eyes. Her smile had a way of lingering two beats too long, after the conversation had moved on to a different mood. Was she lost in her own thoughts and not paying attention? Had someone told her that she was at her best when she smiled? She never guffawed or squealed or made violent movements, though catty classmates told me that when boys weren’t around she was a real sow, rolling on the floor, drinking beer, and giggling with the other girls at obscene speculations about penises they had known or divined through Speedos.

He thinks that had he not been gay, he might have fulfilled their myriad longings: “Unhappy women! How many of them I’ve known. Sniffling or drinking with big reproachful eyes, silent or complaining, violent or depressed—a whole tribe of unhappy women have always surrounded me.”

For most of my life I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I’ve wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I’d be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.

White remembers falling in love with fellow schoolmate Marilyn Monroe, a recollection tender and adolescent, full of longing and projection:

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. My fantasies weren’t specific as to what I would actually say to her or do for her. I never got beyond her little smiles of love and recognition, which burned with a brighter and brighter glow.

My favorite daydream was that she’d come with me to my senior prom. All the other guys would be astonished: the toad, Eddie White, was really a prince. I pictured her on my arm, her sequinned gown glittering, her voluptuous body undulating as we entered the dining hall, which had been transformed by crêpe paper into a ballroom. It was like a mermaid’s visitation. The thin boys with their brush cuts and spotty faces, their dinner jackets and burgundy cummerbunds with matching bow ties, would gape at us. No way, man, the biggest dweeb of them all with . . . Marilyn!

Fortunately, not all the women in his life were unhappy. Some lived fulfilled lives outside a dependency on men, easing his guilt:

What I loved about Anne and Marilyn {another Marilyn}, even Alice, Sally, and Gretchen—was that they weren’t unhappy. Marilyn wanted nothing from me but my friendship, and she has it still.

Because she and the others I’ve written about here were the first women I knew who weren’t unhappy, who never once made me feel guilty, they showed me the way to friendship with women. 

White’s essay emerges a paean to women across the years who were there for him in the hard places, lending solace and fostering courage.

I will miss Edmund White keenly, a voice in the wilderness.

—rj

 

Reading Ove Knausgaard at 4 AM: A Friend to See Me Through the Night

I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning, dawn’s light still absent, an annoying habit of mine, worsened by turning-in too late, despite ardent resolve to do better. God knows, I need more than four hours of sleep, and I pay for it, drifting off repeatedly as day unfolds.

To cope, I try teasing myself back to slumber—whatever works—like counting up to 100 in Italian, gleaned from daily Italian lessons. Or better, groping for the iPad beside me to resume my daylight read, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s massive My Struggle, despite blue light barriers to sleeping well.

I read a lot—mainly books I often list in Brimmings each New Year’s Day. Right now, I’m deep into Book Two of My Struggle, part of a six-volume series totaling nearly 3,600 pages—or three times the length of War and Peace.  In contemporary writing, only Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, at roughly 2,000 pages, come close in length. (Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past runs to 3000 pages across seven volumes.)

Overall, Book Two details Knausgaard’s move to Sweden, his family life with second wife, Linda, and their three children; the tensions arising from his obligations to family life and dedication to writing:

Now I had everything I had dreamed of having since I was a teenager: a family, a wife, children—yet none of it made me happy. On the contrary, I was constantly on the verge of tears, I was always angry, always tired.”

The love I had for Linda was not stable and warm but consuming and often destructive.

I’m attempting all six volumes. I wonder how many have done this and for what reasons. My guess is very few have climbed the mountain, but I’m liking the climb.

In his penchant for recalling past event, interspersed with personal reflection narrated over several volumes, Knausgaard has often been compared with Marcel Proust.

While his prose may lack Proust’s lyricism, it compensates with acute playback of places lived, voices heard, and life’s everyday ironies. It’s like he’s sitting across from you, filling the room, talking to you directly.

Though he’s won several Scandinavian literary awards, he’s yet to take home a prestigious International Booker translation prize or Nobel.

Writing in Norwegian hasn’t helped. There are only 5.5 million Norwegians. It’s the uphill climb all non-English writers face in an industry still dominated by native Anglophones.  And so I commend  The New York Review of Books for its continued effort to revive works originally not written in English.

Some critics think Knausgaard narcissistic for his self-focus, but they forget: he’s writing memoir. Anyway, when is writing anything but a quest to be heard or validated? I think they’re being simplistic.

In Norway, readers were shocked at Knausgaard’s inclusion of family and friends, names unchanged, intimate details not held back. An uncle threatened to sue and former wife, Linda, suffered mental distress, requiring therapy.

Knausgaard can make anyone uncomfortable. He doesn’t hold back about life’s often brutal truths. But to me, that’s his strength. I like writers who unflinchingly deliver human experience.

Knausgaard writes what’s known as autofiction, a blurring of the distinction between the factual and the fictional. Memory, subject to filtering, is unreliable. We cannot even say we fully know ourselves. By this yardstick, even autobiography becomes an act of arbitrary inventory—selecting, omitting, fabricating—and, hence, approximates fiction, or as Knausgaard puts it, memory “is not a reliable quantity in life” as it  “doesn’t  prioritise the truth, but rather self-interest.”

I admire his directness and minute detail. I revel in his feel for nature’s splendors, vignettes of people and their eccentricities, the fiery fever of first love; thoughts on today’s politics, obsessions imposing self-censure, the ennui often accompanying contemporary existence, and not least, the myriad burdens of the writer’s life.

I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

The foregoing passage helps explain the series title, My Struggle, with its provocative echoes of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  Knausgaard’s struggle, however, is an existential one—that of locating oneself in a world often hostile to individuality, of finding balance between writing and family, each under pressure of cultural conformity.

…perhaps it was the prefabricated nature of the days in this world I was reacting to, the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity?

Knausgaard’s critique of cultural homogenization, creeping across Europe like some unchecked fungus, especially resonates with me:

There was the revulsion I felt based on the sameness that was spreading through the world and making everything smaller? If you traveled through Norway now you saw the same everywhere. The same roads, the same houses, the same gas stations, the same shops. As late as the sixties you could see how local culture changed as you drove through Gudbrandsdalen, for example, the strange black timber buildings, so pure and somber, which were now encapsulated as small museums in a culture that was no different from the one you had left or the one you were going to. And Europe, which was merging more and more into one large, homogeneous country. The same, the same, everything was the same.

Thoughts arise of  a visit to Moscow’s Red Square with my students, of fast-food chains—TGI Friday’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC—littering its periphery, exporting America’s consumer culture and eroding local identity; memories of a journey to France—a student lamenting time and money visiting Europe, only to find blue jeans, blaring American music, and global brands echoing home.

There ‘s a humility clinging to Knausgaard’s narrative, a confessed reticence to assert himself in a society indifferent and perhaps judgmental in its appraisal of those differing from the norm:

I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine.

I saw myself as the weak, trammeled man I was, who lived his life in the world of words.

My Struggle abounds in quotable reflections that I hasten to underscore like this hauntingly melancholic passage, evoking a past where dignity, nature, and artistry coexisted—however harsh the drawbacks of its era:

…if there was a world I turned to in my mind, it was that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its enormous forests, its sailing ships and horse-drawn carts, its windmills and castles, its monasteries and small towns, its painters and thinkers, explorers and inventors, priests and drugstores. What would it have been like to live in a world where everything was made from the power of your hands, the wind, or the water? What would it have been like to live in a world where the American Indians still lived their lives in peace? Where that life was an actual possibility? Where Africa was unconquered? Where darkness came with the sunset and light with the sunrise? Where there were too few humans and their tools were too rudimentary to have any effect on animal stocks, let alone wipe them out? Where you could not travel from one place to another without exerting yourself, and a comfortable life was something only the rich could afford, where the sea was full of whales, the forests full of bears and wolves, and there were still countries that were so alien no adventure story could do them justice, such as China, to which a voyage not only took several months and was the prerogative of only a tiny minority of sailors and traders, but was also fraught with danger. Admittedly, that world was rough and wretched, filthy and ravaged with sickness, drunken and ignorant, full of pain, low life expectancy and rampant superstition, but it produced the greatest writer, Shakespeare, the greatest painter, Rembrandt, the greatest scientist, Newton, all still unsurpassed in their fields, and how can it be that this period achieved this wealth? Was it because death was closer and life was starker as a result? Who knows?

Knausgaard has this way of arresting you mid-thought and making you reassess your values.

Book 2  emphasizes the fissure between the expected of you and living your true self. For writers living in a world of the utilitarian with its compromises, the challenge of finding equilibrium can be daunting :

To write is to carve a path through the wilderness. It is to find something that has not been said before, something you can believe in, something that gives meaning to your life.

Again, the unstinting honesty, whether commenting on contemporary mores, engaging in philosophic reflection, or offering informed opinion separating the trivial from the significant.

They say Book 6, 1000 pages long, is steep in philosophical reflection. Whatever, I look forward to the climb.

The New Yorker critic James Wood praises Knausgaard’s ability to extract the profound from the mundane as “hypnotically compelling.”

The Atlantic’s William Deresiewicz applauds Knausgaard’s philosophical depth as a “contemporary Proustian endeavor.”

Life is never simple for Knausgaard in his dense weave of mystery and randomness, of inheritance and free will, of human frailty and moral striving..
I find that compelling.

And so, even when I awake, the silent stars my sole companions, I find pleasure in his company, a friend to see me through the night.

–rj

 

An Owl’s Story: Carl Safina’s Alfie and Me

There exist those books you wish wouldn’t end. Carl Safina’s Alfie and Me: What Owls Know and Humans Think was that kind of book for me.

I had read Safina’s excellent View from Lazy Point several years ago, impressed with its detailed oberservations of wildlife and an arctic indigenous community across four seasons. That same concern for indigenous well-being and the plight of animals in a changing world continue with Alfie and Me.

Safina, a widely published ecological author and Endowed Professor of Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University, is an expert in marine biology and recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes dubbed “the genius grant.”

In all his writings, Safina’s focus is on how humans relate to nature, a theme manifestly central to Alfie and Me, chronicling the story of an orphaned Eastern screech owl found in Safina’s Long Island backyard in 2018. Over the course of eighteen months, Safina and his wife, Patricia, nurtured the owl—whom they named Alfie—until her eventual release, creating a rare, intimate portrait of interspecies connection and nature’s resilience.

Safina becomes nearly a helicopter parent, monitoring Alfie’s daily development, torn between fostering her independence and protecting her from the harsh realities of the wild: “… I knew—as she did not—the relative meaninglessness of a life without risks.” An estimated two thirds of young screech hours die shortly after leaving their parents’s nest.

I found myself anxious for Alfie’s survival. Would she learn to fly, to hunt, to mate? Could she survive storms, drought, and the many predators that lurk in her world?

Species survival today depends not only on healthy ecosystems, but increasingly on humans recognizing their relationship with nature as essential to mutual survival.

Safina criticizes Western philosophy for severing this connection, beginning with Plato’s split between the material and spiritual worlds—deeming the material inferior and ultimately fueling nature’s exploitation: “Plato and his followers were perhaps the first people to feel revulsion toward the world. By forever separating our material world from the realm of perfection, Plato propounded a stark dualist doctrine,” Safina says.

For Safina, “This might be the most consequential idea in the history of human thought, its implications almost literally Earth-shattering. Most fundamentally, we are left with: an existence at odds with itself.”

Descartes and Bacon subsequently embodied a modern mechanistic view of nature, oblivious to nature’s sanctity and evolutionary intelligence, leading to its objectification. “The great blindness of the West is to grope the world as inventory,” Safina writes.

In contrast, Safina draws richly from Eastern traditions, which emphasize the unity of all life and the reverence owed to the source from which we came. Although his book is replete with references to Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist thought, he finds Confucianism especially compelling for its focus on relationships.

Safina also turns to Indigenous cultures as contemporary models of living in harmony with nature. Their ways often involve mindful observation and sustainable stewardship rooted in mutual respect: “For most of human history, Native peoples, more intimate with their existence than we with ours, perceived that Life and the cosmos are mainly relational,” Safina says.

Reading Alfie and Me, I couldn’t help but think of the estimated one billion birds projected to die globally in 2025. According to the Audubon Society, North America alone has lost 25% of its bird population since 1970—about 3 billion birds. Contributing factors include climate change, deforestation, pesticides, habitat destruction, urban structures, insect decline, and free-roaming cats.

Safina’s book appeared in 2023, or before the current avian flu outbreak, which over the past 18 months has led to the confirmed deaths of millions of wild birds in North America—many of them common backyard visitors. The virus has now reached poultry as well, despite the culling of over 166 million birds. A future in which birds no longer sing at sunrise, once unthinkable, now feels disturbingly plausible.

This avian decline is largely human-made, driven by an economy that prioritizes profit over preservation

Why write about birds, some might ask. Shouldn’t human needs come first?

Safina answers with the words of Catholic monk Thomas Merton: “Someone will say you worry about birds: why not worry about people? I worry about both birds and people. … It is all part of the same sickness, and it all hangs together.”

Alfie and Me is not only a poignant narrative about an orphaned owl, but also a powerful meditation on our shared existence, affirming Safina’s truth: “that no isolated separation is possible. We are participant members in one existence—of life, of the cosmos, of time.”

–rj

When the Shades Are Drawn: The Decline of Literary Reading

I’ve been an avid reader of cerebral Virginia Woolf for many years, enjoying not only her novels, but her highly polished essays such as “A Room of Her Own.” Thanks to the Yale Review Archives, I’ve just read “How Should One Read a Book?” (September 1, 2026). It was a different world then, absent of electronic media.

Today, reading is in sharp decline. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (February 2025), 33% of eighth graders lack basic reading skills, and only 14% of students read daily. Among adults, just 40% read a literary book.

This trend exacts a cost, as literature cultivates empathy and instills humane values. Active readers are more engaged in civic and cultural life. They contribute to their communities. In contrast, electronic media foster shorter attention spans and weaken intellectual skills (National Endowment for the Arts Assessment).

With AI increasingly doing our cognitive heavy lifting, our ability to think critically is further eroding.

If Woolf believed literature offered us a window into the world, today it seems the shades have been drawn.

—rj

RJ’s 2025 Reading Recommendations

As I share my annual New Year book recommendations—curated from informed sources—I’m mindful of the diversity in readers’ tastes and the many deserving books inevitably omitted due to space constraints. That said, these lists primarily reflect my own reading aspirations for the coming year, centered on literary fiction and thought-provoking non-fiction. I read most of the titles I recommend here. For you, I hope these selections kindle interest, expand horizons, or simply offer the pleasure of well-spent reading time. To all of you, a Happy New Year!

FICTION:

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. (Auster, the great explorer of the fluidity of human identity, in this early work establishes his literary mastery with themes of identity, grief, loss, and loneliness, presaging those of his subsequent fiction and non-fiction).

Bernieres, Louise de. Corelli’s Mandolin. (A war story of Axis occupation of the Greek island of Cephalonia, inflicted cruelties and devastation, but also of human resilience, cultural conflict, and the enduring power of love transcending tragedy).

Byatt, A. S. Possession. (1999 Booker Award winner, explores themes of obsession, the nature of love, and relationship between art and life. The story moves between the two timelines, Victorian and contemporary, offering poetry, letters, and journal entries that provide insight into the inner lives of the characters and evolving notions of love).

Cather. Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. (A historical novel of the American Southwest, telling of two French priests sent by the Vatican to establish a diocese in New Mexico, the challenge of physical landscape and cultural conflict, faith, perseverance and friendship).

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. (Ahead of his time, Defoe depicts a woman’s descent into criminality as means to survival and purview of a society obsessed by money and status).

Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Blue Flower. (A historical novel centered on the Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis’ obsession with a young girl, Sophie, exploring the nature of love and the tension between imagination and reality).

Haruff, Kent. Plainsong. (Set in a rural town in Colorado, the cyclical interweave of ordinary people and nature, life’s undulations of circumstance, and solace found in community).

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. (Comments on other writers).

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. (The novel to begin one’s reading of America’s most critically acclaimed novelist since Faulker, a saga of lost innocence in the quest for authenticity.)

Munro, Alice. A Wilderness Station: Collected Short Stories 1968-1994. (Told via documents, letters, and recollections, a series of stories centering on Annie, married to an abusive husband, whose death raises questions).

Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. (The aftermath of post-colonial transition, displacement, alienation, corruption and violence).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. (Nietzsche’s salient philosophical novel, consisting of parables delivered by sage Zarathustra, introducing readers to Nietzsche concepts of God is Dead, The Übermensch, The Eternal Recurrence, and Critique of Morality).

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive, Again. (A continuation of Strout’s Pulitzer Prize novel, Olive Kitteridge, featuring Olive as she ages, profound in its themes of loneliness, transformation, community, and mortality).

Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. (Penn’s classic novel, exploring the subterranean machinations of politics through the rise and fall of Willy Stark; the complexities of human nature confronting ethical dilemmas).

Wright, Richard. Native Son. (Unsparing, explosive indictment of American racism, injustice, and violence.)

Zola, Emile. Germinal. (Steeped in naturalism, Zola’s depiction of class struggle, social injustice, and the harsh realities of industrial life among miners in 19th-century France.).

NON-FICTION

Balcombe, Jonathan. Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals. (Replete with examples, Balcombe maintains that animals have an emotional as well as instinctual life, requiring changes in how humans regard and treat them).

Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin. American Prometheus. (Pulitzer Prize winning biography of atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer and basis of the Academy Award movie, it reveals a highly intelligent scientist troubled by his role in creating the atomic bomb and of his victimization in the McCarthy era).

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. (The classic 18c biography of the prominent critic, essayist and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson. Lively and detailed, it provides not only in-depth portraiture of a genius, but of an era.)

Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. (A moving autobiographical work set in the context of WWI and its aftermath, critically acclaimed as among the best of war narratives; exploring, as well, the changing status of women in the new century).

Graves, Robert. Goodbye to All That. (Graves’ autobiography of his war years as an officer in the trenches, disillusionment, and rejection of society’s pre-war idealism).

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (An essential read, exploring the nature of governance, laws, and civil rights still widely debated, influential, and helpful in comprehending contemporary political structures).

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. (Regarded as one of this century’s most accomplished writers, Norwegian Knausgaard’s autobiographical book, comprised of six volumes, explores love, death, and time, inviting comparisons with Proust).

Miller, Lucasta. Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and an Epitaph. (In a blending of salient biographical, critical analysis, and personal reflection, Miller focuses on nine of Keats’ most famous poems, offering fresh interpretations without being pedantic).

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Nature and Destiny of Man. (A seminal Christian theological work first delivered as a series of lectures in the 1940s, it focuses on sin, grace, and human destiny).

Renkl, Margaret. The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. (Reminiscences of 52 weeks of nature’s transitional moods amid climate change, triggering reflections on joy, grief and hope amid ecological demise.)

Said, Edward. Orientalism. (Said refutes the binary mindset, linked with imperialism and colonialism, that treats the East as exotic, but inferior to the West, justifying its dominance.)

Salfina, Carl. Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. (Safina narrates his and his wife’s rescue and nurturing of an orphaned screech owl to good health, leading to reflections on human alienation from nature).

Sontag, Susan. The Pain of Others. (Unfailingly profound, the great essayist wrestles with what troubles her most, and by extension, ourselves.)

Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson. Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes. (Stevenson wrote this travelogue while in his early twenties, seeking space from a romance gone wrong.)

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow. (Psychologist Weller teaches us how to accept grief and allow it to work its gifts and become our greatest teacher).

Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. (Woolf wrote 26 diary volumes. In this posthumous work, her husband Leonard distills from her diaries the architectonics of a mind engaging its artistry).

From Pietas to Relevance: Reflections on the Death of the Classics

Boston Latin School

The ancient classics, once the hallmark of the liberal arts, have increasingly vanished from today’s college campuses.

I remember with fondness my Massachusetts education. In the eighth grade, we read The Odyssey. In high school, I enrolled in what was dubbed the “classical” curriculum, emphasizing languages and the humanities.

In those days, you could major in Latin for four years, culminating in reading not only Cicero and Seneca, but Virgil’s The Aeneid, a work that’s impacted me immensely across the years.

If you’re lucky enough to get into Philips Exeter Academy, not far from where I lived, you’ll find the classics still in full bloom, courses not only in Latin, but Greek, to an advanced level. There’s even a classics club.

In the main, however, exposure to the classics has undergone steep decline.

An early harbinger, the year before I entered the University of North Carolina’s English Ph. D. program, the required Latin reading exam was dropped.

Today, issues of relevancy, racism, changing student interests, and funding have sped up a near universal decline in classics exposure across college campuses.

While Harvard and Princeton still retain courses in the classics, though in English and within a comparative global setting, other colleges have been dropping classics programs altogether, among them, Canisius College, Whitman College, Elmira College, the University of Vermont, Valparaiso University and Howard University, the only historically Black college to feature a classics department.

But back to my New England boyhood days, I remember going “junking” as we called it, ransacking antique stores, among their fare, scores of Latin public school primers, palpable evidence of a discarding of a former ubiquitous cultural presence.

In nearby Boston, there still exists its premium public educational institution, Boston Latin School, America’s first public school, founded in 1635, a year before Harvard College.

In keeping with its traditional Latin emphasis, options in Latin language courses remain, but the trend, as elsewhere, has been to evolve curriculum to service a diverse student body and transition to modern educational priorities.

I accept it’s at least better to retain the classics in English translation where budgets permit than to guillotine them altogether and acknowledge we live in a global village and musn’t exclude its verities of wisdom contributory to fostering a better world.

For nearly thirty years, I taught The Aeneid on a private university campus in a course called Western Classics, the only professor doing so. Its notion of self-discipline over impulsiveness, the obligation to duty (pietas) and mission (fatum) remain integral to civil integrity.

As the late academic Louise Cowan aptly put it, “To lose the classics is to lose a long heritage of wisdom concerning human nature, something not likely to be acquired again. Yet most college curricula now remain sadly untouched by their august presence, or at best make a gesture in their direction with a few samplings for select students. Such neglect is one of the most serious threats our society faces today” (“The Necessity of the Classics,” Modern Age Journal).

–RJ

Blurring Boundaries: Bruce Duffy’s Vision of Wittgenstein and Cambridge Minds

To behold death in the face of this once, he knew there could be no reincarnation, and he thought it a blessing, to have this once to swell forth, then to be enfolded like a seed into the sheltering darkness of eternity — to be lost in time among such furrows as the sea makes (Duffy, The World as I Found It).

When Joyce Carol Oates praised Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (1987) as “one of the five best non-fictional novels,” I knew it would be my next read.

A blend of fact and fiction, it replays the legacy of esteemed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s complex life, thought, and turbulent relationships with fellow Cambridge contemporaries, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.

Born into a  privileged Viennese family of wealth and culture, much of his adult life was impacted by a domineering father, his experience as a combat soldier, frequent retreats from public life, and sustained quest for truth.

Enigmatic, his thinking underwent continuous flux, making Duffy’s achievement quite remarkable.

Duffy didn’t have the resources of extant biographies at the time.

Adding to his  challenge was integrating Wittgenstein’s complex thought into his narrative, yet retaining readers unversed in analytical abstraction.

Wittgenstein premised the insufficiency of philosophy in ascertaining reality, its true function one of providing examples subject for further investigation. It mustn’t attempt to usurp science.

The World as I Found It unfolds episodically, interwoven with asides to the three philosophers—their temperaments, perspectives, strengths and weaknesses.

Of the three academic luminaries, Wittgenstein and Russell captivated my interest with their disparate temperaments: Wittgenstein, the youthful upstart; Russell, the widely celebrated academic renowned for his contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics.

In contrast, though the elder G.E. Moore, brilliant and benevolent, serves as mediator between the two rivals, his serene domesticity and lack of the same intense character traits, renders him less compelling than Russell, ebullient with conceit, yet haunted by self-doubt and bouts of jealousy, the putative exponent of free love; or Wittgenstein, volatile in temperament, given to barbed tongue directness, unsparing and wounding when critiquing his colleagues’ scholarly endeavors.

Wittgenstein emerges a good man, sincerely seeking life’s meaning and doing the right thing; Russell, in contrast, competitive and self-indulgent.

It appears Wittgenstein underwent some kind of religious conversion during his war years, though not in the conventional sense, perhaps influenced by Tolstoy, whose Gospel in Brief he carried everywhere and could virtually quote from memory. 

In fashioning a fictional biography, Duffy made numerous changes not conforming to the biographical facts or timelines:

No letters exist between Wittgenstein and his despotic father.

He assigns Wittgenstein two sisters. He had three.

Wittgenstein never met D. H. Lawrence, despite Bloomsbury’s Lady Ottoline Morrell’s best efforts.  

It was Wittgenstein’s excluded sister, Hermine, not Gretl, who sheltered Jews in Nazi occupied Vienna at great personal risk. This anomaly puzzles me.

Then there’s the inimitable, impulsive Max, rough in exterior, potentially violent, yet Wittgenstein’s faithful companion. Duffy confesses in his Epilogue that he never existed, reminding us of the controversy erupting on the book’s publication: Is it ethical to fictionalize historical figures and events, selectively altering character dynamics and outcomes to serve a narrative?

Still, the defining lineaments of Wittgenstein’s life are never distant: the interplay of a controlling father; the family’s wealth and cultural milieu; the several sibling suicides; the cottage built and retreated to in remote Norway; the two years of trench warfare on the Eastern Front in the Great War; the profound influence of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character; the failed teaching stint in rural Austria; the abandonment of Cambridge; the late sojourn in Ireland and visit to America; the move into his physician’s home as he confronted his fatal prostate cancer. Even his last words, “I have lived a happy life.”

Seldom have I read a book so beautifully written and stylistically riveting, the cadence of its sprawling sentences endowed with verbal exactitude, rendering scenes and personages into palpable visages, an exemplar for aspiring writers.

The New York Review of Books deemed Life as I Found It a classic, restoring its availability in a handsome Classic Series edition, replete with Duffy preface and epilogue.

At its core, The World as I Found It  transcends philosophy, embracing the often contradictory lives of those driven to understanding their world.

A narrative about ambition, genius, and the human condition, it offers profound insights into the interplay of intellect, emotion, and morality.

—RJ

 

Julia Thurman: Crafting Worlds with Words

The writers I admire most never use a careless word. Their sentences are unimprovable —Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman.

There exist those books we scarce can put down, riveting us with suspense, prose eloquence, and resonance of human experience.

Others, we struggle with, bored or chagrined by their non-relevance or absurdities. The usual counsel is to jettison them quickly.

Had I done so with Julia Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman, a book largely focused on fashion couture, playground of wealthy indulgence, I’d have lost out immensely.

Collectively, Thurman’s adroitly articulated 39 essays, gathered mostly from fifty years of writing for The New Yorker, transcend her primary fashion genre, yielding portraitures mostly of heroic women finding autonomy in a patriarchal milieu, leading to my admiration for Thurman, awe at her salient intelligence, fine-tuned to meticulous observation and set-apart brilliance in prose mastery.

As Henry Finder, one of her editors at The New Yorker observes, “She’s not happy with a paragraph until it sings.”

Thurman’s acumen is indisputable, having achieved numerous awards that include a National Book Award for Non-fiction for her biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Writer (1983), inspiring the hit movie, Out of Africa.

Her Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999), earned a finalist National Award for Nonfiction.

She is a recipient of the Ordre des Artes et Lettres by the French government for her contributions to French literature.

A Left-Handed Woman has won PEN’s award for essay excellence .

Nothing surprises me about Thurman. Is there anything she misses in her myriad subject matter teeming with wide-ranging vignettes on not only fashion designers such as Sara Berman, Isabel Toledo, Elsa Schiaparelli , Miuccia Prada Guo Pei and Ann Lowe, but disparate entities like Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Elena Ferrante, Lee Miller, Eva Zeisel, Amelia Earhart, Isa Genzken, Greta Stern, Alison Bechdel, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder, Rachel Cusk, Yasmina Reza, Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, and even Helen Gurley Brown and Cleopatra, among still others, their successes and, yes, the not infrequent intrusions of fate cascading fame and fortune to their doom.

While men do appear in her essays, they’re a distinct minority, sometimes perversely objectifying women as ancillaries of male prerogative:

Conversely, she writes of women, “I scoured literature for exceptions, and there were some. But nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay. In that respect, one might say they were all left-handed: they defied the message they were not right.”

My favorite essays come toward the book’s close, featuring Simone de Beauvoir and in a surprising thematic shift, Thurman’s memoir of cave exploration, torch in hand, accompanying renowned French anthropologists at ancient Dordogne cave painting sites, Chauvet and Niaux.

I believe Thurman is right in crediting de Beauvoir with the genesis of the modern feminist movement with her seminal The Second Sex. As for her revels exploring caves and pedaling across French landscape, it’s truly a tour de force.

One last thing: Thurman is a self-taught fluent speaker of two languages beyond her native English that include French and Italian, highly engaged as she is in French and Italian literary and artistic culture.

She also achieved reading fluency in Danish as prerequisite to her research on Isak Dinesen.

Favorite passages:

“What we bring with us—embedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating it—is the mystery of how we become who we are.”

“There’s a hidden cavity in every story, a recess of meaning, and it’s often blocked by the rubble of your own false starts, or by an accretion of received ideas left behind by others. That updraft of freshness is typically an emotion you’ve buried.”

“The transcendence of shame is a prominent theme in the narrative of women’s lives. The shame of violation; the shame of appetite; the shame of anger; the shame of being unloved; the shame of otherness; the shame, perhaps above all, of drive.”

“Most of the time, a piece of prose lies on the page bristling with cleverness, yet inert, until I hit upon the precise sequence of words—the spell, if you like—that brings it to life. At that moment, language recovers its archaic power to free a trapped spirit.”

“She could love and desire intensely, but rarely at the same moment, and she could think and feel deeply, but not often in the same sentence.”

—rjoly